Rosalind Mitchison (1919–2002) and John Butt (1929–2002): An Appreciation

Abstract

In the deaths of Rowy Michison and John Butt during 2002, the Scottish Economic and Social History Society lost two of its founder and formative members, two of the people who did most to develop the study of both Scottish History and the economic and social history of Scotland in the past half century. Rowy Mitchison and John Butt came from very different social backgrounds and their approaches to their discipline were also different, but each made a major contribution and their work complemented each other’s. Both were born and educated south of the border and brought with them skills and approaches learned there and which were only slowly penetrating History departments in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s. It is hard to remember the position of Scottish History forty years ago. There was very little published on the history of Scotland after 1707. The present writer was still an undergraduate when Rowy Mitchison’s Agricultural Sir John: the Life of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster came out in 1962. As an Honours student in History I did no Scottish History; that was for people doing Eng. Lit. who needed some romantic historical background to the study of Walter Scott. Economic History from Henry Hamilton was the ‘soft’ side of the first-year political economy class. Yet, even in this environment, I can recall Sir John Sinclair being drawn to our attention as something different, as an indication that things might be beginning to stir in Scottish History and as a sign that there was history of a Scotland in the eighteenth century to be studied outside the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment. Rowy had been invited to write the biography by the Sinclair family, at the suggestion of Lewis Namier, and in Sinclair she had someone who combined a multitude of roles: agricultural and urban improver, statistician, bureaucrat and politician and whose world spanned from Thurso to London. Economic, social, political, cultural and family history came together to produce a path-breaking study. As she pushed