The Scottish Nation: Identity and History (Essays in Honour of William Ferguson)

Abstract

This Festschrift for William Ferguson, who taught Scottish History in the University of Edinburgh until 1989, contains nine essays on Scottish subjects ranging from the early modern to the recent past. This diversity reflects Ferguson's scholarly interests, but, like his published work, the book has a particular focus on politics and society in the long eighteenth century. The strongest essays in the collection are wide-ranging and should stimulate further research. This is particularly true of Tristram Clarke's contribution, which assesses the genre of collective biography in Scotland, from the efforts of seventeenth-century antiquarians to the Oxford DNB (2004) and the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (2006). Clarke opens up a new subject in Scottish historical studies, which will be of interest to scholars of national culture elsewhere in Europe. Also of broad interest, Edward Cowan's chapter is a cultural history of the ‘Scottish self-myth of democratic patriotism and honest, steadfast commonalty’ (p. 3). Cowan concentrates particularly on the sixteenth-century figure of Jock Uppaland (actually of English origin), but draws parallels with the interests of Robert Burns and the perennially important William Wallace. Alexander Murdoch has contributed a stimulating interpretation of the legacy of the 1689 revolution, placing the revolution, more than the union of 1707, at the heart of eighteenth-century Scottish political culture. Particularly noteworthy are Murdoch's thoughts on the evolution of whiggish unionism, and the claims of successive politicians (in 1707, after the ’45 and in 1832) to ‘complete’ the work of the revolution. Also important is the late Iain Maciver's survey of the politics of the Church of Scotland before the Disruption. This chapter usefully complements I.D.L. Clark's seminal essay of 1970 on the Moderates between 1752 and 1805, and should be added to undergraduate reading lists on early nineteenth-century religion.