How the Scots Invented the Modern World (66 page)

My interpretation of Highland society and culture has been decisively shaped by two works by Bruce Lenman,
The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen,
1650–1784
(London, 1984) and
The Jacobite Risings in Britain,
supplemented by Thomas Devine’s
Clanship to Crofter’s War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish
Highlands
(Manchester, 1994), R. A. Dodgson, “The Nature of Scottish Clans,” in R.A. Huston and I. D. White’s Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989), and I. F. Grant and Hugh Cheape’s
Periods in Highland History
(London, 1987). The account of Coll MacDonnell of Barrisdale is from Frank McLynn’s
The Jacobites
(London, 1985), as is the quotation from Cassius Dio that opens the chapter. The story of Big Archie MacPhail comes out of John Prebble’s
Glencoe,
which like its companion volume,
Culloden,
gives an especially vivid picture of Highland life.

Prebble also discusses Duncan Forbes of Culloden and his quizzical view of his Highland neighbors; so does Robert Clyde in
From Rebel to Hero: The Image
of the Highlander
1745–1830
(East Lothian, 1995), and both can be supplemented with George Menary’s vintage biography,
The Life and Letters of Duncan
Forbes of Culloden
(London, 1936).

CHAPTER SIX: LAST STAND

I found the Jacobite song that opens the chapter in Robert Chambers’s
History
of the Rebellion of
1745–6
(1840; Edinburgh, 1869). The new scholarship that clarifies the importance of Jacobitism, both in England and in Scotland, is too extensive, and probably too scholarly, to cite at length for the general reader. But any works by Evelyn Cruickshank (such as
Political Untouchables: The Tories
and the ’45
) and Paul Monod’s
Jacobitism and the English People,
1688–1788
(Cambridge, 1989) will give the reader some idea of how historians are coming to appreciate the crucial role of Jacobitism as a political ideology in the Age of Reason.

Oddly enough, no such scholarly work exists on Jacobite ideology and sentiment in Scotland, although there are literally shelves of books on the Jacobite risings in Scotland, both in 1715 and in 1745. The usual starting place for learning about the Forty-five is a biography of Bonnie Prince Charles. Almost every writer of British history for a popular audience eventually tries his or her hand at recounting the prince’s story. Everyone has his candidate for the best version: David Daiches’s
Charles Edward Stuart: The Life and Times of Bonnie Prince
Charlie
(London, 1973) seems to me to have the right balance between readability and scholarly accuracy. I have not hesitated to use it in shaping this chapter, although I also relied on Frank McLynn’s more detailed
Charles Edward
Stuart
(London, 1988) and Chambers’s
History of the Rebellion
and his
Jacobite
Memoirs of the Rebellion
of 1745,
published in Edinburgh in 1834.

The stories about the Edinburgh volunteers come from John Home’s
The
History of the Rebellion in the Year
1745
(London, 1802) and Alexander Carlyle’s
Anecdotes and Characters of Our Times,
which is available in various editions. For the battle of Culloden itself, John Prebble’s
Culloden
cannot be surpassed, just as Prebble offers the definitive account of the battle’s bloody aftermath. However, I have also relied on Katherine Tomasson and Francis Buist’s
Battles
of the ’45
(London, 1962) for its lucid discussion of the military aspects of the campaign as a whole.

Eric Linklater’s
The Prince in the Heather
(London, 1965) is a vivid account of Prince Charles’s escape and time in hiding in the remotest corners of Scotland, although there is a more recent version in Hugh Douglas and Michael J. Stead’s
The Flight of Bonnie Prince Charlie
(Edinburgh, 2000). The final remarks by Samuel Johnson come out of
A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland,
which exists in several editions, although I chose to use the Yale University Press version, edited by Mary Lascelles and published in 1971.

CHAPTER SEVEN: PROFITABLE VENTURES

The invaluable book on the Glasgow tobacco trade and its participants is Thomas Devine,
The Tobacco Lords
(1975; Edinburgh, 1990), and what it sometimes lacks in discussion of personalities I more than made up for by turning to George Stewart’s
Curiosities of Glasgow Citizenship, as Exhibited Chiefly in the
Business Career of Its Old Commercial Aristocracy (Glasgow, 1881), C. A. Oakley’s
Our Illustrious Forbears
(Glasgow, 1980), and Margaret Lindsay’s
Portrait of
Glasgow
(London, 1972). Adam Smith’s relations with commercial Glasgow are covered in Ian Ross’s biography (see Chapter Three, above), as are his relations with Robert Foulis. For the Foulis brothers themselves, I relied on David Murray’s
Robert and Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press
(Glasgow, 1913), and
Some Letters of Robert Foulis
(Glasgow, 1917), and Richard Sher’s “Commerce, Religion, and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Glasgow,” in
Glasgow,
Volume I: Beginnings to
1830,
edited by T. M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (Manchester, 1995).

The book I found most helpful for understanding the physical evolution of Glasgow was Andrew Gibb’s
Glasgow: The Making of the City
(London, 1983). For Edinburgh, A. J. Youngson’s classic study,
The Making of Classical Edinburgh
(Edinburgh, 1966), is still indispensable; Charles MacKean’s Edinburgh: An
Illustrated Architectural Guide
(Edinburgh, 1992) is a handy street-by-street, almost house-by-house guide to the evolution of this fascinating city. On James Craig, see Kitty Croft and Andrew Fraser’s
James Craig,
1744–1795
(Edinburgh, 1995).

The Adam family, father and sons, still have not received the kind of systematic scholarly attention they deserve. It is possible to find editions of
Works
in Architecture,
whose preface gives the best idea of their political and social agenda, as well as their aesthetic creed. Otherwise, the scholar still relies on a wonderful little book by John Fleming,
Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh
and Rome
(Cambridge, MA, 1962), which is a model of what professional historical scholarship should be: careful, detailed, but also gracefully written. Also useful for this chapter were Joseph and Anne Rykwert’s
Robert and James
Adam: The Men and the Style
(London, 1985), Steve Parissien’s
Adam Style
(London, 1992), and Sterling Boyd’s
The Adam Style in America,
1770–1820
(New York, 1985). Those curious about Charles Cameron can check Dimitri Shvidkovsky’s
The Empress and the Architect
(New Haven, 1996).

CHAPTER EIGHT: A SELECT SOCIETY—
ADAM SMITH AND HIS FRIENDS

The bibliography on Adam Smith is, of course, vast—especially since those who write about him come at their subject from three, or even four, different directions. Historians conjure up an Adam Smith who is slightly different from the one philosophers discuss, while economists manage to come up with yet another version, and sociologists still another—compare, for example, the Adam Smith described in Donald Winch’s
Adam Smith’s Politics
(Cambridge, 1978) with the one in Robert Heilbronner’s
The Worldly Philosophers
(1953; seventh edition, 1999). However, the best place to start for understanding Adam Smith in his own time and place might be in a book in which he appears only as a minor character: Richard Sher’s
Church and University in the Scottish
Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh
(Princeton, 1985). It is the indispensable guide to the intellectual milieu of Edinburgh in the second half of the eighteenth century, and offers the proper context for understanding the reception and impact of Smith’s ideas. The two best introductions to Smith himself are Donald Winch’s book mentioned above, and Jerry Z. Muller’s Adam
Smith in His Time—And Ours
(New York, 1993).

Ian Ross’s biography of Smith (see Chapter Three, above), was of course crucial for writing this chapter, as was Dugald Stewart’s
Biographical Memoir of
Adam Smith,
which first appeared in 1793 but which was reprinted from the collected works of Dugald Stewart in 1966. Adam Smith’s two major works,
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
and
The Theory of
Moral Sentiments,
are generally available, while even his lectures on jurisprudence and
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,
both of which are based on notes by former students, can be found in modern editions. The edition of
Wealth of
Nations
I found most useful for this chapter is the University of Chicago Press edition, edited by Edwin Canaan.

William Robertson’s celebrity as historian and author is all but forgotten now: but Stewart Brown’s edited volume,
William Robertson and the Expansion of
Empire
(London, 1997), helps to set the record straight, especially Richard Sher’s brilliant little article, “‘Charles V’ and the Book Trade.”

The amount of scholarship on David Hume is almost as staggering as that on Adam Smith—although in this case it is the philosophers who enjoy the main right of way (an excellent overall guide is David Norton’s
The Cambridge
Companion to Hume,
which became available in paperback in 1993). A key advantage of all this attention is that, as in Smith’s case, almost all of Hume’s works are in print in one form or another, even his
Essays Moral, Political, and
Literary,
of which the best edition is the one edited by Eugene Miller for the Liberty Press in 1985. Even Hume’s
History of England
can be found in abridged form for the general reader—although no one should take on Hume as historian without first reading Duncan Forbes’s
Hume’s Philosophical Politics
(Cambridge, 1975) and the relevant section on Hume in J.G.A. Pocock’s
The
Machiavellian Moment
(Princeton, 1975), which has decisively shaped my approach to Adam Smith, as well.

My interpretation of Hume is bound to strike some as controversial; not surprising, since Hume is always controversial, even two hundred years later. A different approach to mine, and in some ways a compelling one, can be found in Donald Livingston’s
Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life
(Chicago, 1981). In any case, the basis for any serious treatment of Hume as a historical figure is Ernest Mossner’s unsurpassed biography,
The Life of David Hume
(Oxford, 1954), which is now available in paperback, and his collection of essays on Hume,
The Forgotten Hume,
first published in 1943. A biographical shortcut is Nicholas Phillipson’s stimulating and intelligent
Hume,
published by Cambridge University Press in 1989 but now unfortunately out of print. The general reader will enjoy perusing Hume’s short autobiography, which is reprinted in the Liberty Fund edition of the
Essays,
and even
The Letters of David
Hume,
published in Oxford in 1932.

Thanks to his connections to Hume and Smith, who were also his harshest critics, Adam Ferguson is the recipient of a tidy little scholarly industry. There are two modern editions of his
Essay on the History of Civil Society;
there is a trail of excellent critical studies, of which the best might be Duncan Forbes’s
Adam
Ferguson and the Idea of Community
(Paisley, 1979); and even a fine study of Ferguson’s influence on European thought, in Fania Oz-Salzberger’s
Translating
the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Dicourse in Eighteenth Century Germany
(Oxford, 1995), which clearly shows Ferguson’s influence on German thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel—and by extension, on Karl Marx. Edward Gibbon’s relations with the Scottish school are detailed in J.G.A. Pocock’s magisterial study,
Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon,
1737–1764
(Cambridge, 2000). The quotation about Gibbon’s debt to Hume comes from
The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon,
edited by John Murray (London, 1896).

CHAPTER NINE: “THAT GREAT DESIGN”—
SCOTS IN AMERICA

I must mention two invaluable guides to the Scottish diaspora at the outset. Duncan Bruce’s
Mark of the Scots
(Seacaucus, 1996) is a comprehensive reference guide not only for tracing the Scottish impact on American life, but its effect around the world. Mr. Bruce’s more genealogical approach is different from mine, and we disagree on certain details—such as whether the Scots actually discovered America before Columbus! But my work was made much easier by being able to turn to his comprehensive catalog of famous Scots in history, which he supplemented with
The Scottish One Hundred: Portraits of
History’s Most Influential Scots
(New York, 2000). There is an older prototype of Bruce’s project,
Scotland’s Mark on America
by George Fraser Black (New York, 1921), which is still useful.