SCOTLAND before the Union of 1707 can be difficult to assess, for three reasons. Firstly, views of the century before 1707 have been shaped by attitudes towards the Union itself. Most historians writing between 1707 and the mid-twentieth century saw the Union in a positive light. In their minds, the Union had rescued Scotland from difficult circumstances and enabled social, political, intellectual, and economic progress. The resulting histories contrasted the more objectionable aspects of the seventeenth century with improvements after 1707. This perspective was renewed in the 1970s by the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre), who sought to defend the Union against rising interest in Scottish devolution. Trevor-Roper insisted that the seventeenth century represented ‘the darkest age of Scottish history’, marked by the ‘feudal power of the nobility’, the ‘fanaticism of the clergy’, and an ‘arrested economy’. By 1707, he argued, the Scots’ desperate situation gave them no choice but to sacrifice their ‘feeble’ Parliament and embrace incorporating union with England.1
This negative view of pre-Union Scotland has been reinforced by historiographical comparison with seventeenth-century England. For social, political, cultural, and economic historians, England has been seen as the birthplace of modernity. Against exceptionalist accounts of England, with its coffee-house clubs, leading-edge theorists, and sophisticated financiers, Scotland has seemed backwards. This has reinforced periodization conventions that tend to fragment perspectives on Scotland’s pre-Union era. The decades of the seventeenth century slip out of focus as historians foreground the earlier Renaissance and Reformation periods or the later Enlightenment and Empire phases. Studies of the long sixteenth century tend to stop at 1625 (the end of the reign of James VI and I) or 1638 (the National Covenant), while studies of the long eighteenth century begin with the 1660 Restoration, the 1688–9 Revolution, or even the 1707 Union. General histories usually offer chapters on the seventeenth century or the period 1560–1707, but more specialized studies prefer to focus on reigns or crisis points.
These historiographical issues have begun to be addressed in recent decades. Since the 1960s, debate over the formation of the Union has made historians more alert to the way in which attitudes towards Anglo-Scottish union have shaped histories of the pre-1707 period. A trend towards multiple-kingdoms British history has improved our understanding of the Union of Crowns era (1603–1707), though there is still no modern monograph-length study of this period from a Scottish perspective. The negative view of Scotland in comparison to England has been undermined as historians question England’s distinctiveness and identify multiple forms of modernity within and beyond Europe.2 In studying Scottish history, scholars have assessed a broader range of European comparators and have sought to describe change in Scottish, rather than English, terms. At the same time, the new British history has drawn attention to the interconnectedness of England and Scotland in the Union of Crowns. Together these trends have challenged the notion of a static Scotland while pointing to English as well as European influence on change in Scotland.
This chapter will draw together a range of recent work to provide a fresh appraisal of the pre-Union century. It will focus on three areas of supposed backwardness highlighted by Trevor-Roper: Scotland’s society and political practices; its intellectual culture; and its economy and trade. While a more positive consensus will be identified across these topics, the chapter will highlight points of debate on the extent of Scottish development in these areas.
Older accounts have stressed the medieval nature of Scotland’s noble-led society and political systems. In comparison to early modern England’s broadening electorate, emerging public sphere, and vigorous parliamentary culture, Scottish society and politics seemed embedded in older patterns. This view, however, has been eroded. Key areas of debate have emerged around three interlocking issues: the degree to which a politically significant ‘middling sort’ appeared in Scotland; the extent to which the state expanded its influence over localities; and how far the nobility experienced a decrease in power and influence as a consequence.
Compared to England’s yeoman farmer, gentry, and financier classes, Scotland’s middling sorts have seemed a pale reflection, dominated by nobles who were given licence by a weak state to retain a militarized power base well into the eighteenth century. Vigorous empirical research into Scottish society and politics, however, has begun to outline patterns of internal development in Scottish terms. Scotland’s middling sorts now appear in the form of smaller proprietors, educated professionals, and prosperous tenant farmers, merchants and artisans. Though Rab Houston and Ian Whyte stress that the middling ranks were ‘less prominent’ than in England, these growing ranks were literate and possessed property or affluence, which gave them some degree of political responsibility and independence.3
In rural society, proprietorship rose through feuing (payment of a large upfront sum to the feudal superior, followed by a small annual duty) and wadsetting (loans made by tenants or tacksmen to landowners). Margaret Sanderson and Walter Makey have emphasized the significance of the sixteenth-century feuing movement in creating many smaller landholders in lowland Scotland. Tenants with savings, or speculators with capital, could use feuing to secure a heritable estate. Allan Macinnes has shown how wadsetting led to a similar outcome in the Highlands from the mid-seventeenth century.4 Here the tacksmen loaned money upwards to the clan elite, securing heritable control of their farms until the loan was repaid or, more often, title was awarded on cancellation of the debt. In the Lowlands, rising inflation transferred effective control to feuars, while burgeoning debt held by highland chiefs gave leverage to wadsetters. The proliferation of proprietorship through feuing and wadsetting can be seen in the rise of a new term, the ‘heritor’, which encompassed all heritable landholders, noble or not, in a parish. Alongside the smaller heritors, agricultural improvement (described below) and the spread of parish schooling brought more lowland tenant farmers into the ranks of the literate middling sort.
Political engagement for this stratum came through office-holding and participation in an expanding public sphere. The lesser heritors shared responsibility with the nobility for the maintenance of the parish church and school. Many served alongside tenant farmers as elders in the kirk-session. Smaller proprietors did not qualify to vote for a shire representative to Parliament, and many retained strong links to the territorial nobility through feudal superiorities, kinship, or commercial relations, but they still had more political independence than a tenant who remained subject to a landlord for the renewal of leases. Even tenant farmers could participate in political discourse: in 1705 a Scottish periodical featured a tenant farmer as an archetypal ‘Country Man’ in dialogue with his local schoolmaster on political matters.5
As the schoolmaster figure suggests, educated professionals became more socially and politically significant before the Union. After the Reformation, the clergy emerged as a university-educated social group, comfortably provided with generous stipends by the 1630s. Graduates aiming for a parish post often served first as schoolmasters in the expanding parish school system, doubling as precentors and kirk-session clerks. Law and medicine became increasingly attractive careers for younger sons of landowners. By 1672, lawyers acting in the central courts had been incorporated as the Faculty of Advocates. The physicians formed a Royal College, after several earlier attempts, in 1681. Hugh Ouston and Roger Emerson have shown how, by the Restoration period, lawyers and physicians in Edinburgh had joined Scottish nobles in the role of the learned virtuoso. These educated professionals were to become a bastion of the Scottish middling sorts, wielding increasing political and cultural power despite their official absence as a social group from traditional systems of representation in parliamentary and burgh politics. Parish ministers, like church elders, might have close relationships with territorial lords, but clerics also had links to central authorities and could exert independent leadership at the community level through the pulpit and kirk-session.
In the burghs, rising affluence and urban populations brought more merchants and craftsmen into a middling level over the long term. This process was most notable in the increasingly stratified society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s burgeoning capital city. While literacy levels rose across the century in Scotland, they rose fastest in the burghs, through a combination of occupational demand and educational availability. Rab Houston’s research has shown that the vast bulk of the literacy gains of the pre-Union century were enjoyed by the middling sorts, with urban craftsmen and tradesmen reaching a level of 85 per cent literacy by the 1690s.6 Literate burgesses served as church elders, constables, and town-guard officers, while the greater availability of news and print in the towns fed political awareness.
Scholars generally agree that literate middling sorts, particularly lairds, lawyers, and clergy, provided the administrative manpower for a slowly expanding state. More controversial is the question of how far they contributed to a transfer of power from the traditional devolved jurisdictions of the nobility to state-based institutions. Though Whig histories celebrate the 1747 abolition of heritable jurisdictions in Scotland as a benchmark of post-Union modernization, the pre-Union period saw significant erosion of these bailiwicks. If the kirk-session is interpreted as an extension of central authority, as in Julian Goodare’s work on state formation, then the development of the session’s disciplinary jurisdiction can be seen in this light. Though kirk-sessions usually worked cooperatively with local barony courts, their growth coincided with the declining remit of these secular courts and the rise of the parish as a political unit. The new parish courts had strong connections to the centre through Scotland’s unique network of regional presbyteries, which remained in place throughout the century despite changes in episcopal government.
Centralized systems impinged in other ways on local authority over time. The Justices of the Peace, though not considered successful, presented a challenge to traditional courts and managed in some areas to carve out a meaningful role. Perhaps more significant on an ad hoc basis were judicial commissions issued by the Privy Council. Goodare has stressed the extent to which Commissions of Justiciary issued to lairds for witch trials represented an extension of state control into localities through the role played by the Privy Council as a kind of grand jury.7 In the Restoration period, commissions of discipline allowed central authorities to leapfrog uncooperative sheriffs to prosecute conventiclers. More directly, the Jacobean and Caroline episcopate reached into the parishes through a redeveloped Court of High Commission, pursuing laymen and clergy for nonconformity. Under Charles II, the High Court of Justiciary was reconstituted with circuit courts in 1672 to regularize the prosecution of criminal cases.
The long-term development of state judicial systems went hand in hand with a reduction in the military power of the Scottish nobility. Jenny Wormald and Keith Brown have documented a decline in lowland practices of armed feud by the early seventeenth century, corresponding with a greater pursuit of justice at law.8 The need to maintain armed followings declined as the use of the king’s courts proved more effective in the settlement of disputes. Though James VI had demonstrated a commitment to reducing bloodfeud from the 1590s, the Union of Crowns gave a further impetus to this with the pacification of the Anglo-Scottish border. In contrast to the Lowlands, the Highlands remained more militarized, but Allan Macinnes has shown how economic forces as well as lowland cultural example encouraged highland chiefs to begin to shed expensive military retainers by mid-century.9
The early modern Scottish state sought to monopolize the making of war by moving, as in other European realms, away from a feudal common army raised by territorial nobles towards standing regiments led by professional officers. Informed by the experiences of Scottish officers serving in Swedish regiments, the Covenanting state adopted the latest military methods to march against Charles I in 1639.10 The Restoration Parliament declared the making of war to be the king’s right alone and authorized in 1661 a new militia under Privy Council control. After the Revolution, William II and III and Anne raised regiments from Scotland for British service in continental wars. Militarism remained part of noble culture, with young nobles receiving training in the arts of war; but for most, military service became a career choice as younger sons officered royal or mercenary regiments.
This demilitarization of the Scottish nobility indicated a transition in the nature of lordship in the pre-Union period, though historians disagree how far this signalled a decline in the power and influence of the titled nobility in personal terms. While nobles may have shifted ‘from lordship to patronage’, there is uncertainty over the extent to which the middling (or lower) sorts became more significant in early modern Scottish political practices. Traditionally, the sociopolitical radicalism of the Covenanting period has been understood to have vanished with the conservative backlash of the Restoration. Noble dominance continued after the ‘unrevolutionary’ Williamite Revolution of 1688–9, with P. W. J. Riley portraying the pre-Union Parliament as a sordid arena for nobles on the make.11
More recent perspectives have highlighted the vigour of parliamentary and popular politics across the pre-Union century, while acknowledging the continuing importance of noble leadership in Scottish political culture. Faced with an absentee monarch, oppositional nobles turned to popular opinion as a means of resisting Crown policy in the name of the commonwealth. Having opened this Pandora’s box with the Covenanting rebellion of 1637–9, they found it difficult to close again. Allan Macinnes has described the mobilization of grassroots resistance in this rebellion, while Walter Makey and John Young have stressed the social and political radicalism of the ensuing Covenanting revolution.12 Popular resistance continued to disrupt Restoration politics, fuelling the emergence of a more organized parliamentary opposition.13 Derek Patrick and Tim Harris have indicated the influence of popular politics in the making of the 1688–9 Revolution in Scotland; and other work has investigated this in the events leading to the Union of 1707.14 New research has stressed the extent to which the Crown struggled to manage Parliament between the Revolution and the Union, faced with oppositional factions, active lobbying, and mass petitioning.15
These reassessments of political culture have been aided by a reinterpretation of Scottish religious culture. Margo Todd’s groundbreaking study of the making of Protestant culture in Scotland has highlighted the power of religious ideology within Scottish society while avoiding the judgemental baggage of sectarian history or the institutional focus of traditional Kirk–State studies. Interest in the culture of the clergy and laity has created a better appreciation of the patriotic and political nature of Scottish piety and the fierce desire of many to preserve what they saw as Scottish forms of worship, discipline, and Church government. The story of the bifurcation of Scottish Protestant culture into Presbyterian and Episcopalian forms, linked to radical and royalist or, later, Whig and Jacobite political aims, has begun to be outlined through new work on Covenanting, Episcopalian, and Jacobite cultures.
This cultural approach has allowed historians to take a wider view of political systems, looking beyond the institutions of Kirk, State, and Parliament to identify an emerging public sphere accessed by the growing middling sort outlined above. Alistair Mann’s work on the Scottish book trade has given us a better appreciation of the rising, if uneven, availability of political print in this period, while British work on pamphleteering has begun to indicate how Scottish print intersected with a London-based public sphere in the Anglo-Scottish union.16 The Scottish public sphere may not have boasted as many coffee houses as London’s, but historians have begun to recognize the significance of public discourse in shaping Scottish opinions and enabling political participation.
It seems clear that historians can no longer view the pre-Union period as one of social and political stagnation. Scotland, like other European kingdoms at the time, continued to be led by its nobility, but religious controversy encouraged wider social engagement in politics. This was enabled by long-term trends in social change, state formation, and lordship similar to those seen across Europe. Scotland’s experience of the seventeenth century, on this evidence, was not medieval but distinctly early modern. Because the patterns of change seen in Scotland do not match those of England, they have been seen as inferior by generations of scholars. In more recent work, Scottish modes of early modernity have been found, shaped by the realm’s unique circumstances and traditions, though scholars still debate the extent of social and political change.
Commentators have tended to see Scottish intellectual culture in the pre-Union period as moribund, held back by Calvinist intolerance and the 1603 departure of the monarch’s court to London. For literary scholars, the loss of royal patronage and the Kirk’s distrust of imaginative literature, especially drama, have been seen to have doomed Scottish culture to a period of inertia. Among historians for whom religious toleration is a marker of modernity, the pre-Union Scottish Kirk has been condemned for its bigotry. Trevor-Roper believed that while the Scottish north-east may have harboured a degree of Arminian moderation within the Stuart Episcopalian Kirk, only English influence after 1707, starting with the Westminster Toleration Act of 1712, could curb the excesses of Scotland’s fanatical Presbyterians.
As with studies of society and politics, however, more recent work has challenged these negative views. Explorations of the ‘early Enlightenment’ have pushed the frontiers of intellectual dynamism into the Restoration period, while work on Renaissance and Reformation culture has traced continuities across the 1603 watershed. By connecting these studies, patterns can be discerned across the pre-Union period in law, science, literature, and theology. Scottish thinking continued between 1603 and 1707, adapted to the particular circumstances of the century. These activities reveal continuing intellectual exchange with Europe, especially Protestant France and the Netherlands, and rising interaction with England in the Union of Crowns.
In pointing to a relative lack of new Scottish philosophical works in the seventeenth century, Alexander Brodie has suggested that the Renaissance humanists’ return to classical texts discouraged, for a time, the philosophical innovation that would emerge in the next century.17 Instead, intellectual dynamism in Scotland, as elsewhere in Europe, appeared in writings on the law and science. The Union of Crowns, for example, spurred the legal humanist Sir Thomas Craig of Riccarton to investigate English and Scottish feudal law (Jus Feudale, 1603) and assess the feasibility of legal union between the two kingdoms (De Unione Regnorum Britanniae, 1605). After several decades of monarchical union, later jurists sought to document the distinctiveness of Scottish law in the Institutions of James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair (1681), and Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1684).
In the sciences, Roger Emerson has highlighted the medical and geographical projects of Sir Robert Sibbald, Geographer Royal, physician to the king and founder of the Royal College of Physicians in Scotland. Though Sibbald may not have been at the cutting edge of medicine, he embodied an increasing orientation in educated Scottish culture towards scientific debate and improvement. Sibbald acted as a hub within the Scottish virtuosi, with correspondence links to like-minded gentlemen in England, Paris, and the Netherlands. Michael Hunter has shown how even Robert Kirk, a minister from the remote Gaelic-speaking parish of Aberfoyle, could contribute an ethnological study of Scottish fairies to British discussions on the nature of matter and the reality of spirits.18
In literature, scholars have tended to dismiss the outpouring of vernacular prose in this period as turgid or overenthusiastic, while romanticizing ballads as the surviving expression of a pre-Reformation oral culture. Two shifts in scholarly attention have begun to revise this view of the literary corpus. By tracing continuities in Renaissance culture into the seventeenth century, scholars are recovering the diversity of Scottish intellectual life in the pre-Union period. The vitality of Scottish neo-Latin poetry has been rediscovered, though progress is handicapped by the need for specialist language skills.19 As well, the turn to religious culture, noted above, has highlighted the significance of vernacular religious texts. David Mullan’s editions of spiritual autobiographies, for example, have provided new material for the reconstruction of Calvinist piety.20 Fresh readings of Scottish ballads, combined with witch-trial evidence, have helped to reconstruct the nature of post-Reformation magical beliefs.21 Work on popular entertainment has revealed a greater variety of public performance in post-Reformation Scotland, despite clerical disapproval of formal drama.22 Together these various projects are helping to reconstruct a clearer picture of the cultural life of this period.
Perhaps the most tenacious complaint about pre-Union Scotland remains the notion of the fanatical, intolerant Kirk. Many modern historians continue to see the stern Calvinist discipline of this period as repugnant and the Kirk’s attack on popular beliefs and festive practices as regrettable. Yet here too a cultural approach has turned historians’ attention to the slow processes of negotiation and adaptation by which most Scots came to accept, and even embrace, Protestant culture, though further research is needed to unpick regional differences in the pace and nature of Scottish Protestantization.23
While there remains no doubt that many in the Kirk embraced the values of a confessional age in which there was little room for dissent, scholars have sought to complicate simple notions of Calvinist ‘fanaticism’ by demonstrating the continuous presence of intellectual inquiry, forms of moderation, and even notions of toleration within Scottish church culture. Studies of Presbyterian intellectuals have highlighted thinkers like Samuel Rutherford and James Steuart of Goodtrees, who wrote relatively moderate and well-informed political theory for a learned audience, while acknowledging the less cosmopolitan nature of more radical Covenanting writers.24 Setting aside the monolithic notion of ‘the Kirk’, these and other studies have looked instead at the range of beliefs and practices articulated by clergy and laity, influenced by British and European intellectual contexts.
David Allan has indicated how exposure to neo-Stoic philosophy encouraged latitude in the Kirk, particularly among senior episcopalian clerics trained at universities abroad.25 In the Jacobean Church, episcopalian figures like Andrew Boyd, Bishop of Argyll, urged toleration of Presbyterian practices at the parish level in order to maintain unity in the Scottish Church.26 Later in the Restoration period, Colin Kidd has identified a ‘Scottish school of latitudinarian theology’ centred on Robert Leighton, Bishop of Dunblane and Archbishop of Glasgow under Charles II. Leighton’s moderation owed much to his postgraduate continental education in civil law and neo-Stoic philosophy, as well as his close links with Anglicans through his official posts. Leighton’s sponsorship of talks with Presbyterian dissenters between 1669 and 1672 reflected a British intellectual framework in echoing the published ideas of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, on a minimalist episcopate. Leighton’s latitudinarian associates included Gilbert Burnet, whose moderate views were also shaped by an international education and milieu.
In a similar vein, Clare Jackson has indicated how the circumstances of the Restoration led the Stuart episcopate to avoid stringent jure divino claims for government by bishops in order to encourage Presbyterian reconciliation. Moderate clergy like Burnet urged cooperation among Scottish Protestants against greater external dangers such as Catholicism, atheism, and ungodliness. These arguments succeeded with relatively temperate Presbyterians, such as George Meldrum, who complied with the new regime despite personal doubts about prelacy. Like other moderates, Meldrum accepted the Restoration settlement until the Test Act of 1681 and then returned to the national Church via the indulgence of 1687.
Though the Revolution of 1688–9 brought hardline Presbyterians back into the national Church, political conditions encouraged moderation among leading clerics as they sought to steer a course between an unsympathetic monarch and their more enthusiastic colleagues. These included figures like Meldrum, who had complied with prelacy or accepted indulgences in the Restoration; and others, like William Carstares, whose British intrigues and continental exile had inculcated a more politique perspective. These individuals cooperated with like-minded Presbyterian lay elites, including the political theorist turned Lord Advocate, Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees. Tristram Clarke’s research indicates how the Presbyterian Church after 1690 came to accommodate Williamite episcopalians such as John Robertson, formerly of Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, and Laurence Charteris, formerly Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh University.27 Other episcopalian moderates accepted into the Kirk included James Gordon, a minister in Banchory who had advocated accommodation in a 1679 tract, The Reformed Bishop.
Some parishioners as well as clergy turned towards moderation in response to the disorders of the century. Clare Jackson and Julia Buckroyd have noted the rise of anti-clericalism among Restoration elites, marked by disdain for religious enthusiasm.28 On a more intellectual plane, British and European print and correspondence encouraged movement among the educated towards deism. As Michael Graham’s micro-history shows, rising panic among clerics about deism found an outlet in the pursuit of Edinburgh University student Thomas Aikenhead, leading to his execution for blasphemy in 1697. Frequently cited as the ultimate example of the fanatical intolerance of the Scottish Kirk, Aikenhead’s execution must also be seen, in light of Graham’s study, as evidence of a counter-current of lay abstraction from the teachings of the Kirk.29 Though Presbyterian authorities expected the laity to attend church and restrict their activities on the Sabbath, limited cooperation spurred the passage of Sabbatarian legislation in Parliament, town councils, and the General Assembly after 1690. R. Douglas Brackenridge has suggested that the ineffectiveness of these laws can be seen in their frequent repetition.30
Not all scholars agree with the new emphasis on moderation in pre-Union religious culture. Alasdair Raffe and C. D. A. Leighton have provided reminders of the uncompromising nature of much post-Revolution Presbyterian and non-jurant episcopalian thought.31 Still, though the extent of moderation before 1707 remains debatable, recent scholarship has eroded simplistic notions of a fanatical and intolerant Kirk. Scholars have begun to recover the diversity of pre-Union Scottish religious culture, including irreligion and irenicism as well as orthodoxy. Rather than stagnating, Scottish intellectual culture continued to reflect European influences while interacting more with English discourse. Findings in theology, science, literature, and law point to forms of dynamism and moderation that complicate the stereotypically negative picture of a benighted century. More research remains to be done in order to delineate fully the indigenous cultural dynamics of the pre-Union age, but it seems that this period cannot be dismissed as the darkness before the dawn of the Enlightenment.
As in society, politics, and culture, new research has developed a different understanding of the Scottish economy before the Union. A recent assessment concludes that it is ‘no longer acceptable to write off seventeenth-century Scotland’.32 Nevertheless, sharp debate continues on whether the notorious disasters of the 1690s reveal short-term or more fundamental weaknesses in the Scottish economy before 1707. The debate arises in part from competing historiographical aims: some historians highlight the catastrophic conditions of the century’s end in order to explain contemporary economic pressures towards incorporation, while others focus on countervailing trends in an attempt to explain the roots of post-Union growth. Either way, new studies have challenged any simple explanation for the Union or economic development thereafter. As in culture, society, and politics, the aim now is to reconstruct Scottish economic dynamics on their own terms in order to appreciate the rationality and, in some sectors, vitality of Scottish responses to British and European contexts.
Countering older accounts of a declining agrarian sector, Ian Whyte’s work suggests slow improvement disrupted by periods of war. By the 1640s, new ideas for the improvement of agriculture were spreading to Scotland from England and the Continent, but the disorders of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Cromwellian occupation hampered change. With the return of peace, Acts of Parliament in the 1660s encouraged the protection of crops by enclosure, the planting of trees, and the use of legumes for fertility. A set of three Acts in 1695 included a measure enabling the consolidation of runrig strips. With parliamentary Acts indicating an interest in change, estate papers demonstrate actual alterations in agrarian practices. Rising market orientation can be seen in a long-term trend towards the payment of rents in cash and the issuing of written leases. The growing market demands of Edinburgh encouraged the improvement of properties around the capital, with prosperous tenants running larger holdings in Lothian and Berwickshire by the end of the century. Whyte’s analysis is supported by comparative studies that stress the positive effect of rising urban demand and the negative effect of war on agricultural productivity in early modern Europe.33
Gains over the Restoration period allowed tenants to accumulate savings in good years, often loaning these out to lairds to finance estate expansion.34 The commercial development of estates by landholders in both the Lowlands and the Highlands reflected a need to reduce huge debts incurred in wartime, as well as a fashionable desire to display status through conspicuous consumption. Rosalind Marshall’s study of the third Duchess of Hamilton shows how the proceeds from an intense redevelopment of Duchess Anne’s estates funded the rebuilding of Hamilton Palace according to French and English models, complete with continental-style sash windows.35 Similar efforts on other home farms contributed to rising arable productivity, with larger grain surpluses exported in good years. In the Highlands, proprietors profited by droving beef on the hoof to the Lowlands as an already flourishing domestic cattle trade expanded into larger English markets by the 1680s. Highland landholders also used steelbow, a form of sharecropping, to help tenants establish or expand farms. Rural industry developed among proprietors with natural resources, most notably in coal mining for export to English markets and the linked manufacture of salt for the domestic market.
These developments on landed estates accompanied an associated expansion in marketing networks. John Harrison’s Perthshire study has shown how improving local administration of road-maintenance laws enhanced transport infrastructures, aiding the movement of grain to market and lime to fields.36 Larger traders began to operate across multiple burghs while smaller traders proliferated in new burghs of barony and regality and local markets and fairs. By 1672, rising pressure on the restrictive privileges of the royal burghs led to an Act of Parliament allowing the export of agricultural produce from burghs of barony and regality.
Alongside these changes, manufacturing expanded across the century. Gordon Marshall’s attempt to use Scottish manufacturing as a Weberian case study may have been met with scepticism, but his research outlines the growth of this sector. As in agriculture, an improving spirit can be seen in a series of parliamentary Acts designed to encourage manufacturing. Legislation between 1641 and 1681 sought to develop the weaving of cloth from native wool by offering tax incentives to joint-stock entrepreneurs and erecting tariff barriers to English cloth. Ventures in woollen cloth, as well as glass, soap, iron, and paper, were established before 1660, followed by projects in linen, rope, pins, and sugar.37 At the same time, T. C. Smout has shown how less capital-intensive systems of rural part-time spinning and weaving supplied increasing exports of woollen and linen textiles, most notably linen from Perthshire and Renfrewshire and woollen plaiding and stockings from Aberdeenshire. Tariff pressures on selling prices squeezed margins and pushed quality towards the low end of the market, but by the end of the century, linen cloth had become a significant export sector, with much of it sold to England and its colonies.
These areas of growth and improvement are now better understood for the pre-Union period, but this does not change the fact that Scotland’s position in the Union of Crowns created difficulties for economic development in this period. Historians agree that the 1603 Union created tension between Scottish and English interests, with English imperatives in diplomacy, war, and political economy taking precedence in the multiple monarchy. While Scots were naturalized in England from 1608, they were still treated as aliens and barred from the carrying trade to the English colonies through a series of Navigation Acts (although clandestine activity by Scottish merchants was prevalent). English influence in foreign policy led to repeated wars with Scotland’s traditional trading partners, the Netherlands and France. The Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1650s, 1660s, and 1670s, and the French wars of the 1690s and early 1700s, disrupted Scottish trade and triggered the imposition of punitive tariffs and outright prohibitions on Scottish goods.
Scottish exports to England rose as these political circumstances closed off continental markets and fuelled the development of the cattle, coal, and linen exports noted above. Traditionally, this shift towards English markets has been seen as presaging the economic union of 1707. T. C. Smout provided a modern empirical base for this view with an influential 1963 study of Scottish overseas trade. This combined new research into Scottish exports with an analysis of the pamphlet literature on incorporating union, concluding that the better arguments lay with those writers who saw incorporating union as the only way out for a failed economy. Resistance to these conclusions offered by political historians like William Ferguson and P. W. J. Riley created a major battleground in Union historiography over the significance of economics in the making of the Union. This has resulted in two historiographical views of the pre-Union economy: a pessimistic interpretation based on Smout and elaborated by Christopher Whatley; and a more optimistic view advanced by T. M. Devine and Allan Macinnes.
The pessimistic view updates the traditionally negative view of the pre-Union economy. It acknowledges evidence for internal development but still emphasizes the underlying constraints of the Union of Crowns in a mercantilist world. In this view, the benefits achieved by improvers and entrepreneurs were destroyed by a combination of blows in the 1690s, revealing fundamental weaknesses in the post-1603 Scottish economy. These blows started as the Revolution ushered in the long Nine Years War with France (1688–97), which disrupted trade and created extraordinary tax demands on the Scottish economy. Though the Scots’ commercial privileges in France had been eroded since 1603, France nonetheless remained a key trading partner for Scotland. British war with France thus had a disproportionate effect on Scotland, not least because a massive expansion of the English navy supplied convoys for English, but not Scottish, shipping. This allowed French privateers to take Scottish prizes while at the same time the English navy intercepted Scottish ships caught trading with the enemy. Scottish traders sailing for French wine and salt had less to offer, as the French government placed heavy tariffs on Scottish coal and prohibited woollen cloth and fish even after the peace treaty of 1697. At home, the demands of war led to a 50 per cent increase in the land tax in 1690, and the imposition of new forms of taxation with a 1690 hearth tax followed by poll taxes in 1693, 1695, and 1698.
At the same time, a spasm of the Little Ice Age hit agricultural yields in Scotland. New research has stressed the seriousness of the harvest failures of the 1690s, with climate change adversely affecting upland areas from the early years of the decade.38 While the largest tenants and landowners may have prospered by selling surpluses at higher prices, the consecutive bad years left smaller players with a dearth of seed, breeding stock, and ploughing animals. This, combined with the out-migration or death by famine of agricultural workers, left land lying unused for years. Not only did this undermine earlier gains in agricultural productivity, but in monetary terms the collapse of agrarian income short-circuited the chains of credit on which the Scottish economy depended. A growing credit crisis was intensified from 1696 by emergency taxation and borrowing to fund unprecedented levels of spending by local and national authorities on imported victual to relieve the poor. Rural income was further hit by English protectionism as a result of the raising of English tariffs on Scottish linen in 1698.
Just as agricultural returns began to collapse, Scotland’s investors sank their capital into a patriotic venture that directly challenged powerful English commercial interests. Launched in 1695, the initial aim of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies was to create new markets for Scottish wool in Africa. Investors in the English East Indian trade saw the company as a threat to their monopoly, sparking concerted efforts to block the company’s fund-raising efforts in London and continental money markets. In response, a patriotic stir in Scotland attracted not just a wealthy elite to the Company’s 1696 subscriptions but also a large number of small and institutional investors, from widows to royal burghs. As Douglas Watt’s history of the Company shows, these investors saw no returns in the short term as the Company shifted to a high-risk American colonization strategy that clashed with the diplomatic interests of the Crown and the economic interests of English Caribbean colonies.39 The tying-up of capital in the Company, falling agrarian returns, and a European shortage of specie combined to produce a major recession in the late 1690s, leading some contemporaries to conclude that Scotland’s position in the Union of Crowns was untenable.
This assessment of Scotland’s economic problems helps to explain contemporary support for incorporating union, but some historians feel that it underplays the potential for the Scottish economy to recover from a short-term combination of external difficulties. They have emphasized the continuing vitality of Scottish trade in certain sectors, most notably with North American colonies. This alternative view stresses the resilience and entrepreneurial spirit of Scottish merchants in the pre-Union period, suggesting that, given time, the economy could have recovered from the extreme circumstances of the 1690s. Reinforced by Steve Murdoch’s reconstruction of Scottish trading networks in northern Europe, T. M. Devine’s study of ‘Scotland’s empire’ points to the success of seventeenth-century Scots as emigrant traders in Continental Europe, particularly Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and Norway-Denmark; and as colonists and traders in Ulster and the North American plantations.40 From mid-century, Scottish trade to the English plantations in particular offered a means of exploiting Scotland’s position in the Union of Crowns. With support from the Duke of York, Scotland’s commercial elites formed an explicit strategy to build exports via colonial trade, leading to Scottish ventures in South Carolina (1684) and East New Jersey (1685). As well, Allan Macinnes’s recent study of the Union notes the many loopholes by which Scottish traders sold coarse Scottish linen and other exports to North America. Macinnes has argued that Scottish evasion of the Navigation Acts had reached sufficient heights by 1705 to motivate English, as opposed to Scottish, desires for economic union in order to regularize Scottish colonial trade.
These optimistic and pessimistic views of Scottish trade on the eve of Union are, of course, not mutually exclusive. In revising more simple explanations for the making of the Union, together they indicate the responsiveness of the Scottish economy in the pre-Union period as it changed according to European, Atlantic, and British circumstances. As with assessments of culture, society, and politics, historians may not agree on the overall health of the pre-Union economy, but they understand that it was not static.
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There is little doubt that pre-Union Scotland had its problems. Since the 1960s, though, historians have become uncomfortable with the notion that modernity arrived in Scotland with the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s trenchant restatement of this in the 1970s, in the context of arguments over devolution, has impelled a new generation of historians to challenge older interpretations of society, politics, culture, and trade in pre-Union Scotland. Recent scholarship has featured broader comparative frameworks and a willingness to take Scottish development on its own terms. A historiographical shift towards cultural studies has prompted new perspectives on political, religious, and intellectual culture. The result is a fertile field of inquiry with significant areas of debate inviting further research. Periodization conventions still truncate our sense of the pre-Union period, highlighting the need for works of synthesis cutting across the early modern period. Indisputably, however, there is a new consensus which suggests that Scotland did not simply leapfrog to modernity on the back of the Union. There was something we can call ‘early modern’ Scotland, though the shape of this transitional period still remains the subject of robust discussion.
Devine, T. M., ‘The Union of 1707 and Scottish Development’, Scottish Economic & Social History, 5 (1985), 23–7.
—— The Transformation of Rural Scotland (Edinburgh, 1996).
Emerson, Roger L., ‘Sir Robert Sibbald Kt, the Royal Society of Scotland and the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Annals of Science, 45 (1988), 41–72.
Goodare, Julian, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999).
Houston, R. A., and Whyte, I. D., eds., ‘Introduction: Scottish Society in Perspective’, in Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989).
Jackson, Clare, Restoration Scotland 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003).
Kidd, Colin, ‘Religious Realignment Between the Revolution and the Union’, in John Robertson, A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995).
Macinnes, Allan I., Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996).
—— Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007).
Ouston, Hugh, ‘York in Edinburgh: James VII and the Patronage of Learning in Scotland 1679–1688’, in John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason, and Alexander Murdoch, eds., New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982).
Smout, T. C., Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union, 1660–1707 (Edinburgh and London, 1963).
Stevenson, David, ‘Twilight before Night or Darkness before Dawn? Interpreting Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, in Rosalind Mitchison, ed., Why Scottish History Matters (Edinburgh, 1991).
Todd, Margo, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven and London, 2002).
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’ and ‘Scotland and the Puritan Revolution’, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London and Basingstoke, 1972), and ‘The Anglo-Scottish Union’, in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, 1992).
Whatley, Christopher, ‘Taking Stock: Scotland at the End of the Seventeenth Century’, in T. C. Smout, ed., Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900 (Oxford, 2005).
Whyte, Ian D., Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1979).