HINDSIGHT tends to impose an artificial coherence on political movements. In April 1831, in the midst of intense agitation in favour of parliamentary reform throughout the United Kingdom, The Scotsman (founded in 1817 as the mouthpiece of Edinburgh’s increasingly liberal middle classes) called for an end to ‘the Forty Years’ War’ between the people outside of Parliament and a corrupt oligarchy denying them their rights.1 This Whig history of parliamentary reform was born in tandem with the passage of the Reform Acts themselves. These were seen to be the fruits of a long campaign beginning, in England, with John Wilkes in the 1760s and accelerated everywhere by the galvanizing effect of the French Revolution. Pre-reform political arrangements across the United Kingdom, but in Scotland more than anywhere else, were damned both by radical polemic and by Whig hagiography.
There was, of course, some substance to these condemnations of pre-reform politics and to the optimistic narrative of how they came to be amended. One coherent story can be told of the entire period from the 1770s to the 1830s. At the start, Scottish politics was an intimate, face-to-face affair. Political structures ensured a restricted electorate in both urban and rural contexts and a system that ran smoothly with the grease of patronage, while it entailed reciprocal obligations and chains of interdependence.2 By 1832 Scotland had well-developed traditions of extra-parliamentary activity, sustained by meetings, petitions, associations, and a wide press, and had spawned large and diverse movements in support of the reform of many Scottish and United Kingdom institutions.3
Such a trajectory would seem to align Scotland neatly with three broad models of political change: first, an older model of ‘Atlantic Revolution’, whereby economic and social factors such as the rise of the ‘middling sort’ and the traumatic and disruptive nature of industrialization and urbanization, coupled with the political earthquakes of the French and American revolutions, were the crucial motors; second, a more recent model, where the explanation for this transformative change is cultural and is found in a revolution in print and its expanding audiences; and finally, an ambitiously globalized ‘Age of Reform’.4
Like any grand narrative, these ones have their difficulties. Applied unreflectively, they can mask discontinuities and disunity, periods of inaction and reaction. They can also support the tendency of historians to explore oppositional politics and to pit apparently ‘progressive’ movements against an ‘establishment’ or ancien régime, which can be caricatured as immobile and static and whose dynamism and adaptability are all too often ignored. Confident narratives are thus matched by more qualified accounts of an ‘Age of Uncertainty’ as ‘what was once a teleologist’s dream … has lately been turning into a post-modernist’s nightmare’.5
Indeed, this uncertainty has destabilized radicalism as one of the central organizing concepts for the period. As a distinctive ideology and programme encompassing political, social, economic, and moral reform, it was only after 1819 that both hostile and friendly contemporaries began to refer consistently to ‘radicalism’ (and, indeed, to ‘radicals’). This has led some scholars to condemn its use before this reification as anachronistic and ahistorical.6 More constructive have been approaches that remain sensitive to these difficulties, but nevertheless treat radicalism before the 1820s as a meaningful description for a fluid body of ideas and strategies regarding the state, society, religion, and human relations to these. Certainly, such criticisms have established that radicalism must be described, explained, and defined contextually.7 Only by an investigation of events, personalities, structures, groups, and the rapidly shifting contexts in which politics were practised can we begin to achieve an accurate description of the developing political culture of Scotland across these years.
Principally, the concerns of Scottish historians have been shaped by three groups of questions. First, they have been exercised by the question of class: to what extent were popular politics, and radicalism in particular, a reflection of Scotland’s experiences of industrialization and demographic expansion across this period; and how far do they provide a key to the exploration of class formation and inter-class relations?8 A second and related set of questions revolve around the issue of ‘stability’: was Scotland relatively more stable a society across this period, especially in comparison to England and Ireland; and, if so, what factors would explain this?9 A final set of questions run throughout modern Scottish historiography: what do the politics of the period reveal about the relationship between England and Scotland, and the position of Scotland within the imperial state?10
This essay will follow the existing historiography and bisect the ‘Age of Reform’ along the line provided by the Napoleonic Wars. It will suggest what was distinctive about popular political developments in Scotland in each of these periods. In attempting to synthesize historical approaches it will highlight questions specific to each period as well as those more generally applicable ones outlined above. Throughout, the essay will endeavour to identify areas of research and lines of inquiry that might fruitfully be developed by historians, and it will end by summarizing what might be done to expand further our knowledge of Scottish politics and society during this dynamic but problematic period.
One of the more venerable questions surrounding popular politics concerns origins. It tends to be conceptualized as a search for the ‘roots’ of the popular radicalism of the 1790s. Implicit in this search for origins is a challenge to reconcile pre-existing or ‘indigenous’ political traditions and languages and their role in shaping radicalism in the 1790s with a long-held notion that Scotland was somehow ‘awakened’ from a deep and largely apolitical slumber by the transformative events in France. With some notable exceptions there has been little sustained work on popular politics during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century.11 Nevertheless, plausible episodes of ‘politicization’ that demonstrate the interplay of internal and external stimuli can be identified during the period of the American Revolution.
In particular, historians have highlighted the significance of the agitation against a modest proposed measure of Catholic relief after 1778 and the movements for burgh and county reform during the 1780s. The first of these, according to R. K. Donovan, brought ‘active, long-lived political awareness to large numbers of Scotsmen for the first time’, although the ideas and language that framed the agitation—defence of the liberties secured by the Revolution and a politicized anti-Catholicism—underpinned the well-established ‘master narrative’ of eighteenth-century politics in Scotland and England.12 Both the no-popery agitation and the burgh and county reform movements, however, evinced a conscious appeal to a national public and the exploration of new political organizations and technologies. These examples can be joined by evidence for extensive Scottish involvement in pan-British movements and, in particular, in the innovative and ultimately successful campaign for the abolition of the slave trade from the late 1780s.13
All of these developments point to more general contexts for popular politics as well. An increasing volume of scholarship has pushed a model of the public sphere shorn of its original secularism and constituted by religion instead. There has been some treatment of just how religion in Scotland informed and shaped popular politics, but far more could be done to uncover the political dimensions of Scottish religious and ecclesiological disputes in the late eighteenth century, especially in light of recent arguments identifying religion as the taproot of radical politics.14 Similarly, scholars might challenge more effectively those orthodoxies surrounding the politically conservative nature of Scottish enlightenment thought. This might be done partly by determining the scale and content of ‘popular enlightenment’ in late eighteenth-century Scotland.15 In short, while the roots of Scottish ‘Jacobin’ politics are certainly discernible during the first eighty years of the eighteenth century, far more might be done to discover how deep they went and of what they consisted.
However substantial these foundations for Scottish popular politics were, the French Revolution will always hold centre stage as an event of crucial importance (as it does in many other ‘national’ historiographies). Perhaps the best place to begin any analysis of the 1790s is to think in terms of politicization rather than the growth of radicalism. If one telling criticism levelled at the dominant idea of the ‘public sphere’ is that it has erroneously been conceptualized as a secular space, another is that it has been seen as necessarily an oppositional one. The best scholarship would now regard this emerging public sphere as both ‘socially heterogeneous’ and ‘politically multi-directional’.16 Growing numbers of people from the 1790s were interested in domestic and international politics and had access to an exponentially increasing volume of printed matter as ‘the audience for political debate … decisively widened during the 1790s’.17 There was no direct correlation, however, between an expanding press and the growth of reform movements. The public sphere was a space for the development of arguments for and defences of ‘things as they are’ as well as for coruscating critiques of the status quo. It seems far more fruitful to begin with an idea of the 1790s as witnessing a process of politicization, without making facile conclusions about the direction and content of that politicization.
From within this sphere of competing levels of discourse and arguments, however, it is popular radicalism that has attracted the lion’s share of historical attention. Historians can tell a fairly straightforward story: of how the French Revolution was initially welcomed by most people in Scotland, but developed in such a way as to galvanize a radical politics which reached the artisan classes; of how this spawned reform societies, whose middle-class members abandoned them in the face of war and a radicalizing French Revolution; of how this further polarized opinion and created a vigorous loyalist reaction that made life very difficult for radicals; and of how the movement reached its apogee in a dramatic series of conventions, which were met by government with legal repression. This climactic period was followed by a couple of insurrectionary death spasms, before radicalism disappeared until 1815. What is very marked and has recently been underlined as distinctive in the Scottish context was the rapidity of the expansion of Scottish radicalism and its equally rapid contraction.18
‘Radicalism’ itself, however, is an anachronistic term that needs to be used with considerable caution. Once historians begin to explore the sinews of this ‘movement’, its coherence rapidly disappears. In terms of political discourse and ideas there is no simple answer to whether these were ‘homegrown’ or ‘imported’: instead radicals appealed to an eclectic mix of political languages, positioning themselves rhetorically depending on the political context.19 So too, we are only beginning to uncover the diversity of experiences across Scotland, as scholars have moved away from a concentration on the dramatic events in Edinburgh.20
Even at the level of individuals, while there are good biographies of some major figures, such as the Scottish ‘martyr’ Thomas Muir and the transatlantic propagandist James Thomson Callender, there are many more whose roles in popular politics have gone unexplored.21 It seems likely, for example, that further work on William Skirving, who was transported to New South Wales in 1794 for his involvement in the British Convention, could reveal interesting material on the ideological underpinnings of Scottish radicalism. Educated for the Burgher ministry and with an enduring interest in improvement and ‘agrarian patriotism’, Skirving occupies an interesting juncture between religion, Enlightenment thought, and popular radicalism. Literary historians (some of them too enthusiastically) have gone a considerable distance in trying to return the towering figure of Robert Burns to his appropriate ideological and political contexts.22 The potentially more revealing project of rescuing other less celebrated radical poets from his shadow and from the condescension of posterity has scarcely begun.23 Similarly, while scholarly work has charted how those who governed Scotland responded to the challenges of the 1790s, material on the experiences of opposition Whigs—including towering ‘British’ figures, such as the Earl of Lauderdale—is virtually non-existent.24 These are just some ‘gaps’ in the scholarship, which demonstrate the potential for further research on Scotland in the 1790s.
What is clear from the recent historiography of popular politics in both England and Scotland is the importance of remaining sensitive to rapidly changing national and international contexts. A crucial part of these was the development of an organized loyalism in Scotland and its attempts both to repress radical activity and to present a convincing rhetoric in defence of the status quo. For a considerable time this was a major absence from the historiography as historians tended to rely on a rather caricatured idea of the ‘establishment’ or ‘Pitt’s Terror’. Some seminal historical work has demonstrated, in different ways, the importance of recovering histories of popular loyalism and of phenomena such as the mass volunteer movement.25 This is not simply a question of filling in a blank to complete a picture of Scotland in the 1790s. Radicalism cannot be seen in isolation from its proper context, which is provided by loyalism. Mark Philp’s influential formulation, that we examine radicalism as a ‘developing political practice whose principles and ideological commitments are as much forged in the struggle as they are fetched from the arsenal and brought to it’, implies that even attempting to look at ‘loyalism’ and ‘radicalism’ apart from one another inhibits our ability to discuss either.26
If historians have abandoned linear histories of radicalism as a narrative of heroic resistance and inevitable progress, so too the developing historiography of ‘loyalism’ is more than just about putting flesh on the bogeyman story of King Harry and Lord Braxfield, spy systems, and repression. While there is, of course, evidence of repression at both local and national levels, historians also need to take seriously loyalist attempts to persuade and the willingness of many Scots to be persuaded. What historians are beginning to reveal is a distinctive Scottish loyalism, one that relied on the sponsorship of clerical and lay elites far more extensively than its English counterpart, could make effective use of the unique nature of the Scottish courts, and was marked by considerable experimentation in methods of political communication.27 Similar sensitivity needs to be shown in exploring the Scottish contribution to military mobilization and national defence during these years. A number of scholars have shown how a disproportionately large Scottish involvement can provide a crude index of Scottish loyalty for the period. It must also provide a central plank to any explanation of Scotland’s relative stability as well as to explorations of Scottish and British identities. The same scholars have demonstrated, however, that loyalism and volunteering (let alone other forms of mobilization) were not synonymous.28 In short, ‘loyalist’ and ‘patriotic’ politics are emerging as phenomena that are every bit as complex and multivalent as radicalism.
It is understanding these contexts that allows for more sophisticated approaches to some of the big questions historians have asked of radicalism. Many of these questions have either implicitly or explicitly been concerned with revolution and its avoidance. This shapes much of the historiography in England and Ireland as well, in both helpful and unhelpful ways. Economistic and structural explanations for Scotland’s relative ‘stability’ and its imperviousness to revolution have formed an important part of a revived historiography of modern Scotland. Simple questions about radical ‘failure’ or the ‘success’ of the status quo, however, tend to mask the fluidity and contingencies created by rapidly changing contexts. Radicalism declined spectacularly quickly after 1793—but how do we explain a partial revival of oppositional politics from 1796? To talk of elites as ‘robust’ or stable is to paint them as static, whereas in reality the 1790s was a period of dramatic transformative change for political and religious elites as much as for anyone.29
We might, for example, count as a ‘success’ the fact that there was no revolution in late eighteenth-century Scotland, but elites achieved this at the expense of sponsoring a popular loyalism, or a ‘vulgar conservatism’, which invited growing numbers into political debate.30 They had to think about creative ways of doing this, but one outcome was clear after 1815: the genie of popular mobilization could not be put back in the bottle. It is by not only exploring political structures but by attempting to look at the political culture as a whole that historians can begin to ask different questions of this problematic period. Historians should continue to eschew facile characterizations of ‘the growth of radicalism’ or the ‘triumph of reaction’ and instead attempt to describe and analyse the interactions between a wide variety of different groups and individuals—Whigs, Tories, patriots, radicals, loyalists—and their contested and often innovative attempts to appeal for support among the people.
One major blind spot for political historians of Scotland is the years between the Peace of Amiens (1802) and the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815). This is also partly true for the English context, though much more has been done to explore both metropolitan and regional popular politics in England during the period.31 The implications of this lacuna for the history of radicalism are important. The mass reform movement that emerged after 1815 has perhaps been characterized as more ‘explosive’ than the facts warrant. Scotland certainly took some part in the revived reform campaign that coalesced around issues of wartime corruption, while the possible political content of events such as the great weavers’ strike of 1812 has yet to be studied in the same creative manner as Luddism.32 It seems likely that close attention to local contexts might reveal networks of individuals and groups who kept reformist and radical politics alive and reshaped them during the long war years. The Scottish tour undertaken by the veteran English radical leader and activist Major Cartwright—which is seen as an ‘external’ stimulus to the revival of reform after 1815—was prearranged and it seems likely that he was, at least to a certain degree, pushing at open doors.33 This is not the place to assess whether popular political activity in Scotland did persist and adapt after 1800: the point is that we simply do not know and assiduous research might well prove capable of providing a valuable hinge between the popular politics of the 1790s and those after 1815.
In any event the politics of E. P. Thompson’s ‘heroic age of popular radicalism’ in Scotland were different in several key respects from those of the 1790s.34 Many of these differences are traceable to the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the radically altered social and political contexts that followed.35 First, there were the social and economic ramifications of the war itself. The year 1816 witnessed both a poor harvest and a trade depression, which was to return in 1819. Into an already struggling labour market were thrust some three hundred thousand demobbed soldiers—a large number of whom were Scots returning to their homes to establish themselves as labourers or weavers and who thus exacerbated downward pressure on wages—as well as an accelerating number of Irish immigrants.36
It was a volatile situation, and a government that was only slowly coming under the sway of economic liberalism could never have met it entirely successfully. Even before the end of the Napoleonic Wars it had passed a new corn law, which had been intended to insulate farmers and landowners from falling prices. Facing interest payments on a national debt that was two times the size of the national income, the government had to resort to the expedient of maintaining wartime taxes. The result after 1816 was a regressive tax regime, whose legitimacy remained in question until the 1840s.37 It was a volatile mix which threatened to alienate a number of different groups.
Any tendency to see politics after 1816 as characterized only by the development of a working-class reform movement would again view radicalism outside of its proper contexts. In concert with Whigs, for example, it was the essentially middle-class campaign to repeal the wartime property tax that provided the focus for the first national petitioning campaign after 1815 and, for the advocate Henry Cockburn, the first meetings ‘for the avowed purpose of controlling Government on a political matter’.38 Later, burgh reform would revive, recycling arguments from the 1780s and prosecuted by a broad coalition of radicals, moderate reformers, and opposition Whigs.
The success of the campaign against the property tax and the mobilization of a new radical campaign were testament in themselves to how the end of the wars had opened up spaces for politics. Crucially, it had also removed some of the key rhetorical props of a patriotic status quo. The fit between loyalism and patriotism had never been exact during the war years, but the distance between the two expanded dramatically after 1815, while the very rationale for armed loyalism was all but removed. Ministers consistently voiced ‘strong objections’ to embodying armed volunteers in Scotland after 1815, and the grandiose plans of men like Walter Scott, who sought to raise a force from around his home at Abbotsford in the Borders, were treated cautiously.39 If the study of loyalism in the 1790s is underdeveloped, it is all but non-existent for the period following the end of the wars, when radicalism successfully recaptured the rhetoric of ‘patriotism’, which had been lost to reformers during the 1790s.40
It was in this dramatically altered context that the mass-platform agitation was forged. Its main features demonstrate something that had been apparent during the 1790s: Scottish and English radicals were operating within an increasingly common and Parliament-centred political culture, pursuing the same goals, communicating with one another, and reading the same newspapers.41 There were also some continuities in the rhetoric that drove post-war radicalism. The 1790s had seen the development of a critique of governmental corruption and its impact in inflating the national debt and placing unbearable burdens on society. What was marked about the post-war platform was how this message was simplified and repeated relentlessly as a critique of ‘old corruption’, which sought to politicize post-war dearth and economic and social dislocation.42 Many other elements from the 1790s were apparent: there was an internationalist strand that criticized the new holy alliance and the retrogressive agreement at Vienna, which was finalized in June 1815 and redrew the political map of Europe; there was condemnation of slavery; and there was an optimistic belief in the perfectibility of the people. These other concerns, however, took a back seat to a stark diagnosis of the political causes of distress and an equally stark solution comprising a radical reform of Parliament based on the achievement of universal suffrage and annual parliaments.
An equally significant departure lay in the strategies and organization of this reform campaign. Mass meetings had been essayed in the 1790s (1795, for example, had seen such meetings in London and Sheffield) but had been a dangerous political strategy, always liable to see reformers branded as a ‘mob’.43 This fear remained ‘the spectre haunting the radical movement’, but after 1815 radicals sought to exorcize it through an emphasis on the orderly and constitutional nature of the mass platform.44 The huge meeting in October 1816 at Thrushgrove in Glasgow was only the most famous of hundreds of mass, orderly, open-air meetings in Scotland across this period.45
The emphasis on ‘mass’ and on inclusiveness in pursuit of a single object entailed other strategic changes. For example, the rhetoric and practice of petitioning focused on the number of names subscribed to repeated petitions. The recalibrated reform critique and the emphasis on numbers also opened up political spaces for women, who had been less welcome in the masculine tavern- and club-oriented politics of the 1790s. The politicization of subsistence issues, such as bread prices and the impact of corn laws, helped to create these spaces. Women played a crucial and highly visible role in the ritualistic aspects of radicalism by, for example, embroidering and giving caps of liberty to orators or wearing white at mass meetings.46
Part of what facilitated this mass mobilization and the diffusion of a simple and repetitive message of union was the expansion of the realm of print and, especially, the development of a cheap press. The crucial turning point here was William Cobbett’s decision to release the leading article of his Political Register in London in an unstamped twopenny format, which won a large readership among both Scottish and English radicals. There was a similar expansion in the Scottish press, which again articulated both radical and loyalist positions. Attempts by Scottish elites to launch distinctive loyalist newspapers and the political propagandizing of men like Scott, whose anti-reform dystopia The Visionary appeared as letters in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal before being published in pamphlet form in 1819, suggest that print sources might form a good basis for an examination of Scottish loyalism during this period.47
The reform movement reached its apogee in August 1819 with the infamous events surrounding the Peterloo massacre in Manchester.48 The response to this butchery saw protests from many groups in Scotland, including many members of the middle classes and qualified condemnation from bolder Whigs. Indeed, the reaction to Peterloo further emphasizes the integrative nature of popular politics in Britain during this period. Radicals in Scotland (many of whom subscribed to the Manchester Observer, the Black Dwarf, and other English publications) responded to the events at Peterloo with another series of mass meetings and carefully followed the massacre’s aftermath in the courts and in Parliament. As a movement premised on a radicalized constitutionalism, however, it faced considerable strategic difficulties when constitutional rights to meet and organize were savaged by the Six Acts of 1819.49
As in the 1790s, there had been an insurrectionary current running alongside and sometimes merging with the constitutionalist mass-platform agitation after 1816. In 1816–17, whatever the role of the Scot Alexander Richmond, a reputed government spy, an insurrectionary network around Glasgow had clearly been plotting, apparently using the model of the United Irishmen to fashion cells.50 Throughout the period any such plans were susceptible to government interference and to structural weaknesses within popular radicalism itself. Radical movements were strongest at their local bases and weakest in any attempt to mobilize nationally, where their only legitimate means of organization was the press. Aspirations to spark a general rising really came to fruition with the so-called ‘Radical War’ of 1820. This followed the posting of an anonymous proclamation in places throughout the west of Scotland and resulted in a number of violent incidents, notably at Bonnymuir, Strathaven, and Greenock.
There is no historical agreement as to the scope or significance of this attempted general rising. Assessments range from seeing it as, first, ‘the futile revolt of a tiny minority’ and a pathetic death spasm of the constitutional movement; second, as an attempt at a coordinated rising with elements in the north of England and perhaps even the Cato Street conspirators in London, the strength of which will never be known because the rising was aborted; finally, as a doomed attempt at a nationalist republican uprising, precipitated by the machinations of English agents provocateurs and their elite handlers.51 What is clear is that the instability in Scotland did represent a significant threat and that both the authorities and the participants took it very seriously indeed.52 It proved, in the long run, to be most important as a source of heroes and villains, lessons and warnings, and provided a politically ‘usable’ event that helped to shape the language and actions of future activists.53
If the Radical War was not a successful model spawning republican imitators, it was followed by an event that, in the short term, was far more influential: the Queen Caroline Agitation of 1820. The attempt of George IV to deprive his estranged wife of her titles and, ideally, achieve a divorce, electrified British politics and spawned a large movement in defence of Caroline’s ‘cause’. It provided what one historian has seen as a kind of healing of the body politic after the violence of 1819–20, but has received little attention in the Scottish context.54 It provided a populist issue, which could bind a large number of different groups across Scotland—working-class radicals, bourgeois reformers, members of the Whig opposition and women—in the pursuit of a single cause. In one interpretation, the Caroline agitation marks the point at which ‘Radicalism’ became a kind of third party in the state, and the political culture shifted from one that could admit of no reform to one where it at least seemed possible.55 Crucial in this was the rehabilitation and reshaping of the Whig Party in Scotland, which had begun with the establishment of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 and was to have profound implications for the conduct of parliamentary and popular politics into the 1830s.56
The 1820s, like the early 1800s, are something of a blind spot for historians of Scotland. The broad contours are clear enough. The decade witnessed a ‘middling’ sort growing in confidence and increasingly being identified and identifying themselves as a coherent body and the repository of political and social virtues. Such a narrative fits well with a wider historiographical shift from thinking about social class as an objective and explanatory category to exploring the political sources of social perception and description.57 The varied reforming activity of the 1820s, across a broad range of secular, religious, and moral issues, played a crucial role in facilitating the crystallization of a ‘middle-class’ identity. Labour historiography, on the other hand, has tended to view the 1820s as a period of retreat and soul-searching. A more buoyant economy and the ‘defeats’ of 1815–20 stimulated an exploration of alternatives, more especially the growing culture of self-improvement and an apolitical early socialism.
The divisions between these two historiographies can be overstated. The 1820s was a decade during which the technologies and strategies of modern political organization—the meeting, the press, the national association—were refined and applied to a bewildering diversity of projects. Again, it is not helpful to look at this period solely in terms of class conflict and formation. Instead the period from 1815 to 1830 might be viewed as another intense period of politicization in Scotland. When the ‘reform crisis’ arrived it was created by a unique constellation of circumstances. The response—from a broad-based ‘national’ reform movement, exploiting a range of techniques to ensure ‘union’ and organization and encompassing activists from among the Scottish Whigs, local elites, and the middle and working classes—had been rather longer in the making.58
Across this perplexing period new directions can be sought by expanding the content of the political culture that historians seek to describe and analyse, diversifying those concepts we employ to do so, and multiplying the contexts in which we explore Scottish political history. First, in terms of expanding the range of study it should be clear that it is no longer possible to explain phenomena such as ‘radicalism’ simply by attempting to identify either their social constituency or their ideological content. The very best work examines political culture as a whole and asks questions about the shifting discourses and strategies of different groups, while sensitively examining their complex social and ideological characters. One recent path-breaking account of Scotland in the 1790s has shown the fruits of this approach, by analysing radicals and loyalists, Foxites and ministerialists, women, rioters, and soldiers as constituents of a single political culture.59
Nevertheless, some political groups and political positions remain woefully understudied. For example, loyalism (especially after 1816), the Whig opposition, and middle-class liberalism would all benefit from close historical attention. While Scottish source material thankfully loomed large in Anna Clark’s landmark study of women in popular politics, Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995), as yet there has been no answer to Catriona Macdonald’s eloquent plea that we uncover the specific history of women’s involvement in radical politics during this period.60 Linda Colley’s claims about the impact of the French Wars in opening loyalist and patriotic political spaces to women could fruitfully be tested in the Scottish context.61 Without some attention to the diverse groups and voices that comprise any political culture, we risk an impoverished account of this period.
Secondly, in terms of concepts, Scottish political history remains under-theorized and greater efforts might be made to engage with and produce work that is self-consciously interdisciplinary. As a period, the ‘Age of Revolutions’ has been one of considerable historical creativity and, indeed, the Scottish context has provided fruitful soil for some extremely influential work on popular politics. The drama of the sedition trials of the 1790s, for example, has spawned its own mini-historiography, exploring contests over political language and the nature of the courtroom as a political and contested space.62 In particular, work over the last two decades has vastly expanded our perceptions of what constitutes the ‘political’: symbolic practices and what might broadly be called the political culture of popular movements have become crucial and fruitful areas of inquiry.63 The disciplinary borrowings on which this expansion rests might be taken further. Cultural geography, for example, might have a great deal to tell historians about how to interrogate the ‘spaces’ in which popular politics were practised.64 A recent study of the ‘folk memory’ of the ‘Year of the French’ in Ireland might inspire historians of Scotland to consider how political events are remembered in a multitude of different ways.65
Finally, in terms of contexts, historians might think on both bigger and smaller scales. Local and regional studies across this period remain thin on the ground. More of them, where such studies are possible, might afford greater texture to our understanding of events outside Edinburgh and Glasgow. Such studies are crucial, because they allow historians to interrogate apparent ‘silences’ by identifying networks of activists, but they might also serve to lay bare the complex processes of politicization.
In terms of wider contexts, while Irish-Scottish comparisons have proved fruitful, it is remarkable that serious consideration of the Scottish-English context of popular politics has emerged only recently.66 Similarly, the ‘Atlantic World’ setting of Scottish radicalism demands more attention. Michael Durey’s pioneering work on James Thomson Callender is not only virtually the only good biography of a prominent Scottish radical, but is also unique in its careful delineation of the contours of the Atlantic print culture in which he moved.67 Additionally, very recent work on Canada suggests that the recent flowering of imperial history could provide instructive contexts and comparisons for the history of domestic popular politics.68 Thinking along such lines and identifying new content, concepts, and contexts might not serve to rehabilitate a unified ‘Age of Reform’, but it will certainly help to ensure that the period remains one of creative uncertainties for historians of modern Scotland.
Devine, T. M., ed., Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700–1850 (Edinburgh, 1990).
Donovan, R. K., No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in Scotland, 1778–1782 (New York, 1982).
Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994).
Harris, Bob, The Scottish People and the French Revolution (London, 2008).
—— ed., Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution (Edinburgh, 2005).
McFarland, E. W., Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution: Planting the Green Bough (Edinburgh, 1994).
Meikle, Henry W., Scotland and the French Revolution (Glasgow, 1912).
Pentland, Gordon, Radicalism, Reform and National Identity in Scotland, 1820–1833 (Woodbridge, 2008).
—— The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815–1820 (London, 2011).
Whatley, Christopher A., Scottish Society 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialization (Manchester, 2000).