Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680-1820

The essays in this collection examine religion, politics and commerce in Scotland during a time of identity crisis and turmoil. The Acts of Union in 1707 brought Scotland into the English networks of trading and dominion abroad. Jacobite antagonism towards the Union was balanced by an engagement with Empire, as seen in mercantile journals, family correspondence and contemporary accounts of contact with London, Amsterdam, the Baltic, the Caribbean and even as far as the Indian Ocean and the South China Seas. Contributors look at the political aspects of Episcopalian acceptance of the English liturgy, the effect of the Union on Scottish trade and commerce, the Scottish role in tobacco and sugar plantations, the role of the East India Company in helping Whig governments to assimilate Jacobites into the Hanoverian world, Robert Burns’s early poetry on his planned emigration to Jamaica and Scottish anti-abolitionists.