scholarly journals ‘An Eye for an Aye’: linguistic and political backlash and conformity in eighteenth-century Scots

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-282
Author(s):  
Sarah van Eyndhoven
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Conditional Inference ◽  
The Political ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Conditional Inference Trees ◽  
British State ◽  
Politically Active ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
Political Backlash

Abstract This study examines the effect of political change on the use of written Scots during the eighteenth century. In particular, it compares a cross-section of texts from literate Scottish society, with works from certain politically-active authors, who identified strongly as pro- or anti-Union following the creation of the British state in 1707. The proportion of Scots to English lexemes in their writing is explored using conditional inference trees and random forests, in a small, purpose-built corpus. Use of Scots is shown to differ between the two groups, with specific extralinguistic factors encouraging or suppressing the presence of written Scots. Frequency of Scots is also found to be influenced by the political ideology of the politicised authors. These results are linked to the Scottish political scene during the eighteenth century, as well as general processes of change over time.

THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS FROM CULLODEN TO WATERLOO

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-532 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW MACKILLOP
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Development ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Scottish Highlands ◽  
Supportive Relationship ◽  
British State

This article highlights the present lacuna in the study of politics and political culture in the Scottish Highlands between the battles of Culloden and Waterloo. It argues that this neglect is symptomatic of the contentious historiography that surrounds the Highland Clearances. Yet politics remained a crucial factor shaping landlord attitudes to improvements and their estates in general. Moreover, in contrast to their well-known failure to manage the region's economic and social development, Highland landlords exhibited a sophisticated understanding of how British politics had been reconfigured by the emergence of the British ‘fiscal-military’ state. The region's elites constructed a distinctive and effective political strategy that sought to place the Highlands in a mutually supportive relationship with the British state. Scottish Highland political culture thus offers a useful corrective to recent debates on the ‘fiscal-military’ state that stress either the centre's overwhelming power or the ability of local elites to resist that power. Although the Highlands is remembered primarily for its hostile relationship with the political centre, the region in fact constituted a prime example of the process of mutual accommodation that underpinned the domestic authority of the eighteenth-century British state.

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. Smout
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
The Way

This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.

JEAN-LOUIS DELOLME AND THE POLITICAL SCIENCE OF THE ENGLISH EMPIRE

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAIN McDANIEL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Stability ◽  
British State ◽  
Constitutional Republic

ABSTRACTThis article aims to extend our understanding of eighteenth-century political science through a re-examination of the writings of Jean-Louis Delolme (1741–1806). Beginning with an account of Delolme's conception of a modern ‘science of politics’, the article demonstrates that Delolme's ambition to rest the study of politics on scientific foundations developed in the context of an evolving concern with the stability and durability of the English ‘empire’. Underlining Delolme's critique of traditional republican political science as well as the comparative science of politics set out in Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws, the article thus sheds light on the connection between eighteenth-century conceptions of political science and eighteenth-century analyses of the English constitution and the British state. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the resonance of Delolme's central ideas in late eighteenth-century debates, in Britain, America, and France, about the character and properties of the modern constitutional republic.

Communication: The Political Patronage of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales

1958 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. N. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Considerable Degree ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Patronage ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Politically Active ◽  
Concrete Reality ◽  
The Way

An association between the prince of Wales and various opposition leaders is a recurrent feature of eighteenth-century politics. A politically active prince found little difficulty in securing a following among the politicians of the day; the glittering prospects of the ‘reversionary’ interest1 were an obvious lure, and an obvious basis for such a connexion. But this is not a complete explanation. The prince had also a considerable degree of patronage at his disposal, and could add a more immediate and concrete reality to promises for the future. A study of this patronage, its extent and its disposal, and more particularly the way in which it was exercised by Frederick, ‘Poor Fred’, throws much light on the connexion between the prince and his political friends, and contributes to an understanding of the place of Leicester House in the politics of the early eighteenth century.

Defining the Limits of Britishness: The “New” British History and the Meaning of the Revolution Settlement in Ireland for Ulster's Presbyterians

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
State System ◽  
British History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
British State ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Irish historian A. T. Q. Stewart has aptly described the world inhabited by eighteenth-century Ulster Scots as one of “hidden” significance. Compared to the rise of the Ascendancy and the repression of Catholics under the penal code, the story of Ulster's Presbyterians figures as interesting, albeit less significant, marginalia. While a few studies detail the handicaps the group suffered in the years after the Williamite Settlement, their eighteenth-century experience has mainly attracted church historians interested in theological disputes, social historians charting the rise of the linen industry, and students of the '98 Rebellion exploring the ways in which a latent Presbyterian radicalism contributed to the formation of the United Irish movement. Explaining who the Ulster Scots were or how they defined themselves has not attracted much scholarly attention, an unsurprising failure given that historians have designated the eighteenth century in Ireland as the period of “penal era and golden age.”This article argues that a new, more fully integrated approach to the study of Ireland and Britain offers possibilities for recovering the history of the Ulster Scots. Nearly twenty-five years after J. G. A. Pocock issued his “plea” for a “new British history” that would incorporate the experiences of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within a single narrative by exploring the ways in which each “interacted so as to modify the condition of one another's existence,” scholars have finally responded. The new British history, with its focus on the development of a British state system, seeks to explore, according to a chief proponent, John Morrill, the ways in which “the political and constitutional relationship between the communities of the two islands were transformed” and the processes through which they gained “a new sense of their own identities as national communities.”

George Orwell and the Victorian Radical Tradition

1975 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon B. Beadle
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
The Political ◽  
Personal Integrity ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Intellectual Honesty ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
Anthony Powell ◽  
Politically Active

Since his death in 1950, at the age of forty-six, George Orwell's personal following and literary reputation have grown so steadily that he has become the most widely read English writer of his generation. Orwell's name has come to evoke almost universal recognition as a kind of legendary symbol of resistance to political dishonesty, hypocrisy, and totalitarianism. But in spite of his popularity, he remains a strangely enigmatic figure and a source of continuing controversy among critics and historians.The initial critical studies of Orwell and his work were often little more than highly partisan attempts to define or dismiss Orwell as an anarchist, a disillusioned socialist, or a conservative reactionary. The shortcomings of this critical approach, which was once virtually an obsession with the politically committed critics of Orwell's generation, have become increasingly obvious. Orwell was one of the most politically “engaged” writers of the twentieth century, but the precise nature of his political posture simply cannot be defined and analyzed within the context of any identifiably modern political ideology, party, or movement. During his politically active years, Orwell enthusiastically supported a wide variety of radical causes and revolutionary reforms, but the political and intellectual conformity demanded by the modern parties of the Left seems always to have been at odds with his well-developed sense of intellectual honesty and personal integrity. As Anthony Powell has observed, “Orwell could never be integrated into any normal party machine. His reputation for integrity might be invoked, his capacity for martyrdom relied on, his talent for pamphleteering made use of, but he could never be trusted not to let some devastatingly unwelcome cat out of the political bag.”

Scots and Access to Spanish America from Before the Union to 1748

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Lenman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Political Life ◽  
British State ◽  
Scottish Politics ◽  
Partial Integration ◽  
The Way

This article begins with the idea that there was a vigorous political life in Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century which could focus on issues other than Jacobitism or government patronage. The article focuses on the non-dynastic issues in Scottish politics that predated the Union and which carried on into the Westminster parliament to the accompaniment of considerable activism in Scotland, and a distinctive contribution from Scottish members of both houses of the legislature. The example here examined is the burning issue of securing commercial access to the forbidden lands of Spanish America. Studying it reveals very clearly that ‘The theme of Scotland's partial integration into the British state’ and the way in which it ‘was never wholly successful’, goes back to the very start of the eighteenth century.

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

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