Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Colonizing the Sacred: Allahabad and the Company State, 1797–1857

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faridah Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Built Heritage ◽  
The Social

This article rethinks the complicated encounter between the East India Company and the built heritage of India in the early nineteenth century. Through an extended case study of the imperial mosque in Allahabad, which was periodically subject to British intervention over some sixty years, it traces vicissitudes in attitudes towards history, religion, and the social existence of Muslims in India generally and Allahabad in particular. The article argues for the need to look beyond the narrative of Britain's relationship with architecture as artefact or heritage—a relationship that took on institutional form in the 1860s—to the comparatively less familiar story of the Company State's prolonged and serious interest in the built environment, and specifically religious buildings, as part of the political economy of its rule. It demonstrates that such an interest was simultaneously a logical outcome of and a tension within the legitimating discourses that the Company State fashioned during the last half-century of its rule in India.

scholarly journals From Rebellion to Reform: Representations of Regional and Civic Improvement in the Aberdeen Journal, 1747–85

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-220
Author(s):  
Alex Benchimol
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Board Of Trustees ◽  
Agricultural Improvement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Rights ◽  
The City

The role of the Aberdeen Journal in facilitating the commercial modernization of Aberdeen and the northeast of Scotland in the four decades after the Battle of Culloden is an understudied aspect of the city's and region's social, economic and cultural history. This article examines the way improvement initiatives from key regional and civic stakeholders like the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements in Scotland, the Aberdeenshire Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Manufactures, the Commissioners of Supply, Aberdeen Town Council, and Marischal College were represented in the newspaper. In particular it highlights how James Chalmers 2 and James Chalmers 3—the Aberdeen Journal's proprietors during its first forty years—developed Scotland's first newspaper north of Edinburgh as an informational hub to integrate the city and region into key currents of Scottish and British capitalist modernization in the second half of the eighteenth century, from linen manufacturing and processing, to land reform and agricultural improvement. The social and economic transformation facilitated by the newspaper led to demands for political reform by those new commercial stakeholders, like John Ewen and Patrick Barron, who had profited from this regional modernization, and the article argues that the Aberdeen burgh reform movement of the early 1780s that utilized the Aberdeen Journal as a principal periodical platform was an essential consequence of this trajectory of regional and civic improvement, and a key test for translating it into a tangible expansion of democratic rights.

scholarly journals Elites in Transition: The Case of Privatization in Veliky Novgorod, Russia

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Aervitz
Keyword(s):  
Resource Allocation ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
The Social ◽  
Privatization Process

This paper is an attempt to develop a critical reflection on the social, political, and economic transformation that Russia experienced in the last couple of decades. I argue that the continuity of elites in Russia is one of the major features of its transition. This paper attempts to illuminate the continuity of elites as a general trend by using the case study of the privatization process in Veliky Novgord, Russia. This project looks at privatization as an avenue or means of resource allocation by elites during the transition. The data were obtained from 16 structured and unstructured interviews conducted in Veliky Novgorod in the summer 2004 among the representatives of the business and political elites. This paper deals with one group of the nomenklatura elite – top enterprise managers.

Romantic Essayism

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-252
Author(s):  
Tim Milnes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Charles Lamb ◽  
Familiar Essay ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Private Domain

This chapter argues that the Romantic familiar essay privatizes and idealizes the essay’s inherent epistemological ambiguity. While for Addison, Hume, and Johnson, the essayist moderates communication at the borderline of systematic science and the public sphere, for Hazlitt and his contemporary Charles Lamb, the ‘public’ could no longer function as the ground for epistemic solidarity. Once the social intellect of the Scottish Enlightenment was moved into the private domain of consciousness and individual imagination, the essayist was increasingly seen as mediating between idealized phenomenological realms of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience. Consequently, the ludic indeterminacy of the Romantic imagination is oriented by a purely aesthetic purposiveness: its playfulness expresses not the pragmatic presuppositions of communication, but the dark foundations of experience. In aestheticizing the communicative intellect of the eighteenth-century essayists, the identity doublings and performances of the Romantic familiar essay acquire significance as the hypostatized others of a lost wholeness.

Book Ownership in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland: a Local Case Study of Dumfriesshire Inventories

2012 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivienne Dunstan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Material ◽  
Local Case ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Late eighteenth-century Scotland saw a period of growth in the availability of print material set against the backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet despite much scholarly attention having been paid to the Enlightenment and an increasing interest in the books people were reading, little attention has been paid to the books that would have been found in individual Scottish houses and what they reveal about Scottish mindsets in these years. This paper addresses this topic, using a local case study of after-death inventories of personal possessions. These rich records reveal the size of household libraries, the varieties of books they contained, variation by occupation and social class, and the extent to which their owners engaged with and were influenced by debates and ideas of the time. In addition, the evidence allows us to consider the uses to which different types of books were put, examine differences between urban and provincial Scotland, and consider how and where people bought their books.

ON THE CONCEPT OF ‘FELICITAS PUBLICA’ IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico D’Onofrio
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Happiness ◽  
Civil Economy ◽  
Italian Context

This article presents some observations on “public happiness” in order to clarify the idea’s meaning in the eighteenth-century Italian context. It examines Lugino Bruni’s interpretation of this concept, and criticizes his understanding of public happiness as the continuation of Artistotle’s eudaimonia. Bruni stresses the social and collective nature of happiness in the civil economy of the Italian eighteenth century. By examining the works of Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Antonio Genovesi, this article addresses instead the political meaning of public happiness for absolute monarchies, and underlines its origins in the German tradition of natural law.

Gender and the Guild Order: The Garment Trades in Eighteenth-Century Paris

1994 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith G. Coffin
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Female Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Forces

This article concerns female labor, guild organization, and eighteenth-century political economy. The first half of the article analyzes the changing relations between the major men's and women's guilds in the Parisian clothing trades, the norms that governed those relations, and the social and economic forces that reshaped them. The second half focuses on pre-revolutionary petitions from the guilds, which illustrate dramatically the different ways in which guildsmen and women interpreted the rules of gender in the corporate order. The guildswomen's distinctive perspective reflected their history, experience, and changing currents of economic thought.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Colonisation: Carl Bernhard Wadström’s Case for Abolition and Civilisation

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Ahlskog
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Alternative Reading

<p>This article is an analysis of the Swedish abolitionist and Swedenborgian Carl Bernhard Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s (1746&ndash;1799) writings in the British anti-slavery debate in the years between 1788 and 1795. Previous historical scholarship has seen Wadstr&ouml;m primarily as a Swedenborgian visionary on a quest for religious fulfilment in Africa. An alternative perspective on Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings is offered in this article by highlighting his comparatively overlooked polemical publications and Parliamentary testimonies in the British anti-slavery debate. Instead of treating Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings and colonial plans as manifestations of his Swedenborgian dreams, they are reassessed as contributions to the contemporary anti-slavery debate. The focus is on how Wadstr&ouml;m participated and argued in this debate in order to show the ideological tenets underlying his views. Wadstr&ouml;m is linked to the Scottish Enlightenment discourse by showing how he uses the concepts of classical political economy in his argumentation for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Through this alternative reading of Wadstr&ouml;m&rsquo;s writings, it is possible to gain another entry point into the complex and motley character of late eighteenth-century political thought in Northern Europe.</p>

scholarly journals Lhitage des Lumies: The Enlightenment as an unfinished and morally demanding project

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-30
Author(s):  
Charlotta Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Anglo American

The French Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789 have commonly been seen as forerunners of modern Western European democracies and democratic values such as inalienable human rights, freedom from oppression, equality, religious tolerance, social security and happiness, inherited partly from the Anglo-American revolutions and partly from the radical French philosophes of the last third of the eighteenth century. Historians interested in the culture of the age of Enlightenment have long been looking for the movement in itself, studying the forms of participation and the places where Enlightenment ideals, described and impersonated by men like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, were propagated. As much as ‘the Enlightenment’ itself is not a homogeneous philosophical trend, recent historical research has shown that the social and cultural practices of eighteenth-century philosophic-al circles were far from corresponding to the ideals of equality and liberty commonly associated with the Enlightenment. A second bias in our interpretations of the Enlightenment is the central place given to values commonly associated with it in the legitimisation of modern democracies, while in the meantime, other phenomena of the age of Enlightenment, such as cosmopolitanism, are misunderstood or rejected because of, for example, the idea of national primacy. This article is concerned with how the strengthening of the focus in cultural history on social practices has changed our picture of the Enlightenment as a movement, but also with the difficulties experienced by historians who are intellectually and morally indebted to the Enlightenment in constructing a credible picture of this movement in a time when its legacy is subject to political debate.

scholarly journals Why Should I? Cybersecurity, the Security of the State and the Insecurity of the Citizen

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lizzie Coles-Kemp ◽  
Debi Ashenden ◽  
Kieron O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Security Controls ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Local Case ◽  
The Social ◽  
Subsequent Literature

Assumptions are made by government and technology providers about the power relationships that shape the use of technological security controls and the norms under which technology usage occurs. We present a case study carried out in the North East of England that examined how a community might work together using a digital information sharing platform to respond to the pressures of welfare policy change. We describe an inductive consideration of this highly local case study before reviewing it in the light of broader security theory. By taking this approach we problematise the tendency of the state to focus on the security of technology at the expense of the security of the citizen. From insights gained from the case study and the subsequent literature review, we conclude that there are three main absences not addressed by the current designs of cybersecurity architectures. These are absences of: consensus as to whose security is being addressed, evidence of equivalence between the mechanisms that control behaviour, and two-way legibility. We argue that by addressing these absences the foundations of trust and collaboration can be built which are necessary for effective cybersecurity. Our consideration of the case study within the context of sovereignty indicates that the design of the cybersecurity architecture and its concomitant service design has a significant bearing on the social contract between citizen and state. By taking this novel perspective new directions emerge for the understanding of the effectiveness of cybersecurity technologies.

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