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

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.

‘Awakening the echoes of the ancient faith’: the National Pilgrimages to Iona

This article examines two pilgrimages to Iona held by the Scottish Roman Catholic Church in 1888 and 1897, the first pilgrimages held in Scotland since the Reformation. It argues that these religious journeys disrupted the calendar of historic commemorations of Victorian Scotland, many of which emphasized the centrality of Presbyterianism to Scottish nationality. By holding pilgrimages to “the mother-church of religion in Scotland” and celebrating mass in the ruins of the Cathedral there, Scottish Catholics challenged the prevailing narrative of Scottish religious history, and asserted their right to control the theological understanding of the island and its role in a “national” religious history. At the same time, Catholics’ veneration of St. Columba, a figure widely admired by Protestant Scots, served as a means of highlighting their own Scottishness. Nonetheless, some Protestant Scots responded to the overt Catholicity of the pilgrimages by questioning the genuineness of “pilgrimages” which so closely resembled tourist excursions, and by scheduling their own, explicitly Protestant, journeys to Iona.

Highlanders and the City: Migration, Segmentation, and the Image of the Highlander in Early Modern London, 1603-c.1750

The study of Scottish migration in the early modern period has experienced extensive growth in recent decades, but has tended to privilege overseas movement over the presence of Scots elsewhere in Britain. This is particularly true of migrants from the Scottish Highlands: much has been written about Highlanders in America or Continental Europe, but almost nothing is known about their experiences in England and Wales, and in particular in London, consistently the major destination of Scots moving southwards. This article seeks to address that gap by exploring the extent and nature of Highland migration to London during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It begins by surveying the surviving evidence for Highlanders’ presence in the English capital, suggesting that they were most readily to be found in the elite and mercantile sectors, and were comparatively rarer among the ranks of artisans, professionals, or the poor. It is also argued that Highlanders tended not to form a coherent ethnic ‘bloc’, but instead were subsumed within the wider Scottish diaspora. This, however, was paradoxical, because London was during this period developing a strong image of ‘the Highlanders’ as distinctive from ‘the Scot’. The article therefore goes on to explore the origins of Highlander imagery, and concludes that those Highlanders actually resident in London contributed very little to it. Instead, image-makers drew predominantly on pre-existing Scottish stereotypes, travellers’ reports, outlaw tales, and political discourse, for example surrounding Jacobitism. All of this suggests a degree of invisibility around the Highland community in early modern London, and that, the article suggests, underlines the fundamental blurriness of the Highland/Lowland divide within Scotland. It also indicates that a segmented, rather than ethno-cultural model of assimilation might offer the most reliable means of understanding the Scottish diaspora in early modern London.

Intellectual and Practical Education and its Patronage in the Northern Highlands in the Century after the Reformation

This two-part article presents a holistic approach and a comprehensive background to intellectual and practical education in the northern Highlands before the SSPCK. It underlines the way in which intellectual and technical education was experienced, consumed, but also encouraged in one culturally heterodox part of Scotland, essentially the northern Highlands, with its population of Gaels and non-Gaels, from around the Reformation until the mid-seventeenth century. The first part will investigate education through the institutional system of schools and universities as well as education abroad and the patronage of education. It demonstrates that a number of northern Highlanders fully embraced the educational opportunities presented to them by the Crown and by local agencies. As a result, State formation and the integration of the region gradually unfolded through soft power and the shaping of minds. Northern Highlanders, mainly but not solely the clan elite, exploited the educational developments of the time and fully participated in and supported the broader dynamic of education and culture but at times balked at funding it. The education in the northern Highlands presented in this article thus appears much more in flux and less antagonistic between the area and the educational structure developed by the Crown.