Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651-1763 - Paperback

by Alexander Murdoch (Author)

Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651-1763, explores and analyses existing narratives of Jacobitism and Unionism in late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century Scotland.

Using in-depth archival research, the book questions the extent to which the currency of kinship patronage politics persisted in Scotland as the competing ideologies of Scottish Jacobitism and British Whiggism grew. It discusses the connection between the manifest corruption of patronage politics and the efflorescence of the Scottish Enlightenment. It also examines the stance taken by David Hume and Adam Smith in defining themselves as philosophers first, Whigs second, but Scots above all else, and analyses whether they achieved international success because of or despite the parliamentary union with England in 1707.

Organised chronologically and concluding with an assessment of the newly formed United Kingdom in the decades following the 1707 union, Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651-1763 will be of great interest to researchers and academics of early modern Scotland.

Author Biography

Alexander Murdoch is a graduate of the George Washington University in Washington D.C. and received his doctorate in History from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. He was Co-Director of the Scottish Records Programme of the North Carolina State Archives from 1988 to 1990, taught History and American Studies at what is now the University of Northampton in England from 1991 to 1995 and lectured in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh from 1995 until his retirement in 2014. He is currently an Honorary Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh.