A Higher World

The best general books on any historical subject are driven either by a distinctive or new agenda or perspective, insights derived from new archival work or some broader synthetic ambition. In so far as there is a distinctive intellectual agenda behind Michael Fry’s latest book, it is a frustratingly sparse one. What it amounts to is this: by adopting a ‘socio-economic approach’, historians have (apparently) ‘distorted’ the history of eighteenth-century Scotland and overlooked or at the very least downplayed what remained distinctive about Scotland. So Fry, in reaction, has chosen here to lay emphasis on political and cultural history. But this is itself a silly distortion of a much more complex historiographical picture, and I cannot imagine any historian working on this period who would dissent from the proposition that much of Scottish political, institutional, cultural and social life remained in important ways different from English—if England, indeed, is the meaningful comparator. This, however, is where the questions begin rather than end; and Fry consistently eschews exploring deeper and further. Part of the reason for this is his consistent failure to think beyond Scotland, apart from in a few rare moments; and, in this respect, his book singularly lacks the incisiveness and interest of the best work currently being written on Scottish history. Even his discussions of support for the Jacobite cause barely concede the important facts that the prospects for a Stuart restoration hinged very largely on the trajectory of European diplomacy and power politics, and, to a lesser but still very important extent, on the capacity of their supporters to build connections across national boundaries

Diplomacy · Dissent · Epistemology · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Proposition · Sociology · Subject (documents · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Philosophy · Scottish History and National Identity