FORUM: SEEING SCOTLAND, FORGETTING SCOTLAND: BARBARISM, CIVILITY, AND THE FAMILIAR OTHER
How Scotland was imagined shaped the material politics of the Anglo-Scottish relationship, just as how Lowland elites imagined the Highlands had a profound impact on Lowland-Highland relationships. In both cases, however, the interaction between imagination and politics worked in more complicated ways than scholars sometimes argue, and it is not enough simply to say that one side saw the other as barbarous. This, at any rate, is a conclusion suggested by the triptych of articles on aspects of early modern Scottish history with which the current issue of the Journal of British Studies opens. Sarah Waurechen, Allan Douglas Kennedy, and Onni Gust all explore dimensions of the complicated relationship among England, the Scottish Lowlands, and the Scottish Highlands from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Each article turns in some way on the interplay between cultural conceptions and politics, while also seeking to move beyond simplistic dichotomies.
In “Imagined Polities, Failed Dreams, and the Beginnings of an Unacknowledged Britain: English Responses to James VI and I's Vision of Perfect Union,” Sarah Waurechen looks at English debate over the 1603 proposal for an Anglo-Scots union put forward by James VI of Scotland after he ascended to the English throne and became simultaneously James I of England. Scholars have frequently argued that the English disliked the Scots and saw them as uncivilized, and that this dislike informed the failure of early attempts at union.Footnote 1 Waurechen's careful evidence suggests, however, a much more ambivalent relationship. She claims that the Scots occupied a position vis-à-vis the English of “familiar alterity, or the space between sameness and difference” (p. 576). The English held diverse attitudes toward Scotland and the Scots, and tropes of barbarism and civilization, while important, were not the only issues at play. Waurechen affirms that the Scots were never seen as so barbarous as to be completely other or completely uncivil. Some commentators, for example, appealed to the idea that the island-wide entity “Britain” had ancient roots and needed to be restored to its former glory. Adding another layer of ambiguity, English elites were actually uncertain, Waurechen suggests, about their ability to absorb and assimilate the Scots in the context of full union: the debate thus reveals English anxieties as well as self-confidence.
While Waurechen examines Anglo-Scottish links, Allan Douglas Kennedy focuses more specifically on the governance of the Scottish Highlands during the Restoration period in “Reducing That Barbarous Country: Center, Periphery, and Highland Policy in Restoration Britain.” This enables him to nuance the portrait of relationships between Lowland and Highland elites. Although the Restoration government of the Highlands was indeed at times militaristic and authoritarian, Restoration policymakers oscillated between direct rule and rule through local elites. The Highlands were conceived to be wild and barbarous lands, but at the same time Highlanders played crucial, if limited, roles in government. According to Kennedy, this reflected the fact that the integration of the Highlands into English and Lowland norms was already under way. More particularly, while Highlanders may have been seen as different, unruly, and in need of pacification, they were not seen as entirely “other.” “For all their readiness to acknowledge Highland otherness,” Kennedy argues, “there is little to suggest that Restoration commentators made the intellectual leap of concluding that Highlanders were barbarians to be civilized” (p. 602). The vacillation of policy between integration and direct control appears to be reminiscent of dilemmas of imperial rule elsewhere.
There are echoes of similar processes in Onni Gust's exploration of the life of late eighteenth-century intellectual Sir John Mackintosh and his determined choice of a British imperial identity over a local Highland identity. In “Remembering and Forgetting the Scottish Highlands: Sir James Mackintosh and the Forging of a British Imperial Identity,” Gust brings large-scale processes down to the intimate level. Specifically, she shows how a man who would once have been a clan leader saw the Highlands as a feminized, backward, and local space, to be moved away from in pursuit of an elite, masculine, and imperial modernity. Gust thus invites us to reimagine the Highlands as a space of disproportionately male migration, as the soldiers, administrators, and fur traders who migrated across the empire left behind the children, the female relatives, and the elderly. Even as some Scotsmen were defining their own Scottish identity in terms of romanticized Highland idioms, men such as Mackintosh sold their lands, forgot the Highlands, and redefined themselves as British. This was not a choice without context, however: dominant English and imperial conceptions of the Highlands as backward arguably demanded this price. If Gust is correct, we need to consider forgetting as well as remembering in thinking about the complexities of Scottish identity.
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The next two articles in the issue address the long eighteenth century, linked, we might suggest, by attention to some of the unexpected consequences of the development of an increasingly commercialized and monetized society.
William Peter Deringer's “Finding the Money: Public Accounting, Political Arithmetic, and Probability in the 1690s” sheds new light on the emergence of “political arithmetic,” or the use of numerical data in political debates and policy making. He argues that numbers quickly developed an unprecedented importance in English political debates in the years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. The rapid arrival of numbers as a new tool in political debate also provoked questions about the certainty of knowledge itself and particularly the relationship between potentially quantifiable, but nevertheless uncertain, economic knowledge and the always contested political understandings that competed for acceptance in the court of public opinion as well as among members of Parliament and courtiers. Deringer shows that ignorance, and especially ignorance of the numerical details of state finance and state spending, became a political liability in postrevolution England. This problem was addressed through a turn toward probabilistic thinking among the new political arithmeticians of the age. The political arguments in postrevolutionary England would henceforth not only address new problems caused by the unexpected accession of a new regime, but the terms and tools of these debates would include numeric data and the new science of statistics.
Elizabeth Foyster's article, “The ‘New World of Children’ Reconsidered: Child Abduction in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century England,” refines our understanding of parent-child relationships by studying cases of child abduction and responses to them from the 1790s until the mid-nineteenth century. While many historians of the long eighteenth century's revolutions in attitudes toward consumption and familial affection have Whiggishly presented these changes as unqualified signs of progress and social improvement, Foyster's study of abductions turns to the dark side of these new mores. Improvements in children's dress made them a more desirable target for thieves who wanted to steal their valuable new clothes, and the increased valorization of motherhood put pressures on some childless women to abduct children and represent them as their own. Readers familiar with the Joel and Ethan Coen film Raising Arizona (1987) may find these revelations unsurprising, but Foyster's article reminds us that art and history sometimes coincide in unusual ways.
This issue concludes with two articles on efforts to contain the anxieties of the middle years of the twentieth century. In “Immoral Traffic: Mobility, Health, Labor, and the ‘Lorry Girl’ in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain,” Julia Laite offers an innovative study of two waves of moral panic, one in the 1930s and another in the 1950s, that clustered around the newly emergent social stereotype of the “lorry girl.” The lorry girl hitched long-distance lifts with lorry drivers often, it was assumed, in exchange for sex. The images of female hitchhikers promoted by the mass media and by medical and political investigations crystallized fears about sexual deviance, sex work, and increased mobility, not only for unsupervised young women but also for the equally unsupervised male lorry drivers. The combination of these fears helped create the image of the lorry girl as a social type and as a social problem. While this cultural phenomenon is part of a long history of social anxieties over commercialized sexuality, Laite notes that the lorry girl panic was also the product of a particular conjuncture in the history of modern British consumer society, which was increasingly reliant upon the mobility of goods and people provided by trucks and cars.
Finally, there has long been lively debate among both historians and political scientists over whether or not postwar Britain enjoyed a so-called cross-party postwar consensus—eventually to be definitively smashed by Thatcherism—and, if it did, what the key elements of such a consensus were. Daniel Ussishkin's article, “Morale and the Postwar Politics of Consensus,” brings a new twist to the question of whether a postwar consensus existed. Such a consensus would be assumed to include acceptance of the proper role of the welfare state in maintaining social peace and shared economic prosperity. Rather than questioning either the existence or the nature of this politics of consensus, Ussishkin studies management theory and the emerging discipline of “human resources” to show how contemporaries deployed a rhetoric about collective “morale” and consensus in addressing labor relations in the aftermath of the supposedly unifying experience of the war. Ussishkin posits that “consensus was a fantasy, national unity a myth, and the elimination of class conflict a façade,” (p. 723), but he equally insists that the fantasies, myths, and façades that sustained the ideal of postwar consensus must be taken seriously. They were part of an important political aspiration that had significant consequences for the construction of new social knowledges and practices, including the sciences of “industrial management” and “human relations.” By the 1960s, Usshishkin suggests, more individualist and consumerist understandings of work made the industrial morale model of consensus building appear untenable and unconvincing. The postwar fantasy had faded in the face of more enduring social forces.
The next issue of the JBS will feature a special forum on Victorian food history. It will include articles on the ideological functions of food in the nineteenth-century workhouse, the food policies of the new poor law, the temperance movement and consumer culture, and the relationships between food and national stereotypes. The issue will also include articles on the history of demographic thought, on attitudes toward middle-aged women and female aging in eighteenth-century Britain, and on the cultural history of playground violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, as well as an essay on liberal responses to terror in twentieth-century Ireland.
