Synopses & Reviews
The orthodox view of eighteenth-century Britain is of a stable polity dominated by 'politeness' and 'commercialism'. It projects a world that was safe and comfortable for the landed elite and full of opportunity for the middling sorts marching towards their Victorian destiny.
But what kind of stable polity undergoes two revolutions within one hundred years and lapses into internal war on seven occasions during 1688-1803? Our cosy vision of the eighteenth century is surely deep-seated, but it cannot cope with revolutionary movements like Jacobitism, the American Patriots and the United Irishmen. By recovering a 'lost' rebellion that had a serious chance of triggering a revolution as sweeping as that of 1688, this book directly challenges the paradigm.
We have long assumed that the Jacobite movement was reactionary and hostile to reform of any kind. Yet in the early eighteenth century, the Scottish Jacobite movement was transformed into a vehicle for revolutionary change. In the course of the political battles against Anglo-Scottish union, the Scots Jacobites broke with their past and developed a new, radical ideology. At its core was a vision of a future Scotland in which a Stuart restoration went hand-in-hand with a new constitution that would have reduced the Stuart dynasty to mere figureheads presiding over a noble demi-republic. It would also have been a Scotland directly economically attached to France and its empire, and thus able to demand a far more equal relationship with England. Jacobite success would have drastically rebalanced power relations between the three kingdoms in the British Isles. In 1708, it seems, the polite and commercial empire of our happy orthodoxy was on the edge of a precipice.
Review
Published in the year of the Scottish independence referendum, Britain's lost revolution? is a deeply researched and readable account of the alternatives that existed at the time of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. It presents a lost past of radical change and European realignments. Built on totally new research in UK and international archives, Szechi tells the story of the revolution that never was in a way that illuminates the present and provides endless opportunity for counterfactual history. This is a What If? book par excellence' -- Professor Murray Pittock, University of Glasgow
Synopsis
This book is a frontal attack on an entrenched orthodoxy. Our official, public vision of the early eighteenth century demonises Louis XIV and France and marginalises the Scots Jacobites. Louis is seen as an incorrigibly imperialistic monster and the enemy of liberty and all that is good and progressive. The Jacobite Scots are presented as so foolishly reactionary and dumbly loyal that they were (sadly) incapable of recognising their manifest destiny as the cannon fodder of the first British empire. But what if Louis acted in defence of a nation's liberties and (for whatever reason) sought to right a historic injustice? What if the Scots Jacobites turn out to be the most radical, revolutionary party in early eighteenth-century British politics? Using newly discovered sources from the French and Scottish archives this exciting new book challenges our fundamental assumptions regarding the emergence of the fully British state in the early eighteenth century.
Synopsis
Using newly discovered sources from the French and Scottish archives this exciting new book challenges our fundamental assumptions regarding the emergence of the fully British state in the early eighteenth century.
About the Author
Daniel Szechi is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester
Table of Contents
1. Britain's lost revolution and the historians
2. March 1708 and its aftermath
3. The Jacobite underground in the early eighteenth century
4. The Scots Jacobite agenda, 1702-10
5. The geopolitics of the enterprise of Scotland
6. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index