Presents a study of the political culture of Scotland in the 1790s. This book compares the emergence of 'the people' as a political force, with popular political movements in England and Ireland. It analyses Scottish responses to the French Revolution across the political spectrum; explaining Loyalist as well as Radical opinions and organisations.

Presents a study of the political culture of Scotland in the 1790s. This book compares the emergence of 'the people' as a political force, with popular political movements in England and Ireland. It analyses Scottish responses to the French Revolution across the political spectrum; explaining Loyalist as well as Radical opinions and organisations.

For the British government's supporters in Scotland in the 1790s, one thing was paramount: they were fighting French principles in any shape or form they might take. Whether this meant defeating the influence of French revolutionary ideas in Scotland, or defeating the military menace of the French republic, they were determined to stand firm in their support of the British state.This book charts the Scottish contribution to, both the war effort of the 1790s, and the British governments struggles to defeat political radicalism at home; lasting from the first outbreak of political disturbances in Scotland in 1792, until the French revolutionary war came to an end in 1802. In this, the Scots made their very distinct mark in terms of recruitment for armed service, demonstrations of loyalty, and prosecutions against political radicals in the law courts but, perhaps less so, in terms of their financial contributions . The government of Scotland was further integrated into the British state in a structural sense over the course of the decade, yet retained many distinctly Scottish features none the less and on the whole the 1790s comes across as a time when the Scots found little difficulty in seeing themselves as both British and Scottish.

Historians of ideas have traditionally discussed the significance of the French Revolution through the prism of several major interpretations, including the commentaries of Burke, Tocqueville and Marx. This book argues that the Scottish Enlightenment offered an alternative and equally powerful interpretative framework for the Revolution, which focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined the 'modernity' analysed by Hume and Smith in the eighteenth century. The Scots observed what they understood as a military- and democracy-led transformation of European modern morals and concluded that the real historical significance of the Revolution lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary international order. This book recovers the Scottish philosophers' powerful discussion of the nature of post-revolutionary modernity and shows that it is essential to our understanding of nineteenth-century political thought.