Britain's Lost Revolution?: Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain

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. Using newly discovered sources from 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.