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The subcontinent also exported exotic foods and spices, porcelains and silks to Scotland and the rest of Britain. The ritual of tea drinking was a direct result of the discovery of the plant in Ceylon, a British possession from 1795. The firm of Lipton went on to dominate the trade in the 19th century.
The ever-increasing expansion of empire and the opportunities it created for advancement for the middle classes and lesser nobility formed the cement that bound the union together. It also allowed former opponents of the Hanoverian regime to become reconciled. After all, it was a Scot, James Thompson, who wrote the words to ‘Rule Brita
The Enlightenment: Why Scotland?
Mr Amyat, an English physician, on a visit to Edinburgh in 1771, remarked: ‘I can stand at the Market Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.’ Tobias Smollett, the Scottish writer resident in London, described Edinburgh in his novel
Humphrey Clinker
as a ‘hotbed of genius’.
Indeed, the second half of the 18th century saw Scotland gain a worldwide reputation for science, philosophy, scholarship and the arts. The country was in possession of an intellectual life of extraordinary brilliance. Its scientists and thinkers went on to create the modern world:
Adam Smith
became the father of political economy.
Adam Ferguson
became the father of sociology.
David Hume’s
work laid the foundation of modern philosophy.
William Robertson
was the founder of
conjectural history
(speculation about the causes of events).
James Hutton
was the founder of modern geology.
James Watt
was the inventor of the steam engine.
In the arts, there were literary giants, such as national bard Robert Burns, as well as Allan Ramsay and Hugh Blair; painters of the stature of Henry Raeburn; and architects like Robert Adam.
What gave unity to this diverse group of intellectuals was their belief in reason, improvement and progress. Put simply, they were part of a set of beliefs whose purpose was to reform society using reason. This involved, on the one hand, challenging beliefs that were the product merely of tradition and faith, and on the other hand, advancing knowledge through the scientific method. Enlightened thinkers stressed reason, logic, criticism and freedom of thought over dogma, blind faith and superstition. They also believed that by gathering facts about the past and using them to examine human life, the truth behind human society and oneself, as well as the universe, could be revealed.
Everything was deemed to be rational and understandable. The Enlightenment took the view that the history of mankind was one of progress, something that could be continued with the right kind of thinking. Consequently, the Enlightenment also argued that human life and character could be improved through the use of education and reason. Instead of clobbering someone on the head and forcing him to accept your views, you persuaded him through the use of evidence, logic and reason.
The physical representation of these beliefs was seen in the construction of the New Town in Edinburgh, begi
The notion of progress among the Scottish literati was defined as much on English terms as Scottish. England was viewed as a far more progressive society than Scotland in all sorts of areas. In 1761, one of the clubs, the Select Society, hired an Irish actor, Thomas Sheridan, to rid their speech of ‘Scotticisms’ and changed its name to the Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language. The desire to speak correct ‘English’ became a passion; the old Scots language was seen as ‘uncouth’.
The origins of the Enlightenment lay further back in the past (see Chapter 12), and there is little doubt that the Scots owed a great deal to major European philosophers, such as Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire and Isaac Newton. In Scotland, Frances Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, was the founding father of Scotland’s Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment wasn’t a bolt from the blue. Like any other artistic or intellectual movement it had roots:
Universities:
Scotland had five universities compared to England’s two. The curriculum was much more broad-based and scientific and included economics and mathematics, as well as arts subjects such as law, history and languages, particularly Latin. Specialist professorial teaching was introduced after 1707. The late 17th century had also witnessed the re-establishment of professorial chairs in mathematics. Observatories were built at St Andrews and at King’s and Marischal colleges in Aberdeen. Robert Sibbald, who was appointed the first professor of medicine at Edinburgh, co-founded the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1681. These developments helped the universities to become major centres of medical education, as well as later putting Scotland at the forefront of new thinking.
Clubs:
The abolition of the Scottish Parliament didn’t kill off the public’s taste for debate. It’s not for nothing that the Scots have been described as a disputatious people, something that goes back to the Reformation. In the major cities, clubs were established for debating the main issues of the day and campaigning for things such as the establishment of a Scottish militia. In the absence of a parliament in Edinburgh, the clubs served as a safety valve for discontent and at the same time provided an introduction for students into this lively culture of debate and discussion.
In Edinburgh, there were the Select Society and the Cape Club; in Glasgow, the Political Economy Society; in Aberdeen, the Philosophical Society, better known as the Wise Club; in Perth, the Literary and Antiquarian Society. Perhaps the most important club was the Poker Club in Edinburgh, set up to ‘stir things up’.
Politeness:
By
politeness
, I’m referring to intelligent conversation whose unwritten message was to improve morality and encourage mutual understanding. Polite culture would, in the words of the founder of the famous journal the
Spectator,
Joseph Addison, ‘wear out Ignorance, Passion and Prejudice’. This would, as one historian put it, ‘help to establish a new kind of society – peaceful, prosperous and pleasant’.
Lord Cockburn, speaking of the growth of polite society in Edinburgh in the 18th century, said that
there was far more coarseness in the formal age than the free one. Two vices especially which had been banished from all respectable society were very prevalent, if not universal, among the upper ranks – swearing and drinking. Nothing was more common for gentlemen who had dined with ladies, and meant to rejoin them, to get drunk… . Swearing was thought the right, and mark, of a gentleman.
As part of the softening of ma
The Church:
At the begi
Things changed after 1707 with the introduction of the Patronage Act of 1712, which placed the appointment of ministers in the hands of the landowning elites. The elites wanted their appointees to preach on stability, anti-Jacobitism and political cohesion.
Patronage wasn’t welcomed by the Church, but it had little choice but to accept it. Ministers were not only defenders of the union settlement, but also more liberal in outlook, more learned and much more sophisticated than their predecessors, who were described by one Welshman in 1769 as ‘furious [and] illiterate’. This new breed of minister was known as a
Moderate.
But the Moderates didn’t have it all their own way. They were opposed by the Evangelicals, who were drawn to the older forms of preaching and were critical of the elites in Scottish society. However, it was the Moderates who dominated the Church in the second half of the 18th century.
The Moderates were determined to rid the Church of persecution over religious matters and to allow the unthinkable to be spoken, which was very important in allowing for the radical gains made in all fields of inquiry, from mathematics to philosophy. This meant that when the extremists among the Evangelicals attempted to try the atheist David Hume for heresy in 1755, they failed miserably.
Without the open-minded and sociable Moderates’ control of the Church, the flowering of the Scottish intellect may never have occurred.
John Calvin
John Calvin, a French reformer and theologian who died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1564, was the most potent influence on the development of Scottish Protestantism. John Knox, the Scottish Protestant leader, called Geneva ‘the most perfect school of Christ’.
Calvin had a pretty dim view of humanity, which he considered depraved and steeped in sin since the fall from grace of Adam in the Garden of Eden. He split the world into the eternally saved (the elect) and the eternally damned (the reprobates). In his view, there was nothing you could do about which category you found yourself in, even if you had lived a pious and decent life. It was all part of God’s plan, even before the world began. Indeed, he argued that Christ died only to redeem those whom God had already chosen for salvation.
The problem was, who was chosen for salvation and who for damnation? There were telltale signs. The
elect
came to resemble those who had succeeded on earth. So, the better off you were, the more likely you were destined for heaven; the poorer you were, the more likely you were doomed to go to hell.
From his base in Geneva, Calvin established a
theocracy
(in which the Church controls all aspects of life). It was pretty rigid in terms of governing social life and worship. Any distraction from the worship of God was ba