Unprincipled careerists or enlightened entrepreneurs? : a study of the roles, identities and attitudes of the Scots MPs at Westminster, c.1754 - c.1784
The Scots MPs of the eighteenth century have traditionally been portrayed in a negative light. In a century once noted for electoral corruption and the abuses of patronage, they were seen by contemporaries and later writers as among the worst examples of their kind: greedy, selfseeking, unprincipled ‘tools of administration’ whose votes could be bought with the offer of places and pensions. Lewis Namier’s seminal work exposing the cynical approach to politics of MPs generally, sparked a backlash which has produced a more balanced evaluation of English politics. Strangely, although Namier exonerated the Scots MPs from the worst of the charges against them, his less judgmental verdicts are found only sporadically in more recent writing, while the older viewpoint is still repeated by some historians. There is no modern study of the eighteenth-century Scots MPs, a situation which this research proposes to remedy, by examining the group of MPs who represented Scotland at Westminster between 1754 and 1784. It re-assesses the extent to which the original criticisms are merited, but also widens the scope by examining the contribution made by Scotland’s MPs, to British and Scottish political life in the later part of the eighteenth century. A study of the social make-up and the careers of this particular cohort provides the backdrop for the two main themes: the participation of Scots MPs in the legislative process, and their effectiveness as representatives of Scottish interests at Westminster. Existing biographical information has been supplemented by an examination of Parliamentary Papers, debates, and personal correspondence to enable further analysis of attitudes, in particular with regard to politics and political mores. The research explores issues of motivation, asking questions about allegiance, identity, perceptions of government, and how conflicts of interest were resolved, before presenting a conclusion which aims to offer a revised, broader, but more nuanced, assessment of this much-criticised group, based on more recent approaches to interpretation
British History 1660-1832: National Identity and Local Culture
Introduction: Region and Locality The Stuart Monarchy and the Idea of Britain James Loses the Kingdoms: The Revolutions of 1688 in their British Context The Union of England and Scotland and the Development of the Hanoverian State The Idea of Britain and the Creation of the First British Empire Peripheral Nations? Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Provincial England Cultural Politics: National Culture in a Metropolitan State The American Revolution and the Origins of the Second British Empire War and Nation 1793-1815: British Identity and the New Empire Empire and its Discontents: English Nationalism and the Imperial State Notes Bibliography Index
The Decree Rolls of Chancery as a Source for Economic History, 1547-c. 1700
A NY reasonable assessment of the progress of historical research takes care to emphasize that patches of light and patches of darkness owe their distribution not so much to insight and blindness among the craftsmen as to'the presence or absence of documentary evidence, the tools of our trade. Sometimes, however, research is frustrated not by scarcity but by abundance, and nowhere has this been more true than in those records of litigation preserved at the Public Record Office which remain uncalendared, unlisted, or unindexed. Needs are so various that, while one historian may make satisfactory progress so long as there exists a contemporary index by names of litigants, another's researches are frustrated unless there is an index of places concerned, and another type of research may make no progress through such a voluminous archive without a listing to give some indication, however rudimentary, of the matters at issue. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much litigation in the Courts of Exchequer and Chancery was touched off by matters that are central to the concern of economic history, although means of access to the information embodied in the legal records quite fail to match the importance ofthese evidences for historical inquiry. Here and there, listings have been achieved which illustrate the range and significance of the subject-matter in a limited number of cases and for limited years: such is the List and Index of Exchequer Commissions