The Galloway Levellers: a study of the origins, events and consequences of their actions
The purpose of this study is to cast fresh light on the uprising of the Galloway Levellers in 1724. To achieve this objective, the study takes as its starting point patterns of land use and land ownership in Galloway as they evolved through from the late sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The important influence of the plantation of Ulster on the development of Galloway's cattle trade is discussed in this part of the study. Since the society of Galloway in 1724 was still deeply influenced by the religious and political conflicts of the later seventeenth century, this background is then considered. Local responses to the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 are discussed within this context since there was an anti-Jacobite element within the rhetoric and actions of the Galloway Levellers. From these foundations, and having established a chronology for the events of 1724, much of the confusion which previously surrounded the actions of the Galloway Levellers and responses to their actions can be clarified. It has been possible to identify and provide a history for most of the people and places involved, including some of the Levellers themselves. This evidence in turn has revealed that the actions of the Galloway Levellers did have an impact on the later eighteenth century development of Galloway through a more cautious approach to agricultural improvement and the creation of industrial settlements to provide employment for surplus labour. Finally, a previously unrecognised connection between late eighteenth century Galloway and the theory and practice of the industrial revolution is explored.
The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy, 1660-1815
Original archive material is used in this book to explore the social revolution when, in the 18th-century, the old peasant society of lowland Scotland was replaced by a new order of capitalist farmers and landless labourers.
On Fascist Ideology
Fascism is a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism and, in the German case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Fascism, in its many forms did not hesitate to kill its own citizens as well as its colonial subjects in its search for ideological and political closure. Millions of civilians perished on a global scale during the apogee of fascist ideologies in Europe and beyond. In historical terms, fascism can be defined as a movement and a regime. Emilio Gentile – who, with Zeev Sternhell and George Mosse,2 is the most insightful historian of fascism – presents fascism as a modern revolutionary phenomenon that was nationalist and revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist. Gentile also presents fascism as being typically organized in a militaristic party that had a totalitarian conception of state politics, an activist and antitheoretical ideology as well as a focus on virility and anti-hedonistic mythical foundations. For Gentile a defining feature of fascism was its character as a secular religion which affirms the primacy of the nation understood as an organic and ethnically homogenous community. Moreover, this nation was to be hierarchically organized in a corporativist state endowed with a war-mongering vocation that searches for a politics of national expansion, potency and conquest. Fascism, in short, was not a mere reactionary ideology. Rather, fascism aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.3 The word fascism derives from the Italian word fascio and refers to a political group (such as the political group lead by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the time of Italian unification.) Fascism also refers visually and historically to a Roman imperial symbol of authority. Its place of birth as a modern political ideology was northern Italy, the year was 1919, and its founder was Benito Mussolini. Thus, fascism as a term as well as a political movement was born on the Italian peninsula. Its ideological origins, however, predated its name. The fact that fascism was born as a concept before its explicit birth as a movement is central to any understanding of fascism. The ideology of radical nationalism that made it possible was part of a larger intellectual reaction to the Enlightenment.4 This tradition was both European and, in the Latin American case, “non-European” as well. To be sure, the original ideology behind fascism was born as a reaction to the progressive European revolutions of the long nineteenth century (from the French revolution of 1789 to the American and Latin American revolutions of 1776 and the 1810s). Fascism represented a post-revolutionary attack against equality. The ideology of the anti-Enlightenment is the major root of the longstanding ideological tradition that created fascism. Its branches constituted a reaction against liberal politics and a rejection of democracy. And yet fascism did not oppose the market economy and put forward a corporatist organization that aimed to be functional to capitalist accumulation. Equally important, fascism is a philosophy of political action that ascribes value to absolute violence in the political realm. This ascription was boosted by one radical outcome of the