Robert Adam is one of the great European architects. His lifetime and career were bound up with the final flourishing of Jacobitism and its political and cultural consequences. This chapter reviews Adam's work in the light of recent research on Jacobitism and the meanings of Great Britain, the British nationbuilding project and the place of Scottish culture within it. We might ask if a ‘Jacobite’ architecture is possible, revealing its secrets only to the initiated in tokens and manuports, but a larger question relates to the cultural consequences of living and working with Jacobitism as an alternative to the established regime. Most writers on Adam have ignored or side-stepped the question. Many have approached the subject whimsically, as if the threat of Jacobitism to the Hanoverian regime was slight and that the battles and reprisals of the 1745 rising could soon be put to one side as the dying gasp of an old way of life. This attitude continued in a sentimentalized narrative which has been challenged in recent years. It has been argued that the power of Jacobitism was such that it ‘postponed the emergence of a culture in which the national past was usable only as a part of a sentimental or reactionary politics of nostalgia’. Was that culture postponed or simply diverted? Can a Jacobite architectural culture have manifested itself within the Hanoverian settlement?

The historiography of an ‘enterprising Scot’ like Robert Adam is important.