This article explores the formation of British imperial identity through a focus on the career of Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), a well-known Whig intellectual and imperial careerist who originally hailed from the Highlands of Scotland. Using Mackintosh's unpublished letters and autobiography, the article shows how he imagined and narrated his relationship to the Scottish Highlands from the vantage points of Bombay and London. In contrast to recent historiography that has focused on the translation of Scottish society, culture, and identity in British imperial spaces, this article argues that disidentification from the Highlands of Scotland and the erasure of different peoples, cultures, and textures of life was integral to Mackintosh's configuration of a British imperial identity.

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the history of Restoration Scotland, historiographical engagement with the place of the Highlands in the Restoration state continues to be relatively limited. Building upon recent research into the political culture of the later seventeenth century, this article offers a new conceptualization of the relationship between the center and the Highland periphery. It argues that the region was heavily integrated into wider political circumstances, while recognizing that contemporary statesmen remained concerned about its perceived wildness. From this basis, the article moves on to consider the nature of Highland policy, suggesting that tactical shifts spoke of deeper strategic uncertainty as to whether the Highlands were best controlled through the direct imposition of government power or by close cooperation with local elites.

In Ideal Code, Real World, Brad Hooker proposes an account of the relation between his rule-consequentialism and virtue according to which the virtues (1) have intrinsic value and (2) are identical with the dispositions that are ‘essential parts of accepting the rules’ of the ideal code. While it is not clear whether Hooker actually intends to endorse this account or only intends to moot it for discussion, I argue that for him to adopt it would be a mistake. Not only would this mean that his moral theory was no longer properly a consequentialist view at all, but it would commit him to inconsistent views about how normative theories – in particular theories of morality in the deontic sense and theories of virtue – are justified.

“Finding the money”—whether money lost, hidden, or needed—became a defining practical and epistemological problem in the decade after the 1688 Revolution. It was a problem that linked together actors in fiscal administration, parliamentary politics, and economic theory, and drove innovative new applications of numerical calculation to political reasoning. In the debates on monarchical revenues that arose in 1689, a crisis of knowledge engulfed Parliament as MPs discovered how few among them had any insight into the nation's fiscal well-being. A parliamentary Commission of Public Accounts, formed in 1690, learned that even a basic financial assessment was extraordinarily difficult. Yet the commission's travails also revealed numerical calculations to be a potent political tool, which empowered relative outsiders to make incisive criticisms without complete information. Such combative political computation was systematized in the “political arithmetick” of Charles Davenant, who provided a novel political rationale for the value of “probable” knowledge.