The Scottish Enlightenment and the Remaking of Modern History

Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

On 30 October 1745, the advocate Henry Home, Lord Kames, sent a gloomy letter from his Lowland estate in Berwickshire.The Highlands, he wrote, had been infected by a 'disease'. 1In July that year, Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite pretender to the British throne, had landed on the island of Eriskay and began to raise an army from supportive Highland clans; by the middle of September, he had taken the cities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh.After the rebellion was crushed at Culloden the following April, Kames expanded his diagnosis: the Highland disease was the 'Feudal Law'. 2 This law, he claimed, comprised a body of tenurial customs ('Land Rights') that had been imposed on England whig history did not necessarily overlap with support for the Whig administrations of George I and George II (although it often did). 12Rather than a function of political allegiance, the whig tradition can be defined instead as a set of inherited and adaptable beliefs about the sui generis, and often superior, character of English history when compared to the histories of other Western European nations. 13The basis of England's distinction was mutable.English whig history originated in London's late sixteenth-century inns of court, when their lawyers began to claim that England had always been equipped with a unique 'ancient constitution' that had limited its monarchs through parliament and the common law. 14By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, educated English society had coalesced around the unprecedented liberation produced by the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-9: the moment at which England had become 'modern' by escaping its feudal pasteven if squabbles abounded over whether the post-Revolutionary constitution had in fact resurrected the 'ancient' and pre-feudal politics of the Anglo-Saxons. 15t is a 'cosmopolitan' update of this mid-century iteration of English whig history that has been detected in post-rebellion Scotland.As Colin Kidd describes it, Scotland's most successful literary figures, chief among them the philosopher and historian David Hume, came to accept that England 'represented modernity'. 16They promoted the idea that England was the only cultural identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789 (London, 1997), pp.140-5; see also Duncan Forbes, '"Scientific" Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar', Cambridge Journal, 7 (1954), pp.643-71; idem, 'Sceptical Whiggism, commerce, and liberty', in Andrew Skinner and Thomas Wilson, eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1975), pp.179-202; idem, Hume's philosophical politics (Cambridge, 1975); Nicholas Phillipson, David Hume: the philosopher as historian (London, 1989; repr.London, 2011); John Pocock, The ancient constitution and the feudal law (Cambridge, 1957; repr.1987); idem, Barbarism and religion (6 vols., Cambridge, 1999-2015); James Harris, Hume: an intellectual biography (Cambridge, 2015). 12For contrasting perspectives on the breadth and depth of Whig and Jacobite affiliation in eighteenth-century Scotland, see Christopher Whatley, 'Reformed religion, regime change, Scottish Whigs and the struggle for the "soul" of Scotland, c. 1688c.1788', Scottish Historical Review, 92 (2013), pp.66-99; Allan Macinnes, 'Jacobitism in Scotland: episodic cause or national movement?',Scottish Historical Review, 86 (2007), pp.225-52. 13One of Herbert Butterfield's many definitions of the English whig tradition equated it with the national view of England's history since the late sixteenth century, for which see Butterfield, The Englishman and his history (Cambridge, 1944), p. 72.On this view of the whig tradition, see also Peter Ghosh, 'Gladstone and Peel', in idem and Lawrence Goldman, eds., Politics and culture in Victorian Britain: essays in memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), pp.45-73, at p. 48.  1On the 'ancient constitution', see Mark Goldie, 'The ancient constitution and the languages of political thought', Historical Journal, 62 (2019), pp.3-34; Pocock, Ancient constitution; on whig history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, see Peter Ghosh, 'Macaulay and the heritage of the Enlightenment', English Historical Review, 112 (1997), pp.358-95; Piet Blaas, Continuity and anachronism: parliamentary and constitutional development in Whig historiography and in the anti-Whig reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague, 1978); Christopher Parker, The English historical tradition since 1850 (Edinburgh, 1990). 15For the claim that the Revolution had made England 'modern', see Lord John Hervey, Ancient and modern liberty stated and compar'd (London, 1734); for the Revolution as the restoration of Saxon politics, see Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Remarks on the history of England (London, 1743). 16Kidd, Subverting Scotland's past, p. 210.In Kidd's usage, this Scottish idea of England's 'modernity' was historically specific, rather than an anticipation or approximation of the new conceptions European monarchy to have become 'modern' by redistributing its feudal estates into the hands of common people, empowering their parliamentary representatives to seize sovereignty in the Revolution of 1688-9. 17Yet they did so from an elevated cosmopolitan perspective.Dismissive of overtly chauvinistic strains of whig history, they chose instead to explain English history in terms of the universal process of commercial 'civilization'. 18As Kames suggested above, it was commercial activity rather than the contingent features of England's history that explained its precocious redistribution of feudal land.In theory, England's modernization could be imitated by any other nationsuch as Scotlandin which commerce took hold.
This article offers a new interpretation of the historical writing of the Scottish Enlightenment.Instead of rendering Kames, Hume, and their contemporaries as cosmopolitan proponents of English whig history, the article argues that they remade 'modern' history in the light provided by Europe's feudal past.After the rebellion of 1745 was widely attributed to feudal causes, many Scots followed Kames by reconstructing the feudal world to articulate what was modern (and what remained pre-modern) about their own.But they arrived at different conclusions, with different proposals for how to reform the politics of modern Britain.To advocate land reform in Scotland, Kames did deploy the resources of the English whig tradition: for him, English history lit up the route that Scotland should take to escape its feudal past.But others reworked Kames's account of feudal politics in light of the debate stimulated by the 1748 publication of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu's De l'esprit des loix in Geneva. 19 jurist and former chief magistrate of Bordeaux's civil court ( parlement), Montesquieu had used the final books of The spirit of laws to defend feudal of 'modernity' that historians began increasingly to attach to the European Enlightenment from the mid-1990s onwards, on which see John Robertson, 'Enlightenment and modernity, historians and philosophers', International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity, 8 (2020), pp.278-321. 17  1 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, De l'esprit des loix (2 vols., Geneva, 1748); the best accounts of its reception in France and the Swiss cantons are Michael Sonenscher, Before the deluge: public debt, inequality, and the intellectual origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2007); idem, Sans-culottes: an eighteenth-century emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2008).institutions as the critical infrastructure of modern France. 20In contrast to the work's two short chapters on the English constitution, which were excerpted and translated in the London periodical, the Monthly Review, these books claimed that feudal property, feudal courts, and feudal custom protected the citizens of modern France from the arbitrary prerogative of the crown. 21hen considering Montesquieu's influence on Scottish intellectual culture, scholars have mainly found him lurking behind the 'four-stages' or 'stadial' theory of civilization often associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. 22But in a Scotland preoccupied with whether its feudal institutions had fomented the latest Jacobite rebellion, it was his history of France that stood out.In 1757, the jurist Sir John Dalrymple refashioned Montesquieu's ideas into a new history of landownership in Britain to make the case to the Faculty of Advocates that Scotland need not break up its feudal estates. 23In 1759, the minister and historian William Robertson built Montesquieu's account of feudal government into his own history of Scotland between 1542 and 1603: a period in which the 'feudal aristocracy' still survived in Scotland, but which had nevertheless been marked by the arrival of a Presbyterian Christianity which Robertson perceived to be 'modern'. 24The sixteenth century, he wrote a year later, 'contains the opening of modern History'. 25en years before Robertson published his History of Scotland, David Hume had already read Montesquieu as a historian of feudal government in Europe. 26Hume was also the author of what became the standard work of English history until Thomas Babington Macaulay published his own history of England in 1848. 27The following four sections therefore focus on Hume's History of England (1754-62) and the responses it elicited from his Scottish interlocutors.The first two sections show how, in the neglected later volumes of the work, Hume transformed Montesquieu's history of France into a new account of how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past.The history of modern France, for Montesquieu, began with the fifth-century arrival of the Franks into Roman Gaul; he considered Frankish social and political arrangements to be feudal, and feudal institutions as the source of modern French liberty.But modern history, as Hume saw it, only began over a millennium later, after a transformation of feudal manners across sixteenth-century Europe had liberated ordinary people from aristocratic violence.Hume's story was radical in decoupling the emergence of English liberty from land redistribution and the rise of parliament, and issued in a jaundiced view of the health of the modern British constitution.The third section shows how some of Hume's contemporaries, including Adam Ferguson and John Millar, took alarm.They were both troubled by the diminished role Hume seemed to assign to parliamentary government in the formation of modern Britain; their response was to redraw his line between feudal and modern, and restore property-holding and representative government to the centre of the picture.The fourth section looks at Adam Smith, who intervened in the debate by incorporating Hume's central argument into his Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776). 28It was only Hume, he suggested in the work's historical third book, who had grasped that modern European politics consisted in a new relationship between the propertied and the waged, rather than a new distribution of property and political authority.The fifth section offers some concluding reflections.
By reconstructing this Scottish debate about the feudal origins of modern Europe, this article builds on recent scholarship that reveals the extent to which seventeenth-and eighteenth-century visions of political order across the British Atlantic world relied on the periodization and conceptualization of feudal history. 29The article also hopes to begin rethinking the place of the Scottish Enlightenment in the intellectual history of the British empire.Within this historiography, eighteenth-century Scotland is cast as a seedbed of cosmopolitan politics that nourished the intellectual culture of nineteenthcentury Britain.Stadial theory is widely seen as its most powerful nutrient.The 'four-stages' theory of civilization stipulated that all human societies began as associations of hunter-gatherers before moving through the subsequent stages of pasturage, agriculture, and manufacturing and trade; it also pulled European and non-European societies into the same universal system of time, rendering the differences between them as malleable and bridgeable.For some scholars, this theory provided the conceptual tools with which educated Britons rejected conceptions of human difference as racial and intractable until the 1880s; for others, its cosmopolitan promise was soon broken by liberal imperialists such as John Stuart Mill, for whom it became a racist tool for denying self-government to the indigenous communities of Britain's colonies. 30But the Scots considered here deployed stadial theory alongside modernist histories that erected barriers between European and non-European peoples. 31Explicating this tension in the history-writing of the Scottish Enlightenment helps to move beyond broad-brush invocations of its cosmopolitan character, raising new questions about its intellectual legacy.As the fourth section suggests, it also sheds new light on why British thinkers so often saw little contradiction in supporting the expansion of Britain's settler colonies while denouncing company and imperial rule in the East Indies. 32onfiscation nation: settler postcolonialism and the property paradox', Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 33 (2022), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4101307;see also Kathleen Davis, Periodization and sovereignty: how ideas of feudalism and secularization govern the politics of time (Philadelphia, PA, 2008); Reynolds, Fiefs and vassals; Elizabeth Brown, 'The tyranny of a construct: feudalism and historians of medieval Europe' American Historical Review, 79 (1974), pp.1063-88.30 For the former, see Peter Mandler, 'Looking around the world', in Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi, eds., Time travelers: Victorian encounters with time and history (Chicago, IL, 2021), pp.24-41; idem, '"Race" and "nation" in mid-Victorian thought', in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young, eds., History, religion, and culture: British intellectual history, 1750-1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp.224-44; for the latter, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and empire: a study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought (Chicago, IL, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A turn to empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Karuna Mantena, Alibis of empire: Henry Maine and the ends of liberal imperialism (Princeton, NJ, 2010); Karen O'Brien, 'Empire, history, and emigration: from Enlightenment to liberalism', in Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland, eds., Race, nation and empire: making histories, 1750 to the present (Manchester, 2010), pp.15-36; see also John Burrow, Evolution and society: a study in Victorian social theory (Cambridge,  1966; repr.1970).31 For a sceptical view of the idea that Scottish stadial theory, or 'conjectural history', conceptualized a universal system of time, see Aaron Garrett, 'Law, chronology, and Scottish conjectural history', in John Robertson, ed., Time, history, and political thought (Cambridge, forthcoming 2023).

I
In February 1757, David Hume was vacillating about how to extend his History of Great Britain.He had published its first volume in 1754, beginning with the accession of James I in 1603 and closing with the Regicide in 1649; he had completed the second in 1756, carrying the story up to 1688. 33Now he was torn.The options, as he saw them, were to go forwards to Hanoverian Britain in the early eighteenth century, or backwards to the sixteenth century. 34By May that year, he had decided to go backwards, beginning with the reign of Henry VII.'It is properly at that Period', he explained to his bookseller Andrew Millar, that 'modern History commences.' 35I 'wish', he wrote a few days later, 'I had from the first begun at that Period.It really is the commencement of modern History.' 36 He published the next instalment in 1759, under the new title of the History of England. 37After this he went backwards again, publishing a final instalment in 1761 that ran from Julius Caesar's invasion of Britannia to the accession of Henry VII. 38In 1762, he republished the whole enterprise as The history of England, from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. 39n the Stuart volumes of his history, Hume had already shown that England's fabled 'ancient constitution' consisted simply in the strong crown that James I had inherited from Elizabeth. 40He had shown how a rise in commercial activity and new markets in luxury goods had bankrupted small property-holders, allowing the 'gentry' ('that rank which composed the house of commons') to swallow their estates and seek legal protections for their new-found property. 41e had delighted in the irony that parliamentary demands for protection from the crownwhat Hume often referred to as calls for 'civil liberty'had been fuelled by the violence of Protestant 'enthusiasm'. 42And he had heralded the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-9 as the beginning of a 'new epoch' in the history of the English constitution: the source of the 'most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind'. 43The Stuart volumes have accordingly been established as the nucleus of the work.It was here that Hume argued that the English Revolution had given birth to a modern parliamentary monarchy capable of terminating religious and aristocratic war. 44The task of the later volumes of the History was simply to narrate how this modern parliamentary constitution had come into being. 45ut Hume never claimed that the Revolution had given birth to 'modern' history.The word 'modern' appeared a handful of times in the History of Great Britain, but always as a synonym for 'contemporary', or 'present'; Hume never gave the modern world a moment of beginning. 46He did, however, in his history of the Tudors. 47These volumes, alongside the final instalment on the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans, were where Hume constructed a new account of the European feudal system and the 'modern History' that had superseded it.In English whig histories of the kind adopted by Kames, feudal tenures were instruments of royal power that restricted the free and independent property-holding to which England's modern post-Revolutionary constitution owed its existence.Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, had referred to the redistribution of England's feudal estates into the hands of a new class of free-holders as the 'great Change' of English history. 48This 'Change' had been invoked by the English MP George Lyttelton in 1747 to justify the abolition of Scotland's heritable jurisdictions. 49It could regularly be spotted in the court Whig press. 50It had been taken as axiomatic by the French historian Voltaire in his observations on English politics in 1733, and it structured the last general history of England to be published before Hume's own. 51These iterations of the story differed from Kames by attributing responsibility for the shift in landownership to the first Tudor monarch Henry VII, who had legislated to create a new route for breaking 'entailed' estates at the court of Common Pleas. 52But the trajectory from 'feudal' to 'modern' remained the same.Feudal tenures had been introduced into England by William the Conqueror in 1066, restricting property-holding to the king and, once certain fiefs had become hereditary, to his chief men. 53The modern parliamentary constitution created in 1688-9 was the outcome of a breakdown in feudal landownership that had given a 'greater Weight', as Bolingbroke had claimed, to the English House of Commons. 54In this kind of account, the history of modern Britain was the history of the English free-holder and his parliamentary representativeseven if it was often argued that the Revolution heralded a return, as Bolingbroke put it, to the government of 'our Saxon ancestors'. 55Hume's History has always been read as another narrative in this vein. 56But as Hume related it, the problem with feudal tenures did not lie with the pattern of landownership they created.What mattered about the feudal system was the deeper-lying problem of its 'manners', or culture.
Hume acknowledged Montesquieu and William Robertson as his primary interlocutors on the question of feudal government. 57In The spirit of laws, Montesquieu had shown how the arrival of the Franks into Roman Gaul had created a patchwork of fiefs and feudal jurisdictions over which Frankish monarchs had no authority, and bodies of feudal custom that had been preserved within the regional parlements of contemporary France. 58The magistrates who recalled and executed the customs deposited in these courts protected property from seizure and taxation by the crown; nobles depended on the parlements for the maintenance of their status, so could be relied on to defend 52 The entail, or fee tail, was a restrictive type of land grant used by landowners to prevent their heirs from breaking up, selling off, or mortgaging their estates.For Henry VII's legislation (4 Hen.VII, c. 24), see The statutes at large, ed.Owen Ruffhead (18 vols., London, 1769-1800), II, pp.79-80.Hume, History, I, pp.455-6. 58Montesquieu, Spirit of the laws, book 5, chapters 10-11; book 30, chapters 3-5, 8-10, 16-18, 20; book 28, chapters 38, 39, 45.  them from either popular unrest or royal incursions on their authority. 59ontesquieu had insisted that feudal property must be supported and perpetuated through restrictive land grants like the entail. 60He had also warned that noblemen should not participate in commercial activity, as doing so would remove their interest in protecting the authority of the regional courts. 61ume agreed with Montesquieu that Europe's fiefs dated from the fifth-century arrival of Germanic tribes into the western provinces of the Roman empire, although they had only been introduced into Britain by the Normans in 1066; the Saxon invasion of Roman Britannia had been so brutal, Hume explained, that the conquerors had found little need for fiefs, designed as they were to secure territory from danger.62 But Hume diverged from Montesquieu on the politics that the Saxons and the Normans had created, regardless of whether they had recourse to fiefs.Montesquieu had seen the proprietorial arrangements of the Franks as modern because feudal property and feudal courts shielded the persons and possessions of ordinary people from the arbitrary operation of sovereign authoritya form of security that no ancient government had managed to achieve.For Hume, the millennium between the invasion of the Saxons and the accession of Henry VII was characterized instead by a network of protection rackets operated by chief men, or nobles, of various shades.63 Under the Saxons, this system of 'private confederacy' worked via the exchange of protection in return for payment and obedience: Hume pointed out that even the inhabitants of boroughs (towns) had to seek out the 'clientship of some particular nobleman…whom they were obliged to consider as their sovereign'.64 The problem was the same under Norman noblemen, whose fiefs had quickly become hereditary after the Conquest.65 Nobles trained many of their vassals as private 'retainers' (or soldiers) who they used to wage war on one another, and deliberately discouraged the development of arts and manufactures so that their distribution of patronage would be the only avenue through which tenants could elevate their status.66 They also used baronial courts to protect 'adventurers and criminals' who could be used to raid neighbouring estates.67 The result was a world in which security depended on the 'private connexion' of each individual.Liberty had a price, and it was the nobility who pocketed the profits.68 The central claim of Hume's medieval history was that this system was impervious to the political and legal evolution of England's institutions.The origins of both the rule of law and the House of Commons could be traced to what Hume described as the 'Anglo-Norman' period between 1066 and the death of Richard III in 1485.Yet neither mattered much. In1215, for example, King John (1199-1216) had agreed a charter with his nobility ('Magna Charta') that shielded possessions, as well as property, from arbitrary seizure by the crown: even cottagers could no longer be extra-judicially deprived of carts or ploughs.69 But what Hume referred to as an 'original contract' between monarch and people made little impact on feudal disorder, and therefore on those it theoretically protected.70 John's successor, Henry III (1216-72), was the first English monarch who could be said to lie 'under the restraint of law'.71 Yet his reign was haunted by aristocratic violence.72 Hume told a similar story about Edward I (1272-1307), the monarch who first asked royal boroughs to send representatives to parliament.73 Their arrival may have heralded the 'faint dawn of popular government in England'.74 But their new status as members of parliament meant little: their personal security continued to depend on whether they had succeeded in soliciting baronial protection.75 Parliament was unable to make inroads into a feudal culture that saw Edward II (1307-27) meet a violent end at the hands of Roger Mortimer, a baron of the Welsh marches.76 Edward's III's reign (1327-77) was likewise plagued by aristocratic war; decades later, England had become engulfed by the Wars of the Roses.77 Both Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman politics were reducible to a system of clientship and perpetual war, rather than a particular distribution of landownership and political authority.This political culture enveloped each of the monarchies the Germanic tribes had erected in Western Europe, and ensured that ordinary people were 'every where bereaved of their personal liberty'.78 Hume claimed that this culture began to transform itself into something new at the turn of the sixteenth century: what he described in his Tudor volumes as the beginning of 'modern annals'.79 It was around this time, Hume suggested, that gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press had all been invented.80 This was also the moment at which European nobilities gave up their armies in favour of purchasing luxury goods: a 'change in manners' that undermined their power.81 New markets for goods like silks, calicoes, and porcelain had been created by the late fifteenth-century European 'discovery' of the 'Western world' and, via a new naval passage round the Cape of Good Hope, of the East Indies.82 Hume argued that these markets were significant because they offered new channels through which nobles could aggrandize themselves.83 The nobilities of Europe's feudal monarchies had previously competed with one another over the size and strength of their armies of retainers, constantly using them to attack each other or the crown.84 But as luxury goods percolated into places such as England and France, the noble classes began to jostle over sartorial and domestic splendour instead (what Hume referred to as a 'more civilized species of emulation').85 Rather than funding their new appetites by selling off their estates to common people (the central claim of mid-century English whig history), Hume's argument was that Europe's bellicose noble classes had turned themselves into profiteering landlords instead.They 'endeavoured', Hume wrote, 'to turn their lands to the best account with regard to profit, and either inclosing their fields, or joining many small farms into a few large ones, dismissed those useless hands, which formerly were always at their call in every attempt to subvert the government'.86 Barons also began to substitute cash rents for services and rents-in-kind, and the practice of lease-holding spread.87 Former retainers flocked to the towns and began to manufacture imitations of the eastern luxuries that the nobles were buying.The transformation sedated the nobility.Hume likened the new relationship between noble and artisan to 'that moderate influence, which customers have over tradesmen, and which can never be dangerous to civil government'.88 Just as a tradesman was a less dangerous citizen than a feudal retainer, the 'life of a modern nobleman [was] more laudable than that of an ancient baron'.89 In England, the vaunted laws of Henry VII had 'contributed very little' to this shift.The 'change of manners', or culture, 'was the chief cause of the secret revolution of government, and subverted the power of the barons'.90 Wherever new markets in luxuries had emerged in Europe, monarchs secured the authority that they had been denied by the aristocratic bent of feudal politics. 91But Hume's counter-intuitive claim was that as monarchs became despotic, their subjects became free.What he referred to as 'personal liberty' had been impossible under feudal government not because landowning was restricted to noblemen, but because feudal manners militated against personal security.Everyone lived under the shadow of constant violence: even the lives of landowning noblemen were themselves precarious, 'exposed to every tempest of the state'.92 Once the noble thirst for military power had been sublimated into a desire for cash and glamour, however, violence ceased to infect the everyday lives of people of all orders.Although monarchs benefited from this transformation by accruing a new authority that they exercised in arbitrary ways, they could not disrupt everyday life with anything like the regularity of feudal violence.This was the story lying behind Hume's claim that after feudal 'bonds of servitude' had been eroded by luxury consumption, 'personal freedom became almost general in Europe'.93 It was only then that the 'condition of the people, from the depression of the petty tyrants, by whom they had formerly been oppressed, rather than governed, received great improvement'.94 What Hume referred to as 'personal' liberty could germinate, and even flourish, under the glare of absolute monarchy.It did not depend on a redistribution of property into the hands of smaller proprietors, nor on the representation of these proprietors in a popular assembly: personal liberty was a derivative of security, rather than property-holding and enfranchisement.
As this new condition of security had no need for any section of the people to have their hands on the levers of law-making, either directly or indirectly, it could co-exist with the despotism of Tudor rule.Once England's previously violent nobility had begun to reinvent themselves as commercial landlords, Hume claimed that the crown made hay.No English monarch had been as 'absolute' as Henry VII. 95After declaring himself supreme head of the English church, no European prince could boast of such 'absolute authority' as Henry VIII. 96The legislative authority of Elizabethan parliaments was also a 'mere fallacy': the 89 Ibid., pp.76-7. 90Ibid., IV, p. 385.The claim that English landowners, rather than a new middling rank, became the 'conquering class' of the English Civil Wars underpins Tom Nairn's thesis in 'The twilight of the British state', in The break-up of Britain: crisis and neo-nationalism (2nd edn, London, 1977), pp.11-92, at p. 25.
The Historical Journal crown possessed the 'full legislative power' as royal proclamations were treated as law. 97ume explained that the arrival of 'personal freedom' in Europe 'paved the way' for the advance of civil liberty in England. 98His Stuart volumes showed how the seventeenth-century English gentry, fired by puritanical conviction, had acted to erect 'firmer barriers' around the personal liberty that had already emerged. 99But the seventeenth-century establishment of civil liberty in England did not mark the birth of what Hume referred to as 'modern History'.That moment lay around two centuries earlier.Feudal politics, in Hume's account, had been replaced by 'modern annals' at the outset of the sixteenth century because European noblemen had begun to act like profiteering landlords rather than the ringleaders of violent gangs.The result was a new relationship between the propertied and the waged, and a new kind of 'personal', as opposed to 'civil', liberty.This liberty was distinctively modern because it had been produced by consumption; Hume pointed out that the rise of luxury consumption among the Greeks and the Romans, by contrast, had only 'increased the number of slaves'. 100It was exclusionary because its arrival was restricted to the feudal monarchies of Western Europe.The transition from feudal to modern politics was a European history in which non-European peoples appeared unable to participate, complementing Hume's existing racism: only 'the whites' of Europe, he had claimed in 1753, were capable of refining their manners, or culture. 101And in the terms of English history, this liberty had blossomed without the aid of its legal and political institutions: the History had slipped the whig knot tying the arrival of liberty in Britain to establishment of England's 'modern' parliamentary constitution in 1688-9.In Hume's account, neither the sixteenth-century retainers who had flocked to the towns nor the tenants on longer leases breached the proprietorial threshold to elect representatives to parliament.Hume's claim was that they were nevertheless free.

II
Hume's new account of the origin of 'modern History' had direct implications for his interventions in two British political debates in the 1760s and 1770s: first on the politics of public credit; second on the election of the radical MP John Wilkes.In the summer of 1764, two years after publishing the 97 Ibid., IV, p. 363. 98Ibid., II, p. 524. 99Ibid., V, pp.39-40, 134-5. 100Ibid., II, p. 523. 101David Hume, 'Of national characters', in Essays moral, political, and literary, ed.E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN, 1987), pp.198-216, 629, at pp. 208n, 629.The essay was first published in Three essays, moral and political (London and Edinburgh, 1748), to which Hume added a footnote on the natural inferiority of non-white races when he republished the essay in the first volume of Essays and treatises on several subjects (4 vols., London, 1753-4).For textual and contextual discussion of the footnote, see Aaron Garrett and Silvia Sebastiani, 'David Hume on race', in Naomi Zack, ed., The Oxford handbook of philosophy and race (Oxford, 2017), pp.31-43.
completed History, Hume was awaiting news of a recently published edition of his own essays to reach Paris (his home since the previous summer). 102It is well known that this edition contained revisions to an essay on public credit that he had already published in 1752. 103Since the chartering of the Bank of England in 1694, English and British governments had sold debt to the public in order to fund military expenditure. 104Hume had worried in the original essay, however, that the insatiable commercial and military competition in which European states were engaged ('cudgel-playing fought in a China shop') would lead to Britain's appetite for borrowing outrunning the public's appetite for lending. 105If Britain failed to sell a round of debt whilst facing a military threat from a European power, the government could either default on its existing debts to fund its military commitments abroad, or continue blithely to service its debts while risking invasion.The first option (the 'natural death') would sacrifice the property of thousands of people for the security of millions; the second option (the 'violent death') could sacrifice the security of millions for the property of thousands. 106In 1752, Hume was reticent about what was more likely.But by 1764, he had changed his mind: Britain was hurtling towards the violent option with 'amazing rapidity'. 107he darkening of Hume's vision of Britain's future has been attributed to a 'basic Scottish ca'canny', a mistrust of success and prosperity borne by centuries of poverty and disaster. 108It has also been read as a reflection on the fiscal requirements of national security, and the volatile politics these requirements could produce. 109The terms in which he revised his view of Britain's debt burden, however, become clearer when seen through the prism of the History.Hume had suggested in his original essay that if the holders of Britain's debt resisted a government default, the nobility and the gentry could persuade them to prevent the violent option. 110But in 1764, after Hume had spent ten years writing a history that pivoted on feudal noblemen transforming their estates into commercial enterprises, he worried that the nobility and gentry could no longer play that role. 111The nobility had been integrated with the creditors, and many of them sat in a parliament that could not be relied upon to accept losses on debts its members owned.'Adieu', Hume lamented, 'to all ideas of nobility, gentry, and family.'As the 'middle power between king and people' had been 'totally removed, a grievous despotism must infallibly prevail'. 112Britain was lurching toward the violent scenario. 113Hume's lament flowed from his claim that aristocratic consumption, rather than parliament, had built modern Britain.In the History, Hume had refused to equate the rise of England's representative government with the beginning of modern history in Europe.He had explained instead that the modern world revolved around improving and profiteering aristocrats and the new waged of the towns, rather than a new relationship between the English crown and parliament.What mattered about the lesser nobility and gentry who sat in the House of Commons, then, was that they were propertied and financialized; their status as representatives of those who elected them meant little.
Over the following years, Hume continued to insist that Britain's problems ran deeper than parliamentary reform could fix.Between early 1767 and August 1769, he was in London, as the city was gripped by the return of the outlawed radical journalist and MP, John Wilkes. 114Having fled arrest for seditious libel in 1763, Wilkes had returned to London in February 1768 and was elected as member of parliament for Middlesex a month later.His prompt incarceration (he had yet to be pardoned) led to protests, the massacre of protesters at St George's Fields, and rioting across the city. 115After a year in which Wilkes was expelled and re-elected to parliament a number of times, the Commons finally passed a motion declaring Henry Luttrell, Wilkes's opponent, as member for Middlesexdespite his receipt of 296 votes to Wilkes's 1,143 in an election on 13 April 1769. 116arliament was the focus of much of the commentary on the affair.The Wilkites, along with independent county MPs and city radicals, had claimed that the rioting stemmed from disaffection with parliamentary corruption: a problem to which they presented a solution in the form of annual elections, a pension bill to remove court patronage from parliament, and the enfranchisement of market towns. 117The Anglo-Irish MP, Edmund Burke, part of the Whig group that had formed itself around Charles Watson-Wentworth, second marquess of Rockingham, suggested that the rioting stemmed rather from George III's separation of his court from parliament. 118For Burke, the House of Commons was what Montesquieu referred to as an 'intermediate' power; but in order for the assembly to function effectively, royal authority had to flow through it in the form of court patronage, guided by the principles of party. 119Hume, by contrast, showed little interest in linking the crisis to parliament's relationship with the crown. 120He was more preoccupied by England's new class of financialized landlords.Britain's creditors, he claimed glumly, now filled 'all the chief Offices and are the Men of greatest Authority in the Nation'. 121Landholders and stockholders had become 'so involvd with each other by Connexions and Interest', he wrote later, that the former could not persuade the latter to accept a patriotic default. 122ow Hume had reimagined the birth of modern European history as a transformation of feudal manners, he had become worried about the political and financial entanglements of who he referred to in the History as the 'modern nobleman'. 123The reincarnation of the 'ancient baron' may have brought 'personal liberty' to Europe.But in Britain, his presence in parliament increased the prospects of a violent end to its debt crisis. 124

III
In the years following the publication of Hume's History, historians, clergy, and jurists across Britain tried to contest its central claims. 125While reading the first volume of Catharine Macaulay's History of England (1764-83), Hume noticed that he had been in her sights throughout. 126Her own eight-volume history distinguished itself from Hume by reaching its apex with the emergence of a brief republic following the Regicide of 1649: a moment she described as the 'meridian of [England's] glory', after Hume had represented it as a violent, despotic, and fanatical nadir. 127But in Scotland, the response to Hume's History was focused on its argument about the feudal world and the political arrangements that had superseded it.In the decade after its publication, Hume was challenged on these grounds by two prominent figures: the minister and historian Adam Ferguson, who had been appointed to the chair in Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University in 1764; and the jurist and historian John Millar, who had held the chair in Civil Law at Glasgow University since 1761.Ferguson and Millar are usually read alongside Hume, William Robertson, and Adam Smith as protagonists of an Enlightenment united by a cosmopolitan reworking of English whig history. 128Yet they disagreed sharply with Hume on the history of Europe, and where its boundary between feudal and modern ought to be drawn.They each expanded the reach of the feudal system to encompass the rise of absolute monarchy across sixteenth-century Europe, while suggesting that this system had only been superseded in England by the seventeenth-century rise of its representative assembly. 129or them, parliament had created English liberty and was capable of protecting British liberty in the future.
Ferguson reformulated the English modernization narrative in his Essay on the history of civil society (1767).He claimed that England, like the other 'great monarchies' that had grown out of the former western provinces of the Roman empire, began its life as a Germanic barbarian settlement. 130Like Montesquieu and Hume, he traced fiefs to these settlements: they were temporary gifts that leaders gave to chiefs to provide for their subsistence. 131espite pronouncing that the 'original' of his own work could be found in Montesquieu, Ferguson did not engage further with his history of the Franks. 132He agreed instead with Hume that once fiefs had become hereditary, chiefs transformed themselves into the 'tyrants of every little district'. 133But this is where Ferguson's similarity to Hume ended.Hume's 'modern History' began at the turn of the sixteenth century, which was when the Tudors consolidated the authority of the crown and personal liberty flourished across Europe.Ferguson cited Hume's history of the Tudors to make a different claim: that the Tudors exemplified a further despotic stage of feudal government. 134The Tudor monarchs had created a 'despotism', Ferguson argued, by stripping the feudal nobility of their military and legal authority under the pretext of 'rescuing the labourer and the dependent' from aristocratic Ferguson, he rendered the Tudor dynasty as the final phase of feudal governmentwhat he referred to in a set of lectures in 1787-8 as 'feudal monarchy'. 145The Germanic barbarian settlements that had grown out of the former western provinces of the Roman empire began their lives as communities of independent chiefs who held 'allods', and vassals who held fiefs that had been granted by the chiefs (Millar later referred to this phase in his lectures as 'feudal aristocracy'). 146The chiefs tended to unite under a general or king for mutual defence; but in order to make war or peace, the king required the consent of his assembled allodsthe origin, Millar claimed, of the 'ancient Parliaments of France, the Cortes in Spain, and the Wittenagemote in England'. 147As barbarian monarchies were vast, however, kings were often unable to provide security to their least powerful chiefs.The result was that chiefs who held smaller allods, and hence fewer vassals, entered into the vassalage of more powerful neighbours.Millar argued that it was through this process that the 'feudal system was completed in most of Europe': after a point, even the more powerful allodial proprietors could not defend themselves against others, and were forced into the vassalage of the king.This was how the 'whole of a kingdom came to be united in one great fief', as it was under William the Conqueror in England, or Hugh Capet in France. 148he Tudors were the last beneficiaries of this system in England: they took the royal prerogative to a height incompatible with the 'freedom of the people'. 149ike Ferguson, Millar claimed that the Tudor feudal monarchy began to collapse with improvements to commerce. 150The development of trade in luxury goods allowed the poor to profit from their labour and become independent of their feudal superiors.At the same time, noblemen became 'addicted' to consumption and encumbered their estates with debts to fuel their new habits: the means by which they fell into the hands of merchants who simply wanted legal protections for their property (what Millar referred to as 'sentiments of liberty'). 151Power followed soon upon wealth: citing Hume's history, Millar claimed that Charles I was forced into yielding to the 'growing power of the commons'.Their demand for legal protections from the crown had created the 'most popular', or democratic, government that had yet to be established from the ruins of a large feudal monarchy. 152England's feudal monarchy had only been superseded, then, because luxury consumption had transferred wealth to the commons, empowering the Lower House to overwhelm the crown's authority in the seventeenth century (a phase he later referred to in his lectures as 'commercial government'). 153illar's Observations went further than shutting down Hume's claim that the Tudor period heralded the beginning of modern history: it also recast the European feudal system as republican in character.Citing the French historian Gabriel Bonnot de Mably rather than Montesquieu, Millar claimed that in 'each of the feudal kingdoms' that had emerged from the ruins of the Roman empire, sovereignty was exercised by a 'national council' of its independent, or 'allodial', property-holders, while the king was distinguished by being the largest property-holder of all. 154Membership of the legislature was conditional upon property-holding, and all that changed across Millar's three phases of government -'feudal aristocracy', 'feudal monarchy', and 'commercial government'was how many people held it.It was for this reason that Millar later rebuked Hume's depiction of the Tudors in his own Historical view of the English government (1787). 155Hume, he bristled, had made the 'gross error' of describing the legislative power of Tudor English parliaments as a 'mere fallacy'. 156Parliament still legislated as it had done since the arrival of the Saxons into Roman Britannia: it was by acts of parliament, Millar pointed out, that Henry VIII had suppressed the monasteries, become head of the church, and abolished the civil authority of the pope. 157Luxury consumption had changed English politics by democratizing property-holding; but it had not brokered the transition from 'ancient' to 'modern'.For Millar, the Germanic conquerors of the Roman empire performed that function: the feudal governments they had erected in the former western provinces of the Roman empire were modern because parliamentary monarchy was unknown to the ancients. 158The only distinction between Norman and contemporary British parliaments was that the latter were more democratic, as landownership had become more widespread. 159The priority for contemporary Britain, he explained to his students, was to keep it that way.To prevent a reversion to the aristocratic parliaments that had characterized the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, Millar suggested that the franchise could be opened up to labourers earning a high enough wage. 160The 'most popular' of all the Western European governments could be sustained by ensuring that property-holding was spread more widely, if necessary by redefining it to include income from wages. 161ike Ferguson, Millar rejected Hume's periodization of history: both historians designated Tudor government as feudal, rather than the moment at which a new cultureor system of 'manners'was born.But Millar went a step further than Ferguson by questioning whether there was a distinction between feudal and modern politics at all. 162By design, there was no room in Millar's history of Europe for the analytical distinction that Hume had drawn between the lives of feudal and modern noblemen.There was no room, either, for Hume's suggestion that the fundamental characteristic of 'modern History' lay in the kind of life that the modern nobleman made possible: the new sense of securityor 'personal liberty'experienced by the tenants of his estates, or those who earnt wages by catering to his desires.For Millar, as for Ferguson, it was imperative to restore the idea that liberty was only possible in states with a wide distribution of landownership and a popular assembly in which the interests of landowners might be represented.Rather than applauding Hume's bleak account of the modern world, they explicitly rejected its politics.

IV
In a series of lectures that began in the winter of 1762, his final year in the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, Adam Smith intervened in the Scottish debate about the content and periodization of modern history. 163As part of a broad history of government in Western Europe, he told his students that 'the nobility necessarily fell to ruin as soon as luxury and arts were introduced' into the countryside of sixteenth-century monarchies, and that 'their fall everywhere gave occasion to the absolute power of the king'. 164The shift was to be welcomed.Under an absolute monarchy like that of the Tudors, the 'greatest part of the nation' had little to fear from the crown, whereas everyone had been oppressed by 'petty lords'. 165The people, Smith explained, could never have 'security in person or estate' until the power of the nobility had been curtailed. 166aged labourers of Hume's modern world could co-exist without coming into existential conflict.Rather than redistributing property, Smith's solution was to keep wages high by relentlessly increasing industrial productivity. 173hile wages in advanced economies like Britain would always be undercut by less advanced competitors, Smith claimed that improved productivity would allow Britain to outrun them without recourse to imperial projects or slavery. 174In the Wealth of nations, Smith criticized the Iberian empires in Peru and Mexico, the European settlements on the west coast of Africa, and British company rule in India. 175But his anti-imperialism did not issue from a cosmopolitan ability to recognize strange and unfamiliar communities as 'constituting extant forms of life'. 176As Onur Ince has recently shown, Smith justified the agrarian settler colonies of British north America on the grounds that indigenous American communities had no conception of land-property, and were therefore incapable of being expropriated. 177For Ince, Smith's justification was one of many British attempts to reconcile the violence of colonial expropriation with Britain's self-image of its imperial political economy as 'liberal'. 178he inferior status Smith attached to indigenous Americans was also anchored in his set of claims about how the modern world had emerged.Smith had already pointed out to his students in 1763 that the Germanic tribes that 'broke into Europe' in the fifth century were a 'step farther advanced' than eighteenth-century indigenous Americans. 179Americans were 'savage' huntergatherers, while the Germans fell into the interstice between pasturage and agriculturethe subsequent two stages of Smith's conjectural theory of civilization. 180Smith had explained then that human societies only required a governing authority to adjudicate their disputes once they began to survive through pasturage, as pasturage (unlike hunting and gathering) created notions of property in land. 181One reason why Smith never located landproperty and government as active concepts in savage communities is because they had never populated ancient, feudal, or modern European history: in his eyes, neither Germanic tribes such as the Franks and Saxons, nor the Greeks and Romans before them, had ever been hunter-gatherers.In the Wealth of nations, Smith claimed that the eighteenth-century indigenous inhabitants of Peru, Mexico, west Africa, and east India were already 'shepherds'. 182They subsisted in the same way as the Germanic tribes who erected the feudal monarchies of Western Europe.They could be assimilated to the arc of European history, and were included in Smith's account of imperial injustice.But it is unclear whether indigenous Americans could make the critical developmental leap from hunting to shepherding.Although Smith's vision of history was more accommodating of non-European peoples than Hume's, it had limits.Indigenous Americans appeared to inhabit a different temporal dimension, existing outside of Smith's perimeter of injustice.
V It might reasonably be argued that many of the Scots considered in this article never managed to escape the sense that there was something special about English history.Kames updated the ubiquitous English history of the Revolution.Hume's history of the modern world still carried the title The history of England.Ferguson and Millar extolled the virtues of representative parliamentary government.Yet confining them within the English whig tradition obscures their closely argued debate about the relative importance of manners, landowning, representation, Protestantism, and consumption in powering the emergence of the modern world.Regardless of where the 'prime mover' of the transition was located, their histories of how the modern world had emerged from the feudal (or the ancient) engaged with French scholarship as much as English, and moved well beyond the whig fixation on the English Revolution of 1688-9. 183The worlds they imagined were also restricted to the feudal (or postfeudal) monarchies of Western Europe, which had sprouted in turn from the former western provinces of the Roman empire.The communities that existed outside these places, such as the 'savage' indigenous inhabitants of America or Africa, were often denied the same capacities for social and moral improvement.In Scotland's modernist history-writing, the modern period was distinct from a civilizational stage that could in theory be reached by all.
These conclusions suggest that it may be fruitful to reopen the question of how the historical discourses of Enlightenment Scotland shaped the intellectual and political cultures of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain.It is well known that many of the works considered in this article were reprinted in large quantities throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; that they were centrepieces of the subscription libraries blossoming across urban Scotland; that they were taught in Edinburgh to the students who set up the most successful British periodical of the early nineteenth century, The Edinburgh Review; and that they could be found in the libraries of early nineteenth-century British politicians and colonial officials, 182 Smith, Wealth of nations, II, IV, vii(c), 100-8, at paragraph 100; on this point, see Ince, 'Limits of liberal anti-imperialism', pp.1090-2. 183The concept of the 'prime mover' in the collapse of feudalism underpins the so-called 'Transition Debates' of post-war British historiography.For an entry point, see Rodney Hilton, 'Feudalism and the origins of capitalism', History Workshop Journal, 1 (1976), pp.9-25, at pp. 22-4.
The Historical Journal many of whom were Scottish. 184Beyond the story of the cosmopolitan legacy of Scotland's social theory, it is less clear what these readers did with these works.