|
|
 |
EUROPE'S MOST VISITED SF/F WEB SITE |
|
The Scottish Revolution
Scottish SF author Ken MacLeod ponders the twists and turns of
fate that made capitalist development finally and fully possible in
Scotland and irreversible in Britain as a whole.
Well over a hundred people were there, including historians, journalists, and political activists. This is in quantity and quality an impressive audience for a book written by an active socialist with a full-time job and no full- time academic position. A few years ago, when Neil said he was writing a book on the Scottish bourgeois revolution, my first question was: 'When was it?' It wasn't a bad question, because it's easy to think of several mistaken answers: that it happened in one or other bloody episode of the Scottish Reformation, that it was accomplished as part of or in tandem with the English Revolution (including the Glorious Revolution), or that it never happened at all. I'd more or less taken for granted the fairly common view that the bourgeois revolution in Lowland Scotland was completed by 1692, and that its decisive military victory was at Dunkeld. The subsequent Jacobite risings are on this view the assault of the remaining feudal/tribal Highlands, supported by foreign feudal/absolutist reaction, against an already consolidated bourgeois state. In his talk introducing the book, Neil challenged this view. He argued that Scotland, still feudal in the 1690s, underwent a bourgeois revolution from above in the first half of the 18th century, and one whose results were decisive for the future of the world. After the Glorious Revolution feudal relations persisted in Lowland Scotland as well as in the Highlands. Feudal rent, military tenure, and hereditary jurisdictions thwarted the development of capitalism. (A feudal lord is A Man You Don't Meet Every Day: 'I have acres of land, I have men I command, I have always a shilling to spare ...') The Scottish bourgeoisie, such as it was, gambled its all - up to half the capital of the kingdom - not on agricultural improvement or manufacturing, but on the disastrous Darien Scheme. In the absence of agricultural improvement, food production was insufficient to prevent famine in the 1690s. The incorporating Union of 1707, far from extending the gains of the Revolution to Scotland, extended Scotland's vulnerability to counter- revolution to Britain as a whole. Any Jacobite restoration had to aim for the national capital: London. In the context of the world-wide struggle between the empires of capitalist England and absolutist France, this was a real threat. A restored Stuart monarchy would have made Britain a vassal state of France. Between 1707 and 1745 reforms and improvements were made, but not enough. Only a few of the greatest lords, notably Argyle, could go over to capitalist relations on their estates, and even for them it was a partial and difficult process. Others simply racked-rented their tenants and/or racked up their debts. It was the most indebted 'lesser lairds', Highland and Lowland, who threw in their lot with Charles Stuart. It was only the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and the subsequent smashing of Highland society and the abolition throughout Scotland of the hereditary jurisdictions and feudal or military tenures, that made capitalist development finally and fully possible in Scotland and irreversible in Britain as a whole. If the counter-revolution had succeeded, capitalist development could well have been blocked even in England, and absolutism strengthened in France, for an indeterminate but quite possibly historic period: perhaps no American independence, no French Revolution, no Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. The world we know was won at Culloden. Ken MacLeod When he is not pondering alternative realities for Scotland, Ken MacLeod is better known as the author of Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, The Sky Road, Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, and Engine City. For more Ken commentary, try his blog over at http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/
|
OTHER CONTENT - July 2003
|
|||||||||
Last
Saturday evening I went to the well-attended launch of Neil Davidson's
Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692 - 1746 published by Pluto
Press. 
 |
|
| nest home | search engine | site directory | shop | library | tools | about us | | |
|
|
... www.sfcrowsnest.com © 2001 CWant a ? Then send an email to: hologramtales-subscribe@topica.com