North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe identity of eighteenth-century North Britons needs to be disaggregated: there were significant variations in North British attitudes to the Anglo-Scottish relationship in areas such as politics, economics, language, religion and manners. In the first-order spheres of politics and economics North Britons generally subscribed to an Anglo-British identity and tended to welcome anglicization of Scotland's feudal institutions and laws as an acceleration along the pathway of modernization. Although this crucial aspect of North British identity became widespread only from the 1730s its roots can be traced back to the sophisticated debates which hadprecededScottish agreement to incorporating Union. This adherence to an Anglo-British form of patriotism was a common feature of political discourse in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. North British patriotism also shared another prominent characteristic with Anglo-Irish and American identities. The aspiration to share English liberties to the full, when thwarted, could trigger anglophobic responses, as occurred in America in the 1760s and 70s, and in the Irish constitutional revolution of 1780–2. Among North Britons, a coherent Anglo-British ideology of improvement co-existed with a traditional Scottish chauvinism, which was normally dormant, but whose occasional eruptions tended to be provoked by perceived exclusions of North Britons from the liberties of Englishmen.