1. This use of “crisis,” perhaps introduced by Jakob Burckhardt in ch. 4 of the Reflections on History, was applied to the birth pangs giving rise to the Enlightenment in Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, in 1935. This book in turn was to some extent responsible for the fashionableness of the term in the 1950s and thereafter among historians studying the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century which marked the advent of capitalism.
2. Cf. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182.
3. On Buchanan’s relevant views, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, “George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution,” English Historical Review, supp. 3 (1966); Roger A. Mason, “Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain,” in Scotland and England 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987), 60–84.
4. Andrew Fletcher, “Speeches by a Member of the Parliament which Began at Edinburgh on the 6th of May, 1703,” in Andrew Fletcher, Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 135.
5. Edinburgh Review (1755–1756), ii. For the general context, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Scottish Public Opinion and the Union in the Age of Association,” in Scotland in the Age of Improvement, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), 125–47.