The Scottish Militia Issue and the Anxious Origins of Highlandism, 1759–62

Abstract

This article re-evaluates the debates over a proposed Scottish militia that took place in the British public sphere at the height of the Seven Years War and French invasion and Jacobite rebellion scares, and locates within them the origins of the discourse of Highlandism. Accordingly, the real and imagined ethnic traditions and characteristics of Scottish Highlanders to some extent came to represent the entire Scottish nation, while concurrently rehabilitating and replacing former stereotypes of Highlanders as bellicose ‘savages’ and Jacobite ‘rebels.’ Further, the debates were not merely informed by domestic politics and intellectual agendas, as typically assumed in the historiography; they were also tied to the larger geopolitical and cultural entanglements of imperial warfare and continued threats from Franco-Jacobite fifth columns, as circulated in an anxious, mercantilist, wartime print culture. These discourses reveal that mid-century whiggish Britons continued to worry about French-instigated rebellion despite historiographical assumptions to the contrary, and experienced considerable uncertainty and concern for the intertwined problems of foreign enemies, overseas war and domestic politics. This context, the widespread doubts surrounding Scotland’s trustworthiness and relative status within the Union, and the defensive reactions among certain pro-militia ‘Scots’, show how commentators mobilised Highland soldiers in support of Scotland’s deservedness of political, institutional and cultural equality with England. This, however, was not an era of growing confidence, cumulative antigallican military service and a ‘long-eighteenth-century’ process of political and cultural consolidation, but rather a deeply uncertain time of burgeoning global conflict and entangled Scotto-Franco-British identity dynamics which must be more fully considered on their own problematic terms.