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This essay describes the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project (SCOS), a multi-institutional collaborative research initiative into Early America and the British Atlantic world. Developed by the digital scholarship team at the University of Virginia Law Library, in partnership with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, SCOS explores everyday life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through Session Papers, the printed documents submitted to Scotland's supreme civil court during litigation. The project provides scholars, genealogists, and the public with openaccess digital copies of Session Papers held by the UVA Law Library, the Library of Congress, and other institutional partners. By digitizing these documents, contextualizing them with comprehensive metadata, and providing users with interpretative entry points, SCOS is designed to foster new research on this formative period of Scottish, British, and American history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hoping to stop the ratification of a treaty of incorporating union with England, late in 1706 the parish minister Robert Wylie quoted the Declaration of Arbroath in a draft manifesto for an armed uprising. Rather than seeing Wylie's manifesto as part of a perceived tradition of popular sovereignty rooted in the Declaration of Arbroath, this paper asks what his quotation reveals about this early modern moment. It confirms a growing awareness of the Declaration of Arbroath in Scottish political culture and its usefulness as patriotic rhetoric for Whigs and Jacobites alike, aided by the publication of English translations from 1689. It shows how Wylie used the Declaration to suggest that the pro-treaty majority in the Scottish parliament was a traitorous faction out of step with the mind of a nation bound by its covenant oaths and how this attack on the legitimacy of the estates went against more than a century of presbyterian efforts to bolster the authority of the parliament as a counter to Stewart power. Wylie's document thus confirms the rising relevance of public opinion in this era and its construction in terms of conscience and covenants; and underlines a key struggle in the making of the union between extra-parliamentary opinion, highlighted in petitions and weaponised through calls for recesses and special assemblies, and the stature of the Scottish parliament as the embodiment of the political nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Founding documents are parsed, revered and preserved but they can also be misread, mythologised and overlooked. This article examines the entangled fates of the Scots Declaration of Arbroath (1320) and the US Declaration of Independence (1776) at a moment between the seven-hundredth anniversary of the one in 2020 and the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the other in 2026. It shows that the two 'declarations' were both diplomatic texts, rhetorically shaped, and part of sequences of similar documents that have otherwise been largely overlooked. Some recent commentators have suggested that Arbroath influenced the US Declaration; on the contrary, the article argues that the Declaration influenced Arbroath, at least in its reception and its construction as an alleged charter or 'declaration' of Scottish 'independence'. I conclude by presenting fresh evidence for the presence of Arbroath in Philadelphia in 1776, to reflect on the sometimes surprising ways in which documents become, or do not become, foundational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journey to Scotland in August 1768 by Count Karl von Zinzendorf reveals the significance of Scottish socio-economic practices for the Austrian Habsburg lands in the mid-eighteenth century. Zinzendorf's travel came as the result of the Austrian-Habsburg desire to emulate foreign financial structures after defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756–63). His one-month stay in Scotland, supported by the Habsburg monarch Maria Theresa as part of several tours across Europe, was in effect an act of industrial espionage. It is also an illuminating example of eighteenth-century hospitality and sociability. Based on Zinzendorf's unpublished diary entries as well as his economic report on the British Isles compiled for superiors in Vienna, this article introduces Zinzendorf and his 'commercial tour' of Scotland to Scottish historians for the first time. It builds upon recent efforts to explore early modern Scottish connections with continental Europe and demonstrates how these connections projected beyond Zinzendorf's visit during his tenure as governor of Trieste and his later career within the Habsburg monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Henry Dundas, first viscount Melville (1742–1811), lord advocate in Scotland, MP for Edinburgh and Midlothian, first lord of the admiralty, home secretary and the first secretary of state for war, was one of the most powerful politicians in the eighteenth-century British parliament. His involvement in the gradual abolition of the slave trade after 1792 was amongst the most controversial episodes of his career. His role has attracted much interest in the last few years, although there are two irreconcilable schools of thought amongst historians. This article reassesses Dundas's role in the gradual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. His contributions in the houses of parliament between 1791 and 1807 are examined and situated in the appropriate imperial context. Memoirs and published pamphlets reveal how contemporaries viewed Dundas's activities and motives at the time and since. His parliamentary activities are compared with new insights from his personal correspondence as well as public and private communications from West India societies, merchants and planters. By overlaying parliamentary events with commercial networks, Henry Dundas's collaboration with the West India interest is revealed, and how this operated and was perceived at the time. This article—the first detailed study of its type—thus illuminates Henry Dundas's role as a great delayer of the abolition of the slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1745–6, thousands of troops were raised in the Highlands and Islands in support of the house of Hanover. Often neglected due to the intense focus on Highland Jacobitism, these Gaels were instrumental in the defeat of the Jacobites. The study of pro-Hanoverian forces in the Gàidhealtachd tells us much not only about the military history of the 1745 rebellion but also about the nature of the whig regime in Scotland. In contrast to the ideological frameworks increasingly used to make sense of the Jacobite period, this article argues that pragmatic negotiations between the central government and the whig clans helped mobilise and empower regional responses to the rebellion. Exploiting the government's need for Gaelic allies in late 1745, Highland leaders, officers, and enlisted men used military service to shore up a nexus of political, financial and security imperatives. By examining the recruitment and service of anti-Jacobite Gaels, this article shows that—even in the epicentre of the rebellion—the Hanoverian state possessed important structural strengths that enabled it to confront the threat of armed insurrection. In so doing, the article reveals the political and fiscal-military networks that sustained whig control in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It would then be said that I had published, for the sake of an Emolument, not from respect to the memory of my friend, what even a printer for the sake of the same emolument had not published.[38] Hume died three days later (25 August), setting in motion another tortuous series of exchanges about the fate of the I Dialogues i .[39] In a letter to Strahan of 5 September, Smith confessed that he had wished the I Dialogues i 'had remained in manuscript to be communicated only to a few people'. Although La Rochefoucauld's letter of 6 August 1779 had intimated Smith's involvement in the publication of the I Dialogues i , the fragment - particularly its claim that Smith had "expected to have been able" to send the copy "much sooner" - reveals that Smith was in some measure associated with the project, or acquainted with the individuals who superintended it. Keywords: Scotland; 18th century; Adam Smith; David Hume; Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion EN Scotland 18th century Adam Smith David Hume Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 138 150 13 04/02/21 20210401 NES 210401 The discovery of unknown letters by Adam Smith has continued fitfully since 1987, when Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross issued the second edition of their I Correspondence of Adam Smith i .[1] The following article provides an additional instalment: a letter fragment of 15 May 1779, addressed to Louis-Alexandre (1743-92), duc de La Rochefoucauld. This persistent association with the I Dialogues i could suggest, in support of Rasmussen, that Smith's religious sympathies were aligned with Hume's, but one would struggle to disentangle Smith's offices from his sense of obligation to Hume's testamentary instructions. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the connections between the Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume (1711–76) and the Jacobites. Many of his friendships with Jacobites are known, but they have rarely been explored in detail, perhaps because they sit uneasily with the now dominant interpretation of Hume as a whig. While he was frequently accused of Jacobitism in his lifetime, this article does not seek to revive the myth that he was committed to the cause of the Stuarts at any stage of his life. However, his balanced treatment of Jacobitism indicates that we should dismiss entrenched dichotomies between enlightenment and progressive whiggism on the one hand, and nostalgic and conservative Jacobitism on the other. Despite his own lack of Jacobite commitments, the case of Hume shows that Jacobitism needs to be better integrated into Scottish enlightenment studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]