Scotland, the union and the idea of a ‘General Crisis’.

The nature of what historians, over the last thirty years or so, have agreed to call the ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century has prompted a certain amount of sporadic and genteel debate. It is a subject that has aroused interest but not passion, unlike the gentry controversy and, more recently, the ‘revisionist’ version of the causes of the English civil war. My own previous contribution to the debate, an article published in 1984 called ‘Scotland and the “General Crisis” of the seventeenth century’, argued that ‘general crisis’ as a way of explaining what happened in Europe in those years, though appealing, was unsound. The article demonstrated, at least to its author's satisfaction, that the Scottish case was an exception to all of the many hypotheses that scholars had floated as to the nature of that supposed crisis, and therefore, since events in Scotland precipitated what happened in England, clearly ‘Exhibit A’ in any crisis theory, the whole idea was fatally flawed. It goes without saying that what transpired in Scotland and England, and Ireland too, would not have happened as it did, or perhaps at all, had it not been for the Anglo-Scottish union of 1603. Alas for authorial pride, however: the idea of a ‘general crisis’ still seems to be alive and well, though rather less written about in the last few years. So what follows is a reconsideration of the nature of the seventeenth-century ‘crisis’, if that is the proper word, once again from the Scottish vantage-point, and some suggestions which may provide a new starting-place for discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]