Scotland and the Wider World
Postgraduate Students:
Adam Marks, fourth year PhD student, is currently undertaking a doctoral thesis assessing the role of England during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) which will stand alongside the growing corpus of work describing the role of Scotland during the same period. In using this comparative approach it is hoped to create a much fuller understanding of Britain's contribution to this European conflict. What is remarkable is that despite the efforts of those researching the Scottish dimension of the conflict, no major survey has previously been undertaken of the English contribution to the war despite the presence of an estimated 50-60,000 Englishmen during the course of the war. There have been minor works on specific episodes – for example the expeditions of both Lord Craven and Sir Charles Morgan – yet even these have either been taken out of context or only as asides to the research on Scottish participation. The present research will not only provide a thorough assessment of England's role in Europe during the early seventeenth century but will provide context for the already comprehensively researched Scottish and Irish dimensions to the conflict. It is hoped that this will allow for some more solid conclusions to be drawn about Britain's role in Europe by bringing the level of research pertaining to England’s role in the conflict up to the same detailed level to that which currently pertains to Scotland, and, to a lesser extent, Ireland. The results of this investigation will undoubtedly shed light on the various conflicts that occurred inside England and Britain during the 1639-1651 period, not least through an assessment of returning English veterans to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Already Adam has uncovered details of the role of numerous Englishmen, not only in the Bishops’ Wars (1639-1641), but also in England and Ireland during the English Civil Wars (1643-1649). Adam has already worked on aspects of Britons in the Thirty Years’ War and has specifically undertaken research which led to the creation of A Database of Scots in the Italian Peninsular during the Thirty Years' War c.1600-1650. This database has been published online as part of the SSNE Database. Adam has published an accompanying article, ‘The Scots in the Italian Peninsula in the Thirty Years’ War’ in Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons, eds., The Ulster Earls and Baroque Europe (Dublin, 2010). Alongside the publications of Siobhan Talbott and David Worthington (among others), the article and database emphasize that although Northern Europe was undoubtedly the primary destination of Scots abroad during the early modern period, many travelled to central and southern Europe. It has also equipped Adam with the research skills required to pursue his present project on the English and the Thirty Years’ War.
Laura Hedrick, third year PhD Student, is examining European opinions and perceptions of Scotland and the Scots between the years 1560-1714. As part of this process she is cataloguing archival references to positive and negative prejudices and examining chronological trends in order to see how prejudices played a role in how the Scots developed their national identity. Throughout history, cultures have defined themselves by demonstrating what they are not long before they determine who they are. This sociological and historical fact has been neglected in Scottish historiography, and historians have failed to examine the ways in which Europe classified the Scots as indicator of how the Scots would come to class themselves. Using the Calendar of State Papers Foreign and Domestic, Scottish and European broadsheets, illustrations, and contemporary literature, this research intends to analyse systematically how Early Modern Europeans felt about the Scots, what factual occurrences may have triggered their perceptions, and finally how this stereotyping impacted Scottish national myth and identity. Additionally, previous historians themselves have propagated many historical myths without thought for their origin. This new analysis of Scottish stereotypes test the veracity of the image of ‘the Scot’ in Europe, determine whether Scottish identity was internally or externally developed, and allow for a re-examination of prevailing biases in our historical understanding of the early modern Scot.
Cynthia Fry, second year PhD student, is undertaking a doctoral thesis analysing the diplomatic policies and practices of James VI between 1584 and 1604. Whilst much is known of James's post-1603 diplomacy, there is no systematic survey of his foreign relations during his kingship in Scotland. The absence of such a survey has led some historians to make many assumptions regarding James’s role in the diplomatic activities of early modern Europe. This project intends to provide the evidence required to validate current assumptions, and where these are inaccurate, to revise them based on the evidence produced by original research in a variety of European archives. This project will not only examine the official diplomatic correspondences between James and his various allies, but it will also explore the Scottish intelligence network that provided James with covert information on both his friends and enemies. This approach is intended to recover the motives and contexts that influenced James's decisions in a manner that has already been successfully applied to Elizabeth I’s foreign policies. The research will therefore complement studies of late Tudor diplomacy with a pioneering examination of Stewart policy in the same period, contributing to a broader understanding of late sixteenth-century European diplomatic relations in general.
Claire McLoughlin, second year PhD student, is undertaking a doctoral thesis which will examine the commercial connections between Scots and the Iberian World in the early modern period. This area of Europe is under-researched in a Scottish context and though the archives suggest regular and sustained contact, very little is actually known about Scottish-Iberian contact beyond the overtly political. This research will fill an identifiable vacuum in our knowledge of the Scottish commercial world and encompass not only Spain and Portugal, but also their dominions, such as the Spanish Netherlands, and the New World. Predominantly looking at Scottish commercial contacts with Spain, the Spanish Netherlands and Portugal, the project will consider a number of angles such as the effects of war, (primarily Anglo-Spanish wars and their effects upon Scottish trade with Iberia) and dynastic unions upon trade. To date, this research presents very interesting findings, such as several Scottish factors based in Andalucia as well as a Scottish Conservator, William Ord, who was commissioned by James VI to represent the interests of Scottish merchants in the territories of Habsburg Spain. This research project continues the work of the Scotland and the Wider World Project and fits well with the aims of the Institute of Scottish Historical Research.
Darren Layne, first year PhD student, is basing his doctoral research on the establishment of a large-scale, online database that will compile and document the constituency of the Jacobite movement during 1745-46. Even within the vast corpus of letters, court records, transportation lists, and muster rolls that form the backbone of what we currently know about the framework of 18th-century Jacobitism, there are inconsistencies, gaps, and deletions, thus admitted by many scholars who have previously attempted to collate this data. Such a definitive repository, undertaken in a technically modern and flexible format, would be an authoritative source for present and future Jacobite scholars. The creation and maintenance of this database is the centrepiece of Darren’s doctoral research, which will undoubtedly yield a large number of cultural, social, religious, and military topics about Jacobite constituency for detailed and discrete chapters within his forthcoming doctoral thesis. During the creation and establishment of the database, he will be harnessing a number of technical assets in order to build, maintain, and promote its functions, including remote collaboration, curation, and research; digitisation of and linking to primary source documents; and concurrent documentation of Jacobite personalities on a dedicated webpage within the database’s online domain. While still an ambitious project, limiting the entries to having a context within the ‘Forty-Five makes it attainable over the course of a PhD programme, though there will certainly be room to connect it with the wider fabric of the ‘Jacobite Century’ as more data enters the field. Its living format will allow the database to be expanded after its initial scope and context is described, following the progression of technology and its increasing use in historical study and digital documentation.
Completed PhD students:
Dr Kathrin Zickermann, finished her doctoral thesis within the Scotland and the Wider World Project in 2009. This focused on the commercial, maritime and military relations between Scotland and the Northwest German cities and territories (Bremen and Hamburg, the Swedish duchies of Bremen and Verden, the various counties of Holstein (partially under Danish control) and the duchy of Braunschweig-Lüneburg.) The core of her research identified the immigration of Scots and the establishment of commercial networks within this region rather than an individual territory, highlighting contact across political borders. It revealed that the region differed significantly from other places in Northern Europe in that it did not maintain an ethnically distinct Scottish community, enforcing and encouraging interaction with the indigenous German population and other foreigners such as the English merchants in Hamburg. By comparing the Scots to other migrant groups such as the French Huguenots and Dutch Lutherans and Calvinists her research also contributed significantly to our understanding of the importance of the region to foreign exiles and expatriates and of the coherence of the region itself. Upon completing her doctorate, Kathrin won the Alan Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History 2010--2011 at the Institute for Historical Research. Upon completion of that fellowship Kathrin was rewarded with a permanent post at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Centre of History. She continues her work on Maritime History and remains firmly integrated into the 'Battle of Wittstock' project as an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews.
Dr Siobhan Talbott, completed her doctoral thesis lin 2010. She looked at Franco-Scottish commercial relations from the Scottish Reformation in 1560 to the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713. Previously historians had too often assumed that, following the Reformation and the restructuring of Scotland’s diplomatic ties with France, long-established commercial, cultural and religious networks between the two countries must also have ended abruptly or simply withered away. Siobhan’s research tested these assumptions on a variety of levels and in a number of ways throughout the early modern period with some remarkable results. Scrutiny of sources such as the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland revealed substantial evidence of Scottish mercantile networks and communities preserving their already well-established trade routes with France. Indeed, these continued to flourish during periods of acute political and diplomatic crisis such as the Franco-Stuart Wars of 1625 and 1666-1667, the Williamite Revolution of 1689-1691, the Scottish declarations of war on France in 1689 and 1702 and the union between Scotland and England in 1707. The result of this research has added a further dimension to our understanding of Scotland’s commercial relations in the ‘long’ seventeenth century, establishing the continued importance of France to the early modern Scottish economy, and enhancing our understanding of the social networks that bound Scots to continental Europe and versa-versa. Upon defending her thesis in 2010, Siobhan became the Economic History Society Tawney Fellow 2010-11, at the Institute of Historical Research before taking up a three year fellowship at the University of Manchester.
