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This thesis examines how primary sources were used to build conceptualisations of the Scottish past during the nineteenth century. To achieve this it focuses on the work of the record scholar and legal antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874). Innes was a prolific editor of source material relating to parliament, the burghs, the medieval church, family history and the universities. He was also an authority on Scotland‘s legal history, an architectural antiquary, a practising lawyer, a university professor and one of Scotland‘s earliest photographers. Through an investigation of these activities, this thesis explores the ways in which Scots perceived their own history during the period of what Marinell Ash calls the 'strange death of Scottish history‘. What differentiates this study from previous investigations is its emphasis on the presentation and associated interpretation of primary sources, as opposed to institutional frameworks or secondary narratives. Innes put particular types of source to specific uses in an attempt to rehabilitate the tarnished reputation of Scottish history. However, he was not a radical operating on the intellectual fringes, but a respected mainstream figure who worked within the traditions of Enlightenment and the boundaries of Romanticism. He relied upon an institutional interpretation of history which placed abbeys, bishoprics, burghs, universities, families and the apparatus of law and government within broader narratives of national progress. Yet he also used both documentary and architectural sources as the basis for an imagistic and imaginative evocation of the textures of the past. Whilst Innes‘s work illustrates how conflicted Scottish historiography was in the period, it also shows how a prominent antiquary sought to heal those historiographical wounds. The thesis will demonstrate that many of his attempts met ultimately with failure, particularly those which tried to imbue the Scottish past with an ideological validity derived from Whiggism and Enlightenment. However, it will also argue that Scottish historical Romanticism, to which Innes was an important contributor, provided the basis for a broad consensus about the value of Scottish history in the later decades of the century. The significance of this romantic consensus has been neglected by recent scholarship, and the study therefore sheds new light on the 'strange death‘ that occurred in the 1840s and 1850s.

This thesis analyses the origins, development and impact of British army recruiting in the Scottish Highlands in the period from 1739-1815. It examines the interaction of government, landlords and tenantry using estate papers, notably the Macleod of Dunvegan and Gordon Castle Muniments, the Forfeited Estates papers and Campbell of Breadalbane collection. Recruiting is analysed within the context of rapid socio-economic change. The emphasis is on tenant reactions to recruiting, and the study concludes that the upward pressure released by this process was a vital factor in bringing about change in the tenurial structure in the region. Both the decline of the tacksman and the emergence of crofting are linked to the process of regiment raising. Military recruiting involved a clear recognition on the part of Highland landlords and tenantry that the empire and the 'fiscal military state' offered alternative sources of revenue. Both groups 'colonised' various levels of the state's military machine. As a result of this close involvement, the government remained a vital influence in the area well after 1745, and a major player in the region's economy. Recruiting was not merely a residue of clanship, rather it was a form of commercial activity, analogous to kelping.

This thesis proposes that the Scottish past lived a double-life, both as history and as memory. This is archived through an analysis of the discourse of commemoration in Scotland, focusing on the commemorative representation of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, John Knox and the Scottish Reformation, as well as the seventeenth-century Covenanters. In common with other nations in Europe and further afield, Scottish civil society was adept at commemorating its past as a means of proving its national legitimacy in the present. Analysis of these practices shows that, far from the Scottish past being elided from discourses of Scottish national identity in the nineteenth century, collective memories of Wallace, Bruce, Knox and the Covenanters were invoked and deployed in order to assert Scotland’s historic independence and ‘nationality.’ Furthermore, whereas until recently, the tension between Scottishness and Britishness was seen as having undermined attempts to express a coherent and viable Scottish nationality at this time, collective memories of the legacies of Scotland’s national heroes were used to assert Scotland’s role as an equal, partner nation in the enterprise of Great Britain and the British Empire. At the core of this national memory was the concept of ‘civil and religious liberty,’ whereby the Scottish past was defined by the struggle for and achievement of civil and religious deliverance from the hands of tyranny. As each period had its own set of heroes whose efforts had returned Scotland to its true path of civil and religious liberty, so each hero had faced his or her own despot intent on undermining Scottish nationality: for Wallace and Bruce it had been the Plantagenet monarchy, for Knox and his fellow Reformers it was the Roman Catholic Church, and for the Covenanters it was the later Stuart kings. These victories were woven, implicitly and explicitly, into an unbroken narrative of civil and religious liberty, sustaining Scotland’s historic nationality.

The stated purpose of the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge was the establishment of charity schools which were complementary to statutory parochial schools in the Highland parishes of Scotland. The parochial schools were demonstrably unsuited for these parishes due to terrain, weather, infrastructure, the nature of settlement, and their vulnerability to the Catholic mission. Historians and commentators have tended to see the society through a cultural and linguistic lens, imputing to it the weak condition in which Gaelic finds itself today. A ban on teaching Gaelic literacy, which was not lifted until the 1760s, has been considered part of an overall strategy to eliminate Gaelic in the hopes of greater civilization in the Highlands. This perspective overlooks a broader significance of the society, which, as a corporation, extended charity beyond the landed classes and nobility, to the rising professions and also common labourers and tenants, through its use of the parishes to collect donations. It was also a sustained effort at establishing a joint-stock company in the wake of the Bank of Scotland and the Company of Scotland, and instituted transparent business practices to foster a reputation for financial probity. The moral aspect of its mission required good and pious behaviour from its teachers, for them to serve as an example for the schools’ communities and to persuade, rather than coerce, children to attend. The society was also very much of its time, with a role in a completion of the Reformation which was a common theme in contemporary religious and social circles. This completion was structural, with the Church of Scotland trying to secure its presbyterian establishment throughout the country, but also moral, with the Societies for Reformation of Manners in England and Scotland, and the Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge in England, building the legacy of the Reformation and the providential revolution through an encouragement of moral behaviour. These were private groups, however, and while the SPCK developed a channel for charitable activity for the rising professional and middle classes, the SSPCK worked to produce a national corporate effort to support reformation and education in the Highlands.

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