Ebook: Recovering Scottish History: John Hill Burton and Scottish National Identity in the Nineteenth Century

The making of the historian who transformed Scottish history and the nation’s understanding of its past

• Presents a revision of the predominant historiographic interpretation of nineteenth century Scotland
• Traces the re-emergence of the 1707 Union as a historical issue of contemporary relevance in the context of the Scottish Rights agitation of the 1850s
• Highlights Burton’s role in transmitting the work of David Hume and Jeremy Bentham to the Victorian age
• Based on primary sources, particularly the extensive, and largely neglected, Burton archive in the National Library of Scotland

Providing a reassessment of John Hill Burton, a significant figure in 19th-century Scottish thought, this book revises the predominant historiographic interpretation of nineteenth-century Scotland. It traces Burton’s remarkably diverse social and intellectual acquaintance, and equally varied literary endeavours, from his early life and education in 1820s Aberdeen to his increasingly prominent profile in the Edinburgh of Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey and Henry Cockburn.

A detailed assessment of Burton’s History of Scotland (1873) uncovers major themes which are then related to his formative experiences in the social and cultural world of his time. This analysis – and an examination of the enthusiastic reception of the work at home and abroad – overturn orthodox assumptions of the ‘death’ of Scottish history in the 19th century.