Introduction
Summary
The ‘Radical War’ – one name given to an attempted general rising in April 1820 – holds a prominent place in Scottish culture but an uneasy one in Scottish historiography. The only book-length exploration of the event, Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a'Ghobhainn's The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 (1970), offers an interpretation of it as both a serious rupture in Scottish society in the form of an insurrectionary attempt nourished by nationalist and class consciousness and as a piece of ‘hidden’ history which had been intentionally exorcized from Scottish historiography. In some quarters this interpretation has been challenged, but with the paradoxical effect of reducing the social and political tensions demonstrated by the event to ‘the futile revolt of a tiny minority’. A more recent investigation of the ‘Radical War’ within the wider context of the long eighteenth century, by C. A. Whately, has gone some way to marking out a different case for the significance of the event and acknowledges its disruptive effect, but unshackles it from some of the less supportable assertions of The Scottish Insurrection. Nevertheless, as Ellis points out in the new preface of the 2001 reprinted but unrevised edition of the book, it remains the only full-length published study of ‘the last major Scottish insurrection.’
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- The Spirit of the UnionPopular Politics in Scotland, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014