This volume emerges from a conference held at the University of Strathclyde in 2018 that sought to acknowledge the enormous contribution made by Allan Macinnes to the study of early modern Scottish, British, and European history. Macinnes, currently Emeritus Professor at Strathclyde, retired in 2014 and, we believed, there was an urgent need to celebrate his exceptional career while also reflecting on the significance of his scholarship. Doing so has allowed us to think deeply about the transformation of Scottish History as a discipline in the past half-century as well as the development of the early modern British historiographical landscape. Colleagues, friends, and former students of Macinnes were invited to consider, therefore, how he had influenced their work and in what ways they saw it as building on, or a response to, his research. The key theme that emerged in the essays that follow was the way in which Macinnes had emphasised the need to consider Scotland – or, indeed, other territorial units – comparatively and in an international context. How, in other words, had Scotland interacted with the wider world? As will soon become clear, the wide-ranging contributions to this volume reflect, indeed, a career spent collaborating fruitfully beyond Scotland's borders and taking Scottish History to a global audience.

The volume has, however, been delayed severely by a number of unforeseen circumstances – not least serious illness, bereavement, and the impact of COVID-19. It is with great pleasure, then, that we can finally thank the institutions and individuals that helped to make the conference such a success, and who have supported the volume to publication. For their generous financial support, we thank, firstly, the Scottish Historical Review Trust and the Economic and Social History Society of Scotland. For her organisational nous and good humour, we thank Rowena Hutton. For the memorable whisky-tasting that concluded the first day of the conference, we thank Kieran German. For the provision of whisky glasses and the design of commemorative glassware, we thank Campbell McClure and Glencairn Crystal. For his fantastic last-minute discussion of the ‘Ice Pick’ on the second day, we thank Stephen Mullen. For his own heartfelt note of thanks, we are grateful to Mike Russell MSP.

The purpose of this essay is to explore a major ideological shift performed by the preacher and polemicist Alexander Shields in his epic 700-page tome A Hind Let Loose, or, An Historical Representation of the Testimonies of the Church of Scotland, first printed in the Netherlands in 1687 and republished at Edinburgh in 1744 and Glasgow in 1770 and 1797. In this work Shields made a significant contribution to the shape of dissenting Presbyterian political thought in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States in the eighteenth century.

The subject engages with Macinnes's scholarship on two levels. It represents, first, a nod towards his unfulfilled undergraduate desire to study Shields at doctoral level. At our meetings Macinnes lamented how his own doctoral supervisors, Ian Cowan and Archie Duncan, had persuaded him to concentrate on the emergence of the Covenanting movement rather than the maintenance of the cause after the Restoration. While scholars may be curious to know how his own study might have played out, they are surely grateful for the research trajectory he pursued. Second, the essay picks up an idea first proffered in his essay on Covenanting ideology in the seventeenth century. Here Macinnes argued that the Covenanting movement was in fact two movements: a movement of power, from 1638; and a movement of protest, from 1660. This is perhaps an over-simplification of a far messier reality on the ground, but it remains the case that we know relatively little about the process by which Covenanting ideology shifted from underwriting the existence of a revolutionary regime to that of an atomised pressure group. Of course, the complexity of this shift cannot reasonably be covered here, so the essay will therefore focus specifically on the justification of what Shields termed ‘punitive force’; that is, the move by radical Presbyterian dissenters from defence to offence. It is argued here that this shift reflected the politics of religion at the local level in the Restoration period, providing a theoretical framework which vindicated violence resistance in the 1680s and the campaigning of future generations of dissidents seeking to imitate their ‘renowned Ancestors’.

Shields was born at Haughhead near Earlston, Berwickshire, in 1659 or 1660 to the tenant farmer James Shields.

Across a remarkable forty-year career that has continued apace since his retirement in 2014, Allan Macinnes has made a hugely significant contribution to Scottish, British and early modern historical scholarship. Across five monographs, nine edited books and innumerable essays and articles, Macinnes honed a distinctive style as a historian, renowned for his unrivalled coverage of Scottish and international archives and a take-no-prisoners approach to intellectual inquiry that recalled his days as a shinty player. This was later captured in the nickname he acquired among British historians in the early 1990s – Ice Pick – on account of his ‘direct’ style of engagement. Yet despite this fearsome reputation, Macinnes was also a committed teacher and advisor. As an early adopter of what is now accepted as an essential requirement of all professional historians – research-led teaching – he had incomparable success in producing a new generation of historians, many of whom remain active scholars today.

Macinnes was integral to the transformation of Scottish History as a discipline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In his own words, he sought to avoid what he perceived to be the excessive insularity and introspection of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries by emphasising comparative history and the promotion of Scottish History internationally. Much like his historical sparring partner Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, Macinnes has been comfortable operating in Scottish, British and overseas theatres. This has been reflected similarly in his many collaborations with early modernists in Europe and North America and in the wide-ranging contributions to this collection.

Evaluating Macinnes's wide-ranging scholarship is no easy task: any attempt to do so is liable to fall short when trying to fully capture its breadth and depth. Rather than auditing a prolific and ongoing publication record, then, we have opted instead to trace three fundamental elements of his work that also serve to illuminate the broader historiographical landscape of the last half-century, and which remain major interventions in Scottish and British historiography. These elements are: (i) the study of Scottish history in a comparative international context and a rejection of Anglocentrism in British history; (ii) the study of the Scottish Highlands without recourse either to sentimentalism or the over-privileging of governmental perspectives; and (iii) the study of political economy and Scottish commerce before and after the Treaty of Union.

Memory, and the processes by which individuals, groups or communities remember, represent or forget the past, has been a burgeoning field of study since the early 1990s. In 1992 the anthropologist James Fentress and historian Chris Wickham collaborated on a project which probed the concept of ‘social memory’. They sought to provide new perspectives on the past by considering how the philosophy and psychology of remembering contributed to the self-definition of such diverse societies as medieval Iceland and modern Brazil. Indeed, such geographical and chronological versatility has become a marked feature of memory studies. This work was followed in 1995 by a translation of a seminal article on collective memory and cultural identity by the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, which was originally published in 1988. Building on the markedly different approaches taken by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the art historian Aby Warburg earlier in the twentieth century, Assmann developed a theory of cultural memory that articulated the complex interaction between memory, culture and society. Since then, an avalanche of studies on memory has been produced by scholars across a range of academic disciplines. In fact, memory studies can claim quite persuasively to be a truly interdisciplinary exercise at a time when interdisciplinarity is much vaunted.

The study of memory has been of no less interest to historians of early modern England. Most notably, Daniel Woolf, Alexandra Walsham and Andy Wood are each identified with the exploration of early modern memory. Matthew Neufeld has also published on the legacy of the British civil wars for cultural memory in later Stuart England. This work drew a riposte from Edward Legon in his 2015 dissertation on seditious memories in England and Wales. Legon argued, quite rightly, that Neufeld over-privileged the royalist interpretation of events and assumed that those who supported the Stuarts were able to ‘invent’ the past with impunity after 1660. Yet both scholars approach the subject as if New British History had never happened. Where Ireland or Scotland fit into their picture is presently unclear.