Introduction: Loyalty and Identity

Abstract

The study of Jacobitism is at a crossroads. From the 1970s, when Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill re-established it as a serious area of research, the main emphasis among those who work on Jacobitism has been on its disruption of the prevailing trends of the contemporary societies of the British Isles through risings, conspiracies, riots, seditious words and a language of dissidence that resonated in literature, song, art, glass and textiles. This new research disrupted a traditional historiography which in response has generally sought to ignore rather than counter it. The traditional view identified Jacobitism not as a real threat to the stability of the British kingdoms, but rather as a defiant pose that never translated into a coherent ideological alternative, a marginal politics outside the social, religious and political mainstream. To be a Jacobite was to be a backward-looking absolutist rather than a forward-looking Briton.