Abstract
William Guthrie’s political career started in the same political milieu in which Thomas Salmon’s reached its fruition. While Guthrie had been a hack writer for the Gentleman’s Magazine in the late 1730s with Samuel Johnson, he achieved notoriety writing in the Old England Journal, which was the most prominent patriot periodical in the early 1740s, opposing first Walpole and then the succeeding governments. A collection of essays from that journal (some of which were by Guthrie) was reprinted as A Collection of Letters Publish’d in Old England (1743), cashing in on the succès de scandal caused by the imprisonment of the printer. Guthrie was soon silenced by a pension from the government.2
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Notes
For discussions of this, see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Part III;
Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
and many of the essays in Stewart Brown, ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
See Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: the Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), pp. 9–11; and Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 253, n. 3.
See Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, pp. 253–8 for a discussion of this work. It was praised at the time by Henry Fielding in The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, W.B. Colley, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 177 and 196.
On military valour and modern luxury in Scottish Enlightenment thought, see John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: Donald, 1985); and idem, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment and the Limits of the Civic Tradition’, in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds, Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 137–78.
For Scottish Enlightenment fears of Empire, see Sher, Church and University, pp. 271–2. The more widespread fears about empire intruding into political discussion are chronicled in Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 237, 246–8 and 277;
and Peter Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Chs. 3 and 4.
I discuss the sources Guthrie used below. Commentaries on stadial theory include: Knud Haakonssen, The Science of the Legislator: the Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ch. 7;
H.M. Höpfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (1978), pp. 19–40; and Michael Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and Individualism’, in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue, pp. 317–43.
See Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Fania Oz-Salzberger, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 116–18.
David Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of Arts and Sciences’, in his Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, Eugene Miller, ed., 2nd edn. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987), pp. 111–37 at p. 121.
See Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Providence and Progress: an Introduction to the Historical Thought of William Robertson’, in Brown, ed., Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, pp. 55–73; and David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), Ch. 4.
See P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982).
W. Gordon East, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Geographer. William Guthrie of Brechin’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 72 (1956), pp. 32–7; summary assessment on p. 37.
On this intellectual stance more generally, see Michael Kugler, ‘Provincial Intellectuals: Identity, Patriotism, and Enlightened Peripheries’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 37 (1996), pp. 156–73.
Colin Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the Nature of Eighteenth-Century British Patriotisms’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 361–82.
This continuity in political thought which is reflected in the politics of geography is discussed by J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760–1790: (ii) Empire, Revolution and the End of Early Modernity’, in J.G.A. Pocock et al., eds, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 283–317.
See Sher, Church and University, for the Scottish Enlightenment; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 274–94, for English Whig political language; and Frank O’Gorman The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1967) for the parliamentary Whigs.
William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 161.
See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 33–5 and 88–90.
See A.A. Wilcock, ‘“The English Strabo”: the Geographical Publications of John Pinkerton’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 61 (1974), pp. 35–45, at pp. 36–8; and Pinkerton, Correspondence, II 229–30.
A similar trajectory can be traced in the political thought of Edward Gibbon: see David Womersley, ‘Gibbon’s Unfinished History: the French Revolution and English Political Vocabularies’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 63–89.
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© 2000 Robert J. Mayhew
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Mayhew, R.J. (2000). The Scottish Enlightenment and British Geography (I): Guthrie and Pinkerton, c.1770–1802. In: Enlightenment Geography. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595491_9
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