Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire (review)

This is a slightly odd book. It comes out as part of an Early American Studies series, which has the usual American nationalist undertones in its reference to ‘our’ colonial, revolutionary and early national history and culture. Imperial historians like this reviewer tend to look on the pre-1775 white settler colonies which later formed the original United States as colonial British North America, and their material and intellectual culture at the time of the Revolution was certainly more emphatically British or rather English than it ever had been. Another and more significant bias is implicit in the Series self – definition which stresses reinterpretation of old themes in ‘fresh’ ways and the fact that its books are ‘interdisciplinary in character’. In the hands of a major historian with a strong theme this can be wonderfully refreshing, but when everyone is supposed to do it, the results can be somewhat forced, as is the case here. The author has done a lot of solid work on printed and manuscript sources, but the overall thesis is deeply flawed and the quality of thought and prose is not high enough to compensate for basic defects.

The thesis is as follows: the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 was a crisis not only for Britain but also for the entire British Empire. The Jacobite Highlanders were denigrated as rebels, papists and savages and this (largely false) image was used to ‘legitimate’ the violence of the Hanoverian government’s brutal campaign against them. There is the awkward point that the colonies were remarkably uninvolved in the ’45, though one might point out that there was widespread colonial rejoicing, including celebratory bonfires in Williamsburg Virginia, when the Stuarts went down to final defeat at Culloden. Nevertheless, the Plank thesis is that there was rising paranoia in what even he admits in connection with his earlier work on the expulsion of the Acadians from the Canadian Maritimes in 1755, was a ramshackle Hanoverian monarchy. Paranoia was rooted in fear of a perceived global conspiracy of Jacobites and other ‘savages’ such as American Indian peoples. As a result of this paranoia and his military achievement, the Duke of Cumberland became a popular hero on both sides of the Atlantic, and was able to mobilise unprecedented populist support for the maintenance of peacetime military establishments which he and his henchmen deployed in the Scottish Highlands, the Mediterranean and North America. Once installed in this newly militarised empire, and driven by a self-righteous conviction that ‘a free people cannot oppress’, the Duke’s officers became Britain’s most influential and uncompromising imperialists. By this time warning bells should be ringing in any sensible reader’s head. On the principle that deconstruction is one of the most useful tools devised by radical modern historians, especially when applied, as it must be, to them, one can use the technique to see where Plank is coming from, or where one suspects he feels he has to be seen coming from to survive in the bizarre world of the humanities in American academe. Insufferable self-righteousness and ownership of Liberty are two of the traits that the fathers of the American republic took over and exaggerated from their originally English Whig political culture. Iraq is only the latest monument to a propensity towards forcing people to be ‘free’, and the latest Iraq war cannot have been absent from Plank’s consciousness. Then there is the more basic imperative to depict all dead white men and especially Anglicans or adherents of the Kirk by Law Established as tyrants, genderists, specieists, bigots and above all imperialists (I offer a traditional British grovelling apology should I have missed any other mandatory category). The trouble is that there is a predecessor on the primrose path Plank is treading in the shape of another American, Stephen Saunders Webb whose first book The Governors-General (Williamsburg, 1979) suggested that Cromwell and Marlborough’s...