Highlandisms: The Expanding Scope of Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies

Until quite recently, literary and historical studies of eighteenth-century Scotland have tended to focus on Scotland's relations with England, inadvertently downplaying the distinctive differences within Scotland between Highland and Lowland cultures. While few studies have ignored these differences entirely, the Highlands often surface uncannily for a few sentences here and there in discussions of a Scotland that is implicitly Lowland. At best, the Highlands are relegated to their own chapter as a special case in the already special case of post-Union Scotland, much as they have been relegated to the margins of Scottish studies as a subfield of an already relatively small, albeit growing, discipline. Kenneth McNeil's Scotland, Britain, Empire and Matthew Wickman's The Ruins of Experience counter this trend by taking the literature and culture of the Highlands as the focus of their studies, and by coining, apparently independently, the term "highlandism" to refer to the romanticization of the Scottish Highlands and Highlanders that began in the eighteenth century. Together, McNeil's and Wickman's books reveal that the tendency to neglect the Highlands as either inaccessible to or unworthy of scholarly analysis is itself a form of "highlandism" that we would do well to rectify.

Both Scotland, Britain, Empire and The Ruins of Experience grow out of studies of eighteenth-century Scottish literature and culture that explore the tensions between enlightenment and romance, or modernity and tradition, beginning with Peter Womack's Improvement and Romance (1989), and including, most recently, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (2004), a collection of essays edited by Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen. Scotland, Britain, Empire takes a postcolonial approach to highlandism, exploring the ethnographic assumptions informing the construction of Highlanders as at once familiar and exotic, self and other, British citizens and colonial subjects. McNeil builds on Katie Trumpener's and Janet Sorensen's explorations of the literary and linguistic relationships between Scotland and the wider British empire in Bardic Nationalism (1997) and The Grammar of Empire (2000) to demonstrate that these dualities placed the Highlands "at the very nexus between nation and empire" (3). While McNeil investigates highlandism's imbrications in British nationalism and imperialism, Wickman discusses the epistemological implications of highlandism for modernity. The Ruins of Experience traces highlandism through a variety of disciplines, including legal history, political economics, and critical theory, to show how the myth of the romantic Highlands devalued experiential forms of knowledge. Wickman argues that although Enlightenment writers' preference for probabilistic, juridical knowledge marginalized witness testimony to the Highlands, experiential knowledge continues to haunt enlightened modernity. The Ruins of Experience thus complements Mary Poovey's History of the Modern Fact (1998) by investigating "what happened to those modes of knowledge that were displaced by factuality" (xi). While I will concentrate here primarily on those aspects of McNeil's and Wickman's books that are likely to interest scholars of the eighteenth century, both writers reveal that the questions raised by the writings about the eighteenth-century Scottish Highlands echo across centuries and around the globe.

Scotland, Britain, Empire foregrounds the various conflicting ways in which the Highlands and Highlanders were implicated in the construction of both Scotland's and Britain's identities and in the formation of Romanticism between the mid eighteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries. McNeil corroborates Hugh Trevor-Roper's argument, in The Invention of Tradition (1983), by showing how, during the late eighteenth century, Lowland Scots began to appropriate Highland customs, creating a distinctive Scottish identity in post Union Britain. However, McNeil points out that this appropriation did not prevent Lowland writers from representing Highlanders as savages, emphasizing their difference from civilized, modern Britons, and their similarity to Britain's imperial subjects in India and elsewhere. This double vision of Highlanders, according to...