Boss: The First of Hanoverian Scotland’s Three Great Satraps—the Earl of Ilay

This is an important publication from more than one point of view. It sums up Roger L. Emerson’s extensive work on the man Scots historians usually refer to simply as Ilay and on the central role he played in the political and cultural life of Scotland in the early Scottish Enlightenment. Ilay, who, in 1743, at the age of sixty-three, succeeded his elder brother to become the third Duke of Argyll and Chief of Clan Campbell, was a machine politician whose power in a quasi-autonomous Scotland was based on patronage, and whose considerable clout with the central British government in Westminster was based on his ability to control the return of a phalanx of MPs who could be relied upon to support government measures. He was in many ways disconcertingly akin to Mayor Richard J. Daley, “Hizzoner,” who ruled Chicago with a rod of iron for twenty-one years and was taken very seriously by American presidents, especially John F. Kennedy, whom he obliged by rigging the vote in Cook County to give Kennedy his extremely narrow 1960 election win. Ilay, though a great prince of the Celtic periphery, the Gaedhealtacht, was never quite so influential.

Roger Emerson is an American who moved to a post in a Canadian university. From 1979, he began to produce articles on the history of science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment. He never was a political historian, as he himself says. However, he always was a cultural historian and an institutional historian with an increasingly prosopographical approach. From the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh he progressed to studies of the physical and medical sciences in the Scottish universities with some emphasis on their professoriates. From there he was drawn to studying the patterns of politics and patronage that had governed specific appointments, and to examining the first of the three political bosses who dominated the politics of eighteenth century Scotland, Ilay.

At this point, as he explains in a section at the start of this book, Emerson inadvertently joined a revisionist school of historians of Scotland, some of the best of whom were, like Emerson, American. These scholars were rescuing the history of eighteenth-century Scotland after 1707 from almost total historical neglect, apart from an obsessive cultivation of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Until about 1980, twentieth-century historians of Scotland were as obsessed with those two years as their Irish equivalents, at least in the Republic, were with 1798–1800. One historian, the Northern Irishwoman, Edith Mary Johnston, who assumed that the rest of the eighteenth century in Ireland was the history of a typical European Ancien Régime worth studying in its own terms, had to go to the antipodes to secure a chair, despite having written two excellent books.¹ Much the same problem of unfashionability faced the new wave of often very bright postgraduates who rediscovered the political and cultural history of eighteenth-century Scotland, which Emerson sees as a semi-independent polity. Richard Sher, the author of two massively important works on, respectively, the Moderate Literati, and on book culture in Enlightenment Scotland, did find a post in New Jersey, but Alex Murdoch had a long struggle to find, at last, an appropriate position commensurate with the quality of his early book, and John Shaw, who really should have had an academic career, could not get launched, and to the great advantage of other scholars, including Roger Emerson, entered the archival profession, where he still managed to publish important work.² On the other hand, Richard Scott’s important 1982 work on politics and administration in Scotland, 1725–28, remains an unpublished Edinburgh PhD thesis.³

One of the main problems facing anyone trying to carve a career out of recreating the lost political life of eighteenth-century Scotland was the almost total indifference of the great Sir Lewis Namier to...