La reconstruction du passé anglo-écossais par les premiers historiens whigs de l’Union (1707)

• Main Author: Yannick Deschamps
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 2017-12-01
• Series: XVII-XVIII
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/1718/914

Contrary to other early eighteenth-century historians, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), Abel Boyer (1667-1729) and Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (1676-1755) deal at length with Anglo-Scottish relations before the Union of 1707. Whigs and unionists, these authors are inclined to blacken the pre-unionist Anglo-Scottish past so as to underline the better the necessity for a rapprochement between England and Scotland. While they sometimes fall into the methodological traps warned against by Herbert Butterfield, they achieve a truly Whig interpretation of the Anglo-Scottish past, which assigns a central role to the concept of liberty, although it differs from the Victorian Whig-Liberal interpretation of that past on account of the importance it attributes to Providence.