Marion Amblard

Université Grenoble Alpes, ILCEA4 & Pléiade

Impressions d’Écosse : les représentations de l’espace littoral dans les tableaux de William McTaggart.

Les Highlands sont une importante source d’inspiration pour les peintres de l’école écossaise dont les œuvres s’inscrivent dans le courant romantique. Horatio McCulloch (1805-1867) est l’un des premiers à s’être spécialisé dans la représentation de paysages sauvages et montagneux des Highlands et, pendant près d’un demi-siècle, son succès incite nombre d’artistes écossais à suivre son exemple. Ensemble, ces paysagistes contribuent à ancrer dans les esprits la synecdoque Highlands/Écosse sur laquelle repose alors l’identité nationale pro-unioniste. Ces représentations de l’Écosse sont toutefois contestées par plusieurs artistes dès la fin des années 1860, tout d’abord par le groupe de peintres désormais connu sous le nom de Glasgow Boys, puis par William McTaggart (1835-1910), à partir des années 1880.

Originaire de la péninsule de Kintyre, cet artiste ouvre son atelier à Édimbourg mais, tout au long de sa carrière, il retourne régulièrement sur la côte ouest de l’Écosse pour y peindre les paysages et le quotidien des communautés de pêcheurs. L’histoire des Highlands, l’exode massif des habitants de la région, le retour du Highlander dans son village natal après une longue absence, les jeux des enfants issus des communautés de pêcheurs et le dur labeur de leurs parents, sont des sujets récurrents dans son œuvre.

Cette communication s’intéresse aux différentes manières dont McTaggart a peint l’espace littoral de la côte ouest de l’Écosse et a pour ambition de montrer que ces œuvres peuvent être perçues comme marquant l’évolution de la représentation de l’identité culturelle écossaise dans la peinture de paysage.

Marion Amblard est maître de conférences en civilisation britannique à l’Université Grenoble Alpes. Fellow de la Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, elle est membre des laboratoires de l’ILCEA4 et de Pléiade. Ses recherches portent essentiellement sur l’art pictural écossais depuis le XVIIIe siècle ainsi que sur les échanges culturels et artistiques entre l’Écosse et l’Europe continentale. Elle s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux liens entre l’Écosse, la France et l’Italie au cours du long XVIIIe siècle.

 

Thomas Archambaud

University Of Glasgow

The whale and the elephant coalesced in one: Scottish kin-based networks of trade, science and diplomacy on the coast of Coromandel and the Malaysian peninsula, c. 1770-c. 1790

This paper examines the transnational networks of Scottish trade in south-eastern Asia between 1770 and 1790. More specifically, it focuses on the activities of Scottish merchants and navy officers in southeast Asia from the war with the American colonies in the 1770s to the outbreak of the French Revolution in the 1790s. The objective of this paper is to investigate the activities of Scottish East India Company and private traders involved on the coast of Coromandel and the Malay Peninsula.

Based on the correspondence of two Scots, the governor-general of Bengal Sir John Macpherson and the Madras governor Archibald Campbell of Inverneill, this paper uncovers the coastal experiences and maritime strategies of Scots involved in the development of Sino-Indian trade. At a time of conflict in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, Scottish private traders adopted ad hoc arrangements, often on the verge of legality. Using French and Dutch neutral ports, they created transnational firms and collaborated with French ship-owners, such as the Admyrault family in La Rochelle, to carry British goods under Frech flags and avoid customs during the war with America in the 1770s. This neutral ground strategy extended to the EIC in the 1780s, as shown by the example of the Scottish officer Charles Cathcart, working as intermediary between the king of Siam and the Bengal presidency in the 1780s. Cathcart’s close acquaintance with the Compagnie des Indes further demonstrates the ability of Scots to utilise their kin-based networks on the global stage. Another example of Scottish and European financing is the Macpherson post-clanship network in London, Madras and Penang and the role played by Sir John Macpherson and Col. Allan Macpherson in country trade, and opium in particular. Finally, the paper will demonstrate how the creation of the Calcutta botanical gardens by Col. Robert Kyd under the patronage of his compatriot Macpherson fostered trade across the Golf of Bengal, the China Sea and Malacca.

Revisiting the opposition between Empires of the sea and the land, represented by the whale and the elephant respectively (Armitage, 2011), this paper looks at how Scots used coastlines as contact zones for the economic and territorial development on Britain’s maritime economy. Rather than opposing Britain’s maritime supremacy (whale) to France’s territorial power (the elephant), this paper reevaluates the role of Scottish interlopers in promoting forms of trans-imperial cooperation and defending a flexible commercial monopoly on south-Asian coastlines.

Thomas Archambaud has completed his doctorate at the University of Glasgow in September 2024 co-supervised with the Centre Roland Mousnier (Université Paris-Sorbonne). His dissertation, entitled ‘Literary agents, patronage brokers and imperial administrators: the Macphersons and ancien régime global Empire in America and India’, examines the integration of the Macphersons into the British Empire, and the East India Company in particular, from the end of the Seven Years’ War to the eve of the French Revolution. His research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Scottish Historical Review Trust.

 

Ugo Bruschi

University of Bologna

The Legacy of Darién in 1690s and 1700s Scottish Political and Constitutional Discourse

Scotland has between over 6,000 and nearly 12,000 miles of coastline, depending on whether one counts the islands, or not. In the past, the Scottish coastline acquired also, at times, a political dimension – e.g., as the landing point of feared or hoped-for Jacobite forces. Still, the coast that was the scene of events that possibly contributed in engendering the longest-lasting transformation in modern Scottish history lay approximately 5,000 miles away from the mainland and was only for a very short span of time under Scottish control. The Gulf of Darién, on the isthmus of Panama, witnessed the ill-fated and short-lived attempt of Scotland to create its own colony between 1698 and 1700. It was an experience that ended soon in failure, but its legacy had an enduring effect on Scottish political and constitutional history. Disappointment and bitterness over the behaviour of England and of William III during the Darién crisis jeopardized a significant portion of the support that the Revolution Settlement had enjoyed up to that moment north of the border. On the other hand, the shock for the disastrous end of Scotland’s attempt to enter transoceanic markets independently was among the factors that contributed to the process that led to the Union between Scotland and England in 1707, a marriage of convenience in which, while the English aimed at securing the Protestant succession in both countries, the Scots desired to secure an entry to the vast markets dominated by their neighbours. Analysing the role that, in the years following its tragic failure, the legacy of the Darién scheme played in the public sphere is the aim of this paper. In particular, attention will be paid at how political discourse employed the memory of Darién, at times resulting in anti-English and anti-Williamite feelings, while at other times building from that failure an argument for a stronger union. The paper will also discuss to what extent the shadow of Darién was a factor in the negotiations and debates that led to the Act of Union.

 

Ugo Bruschi PhD FRHistS is an historian who works at the University of Bologna. He has published extensively on the dynamics of power in the late medieval and early modern period. The development of the British constitution in the long 18th century has long been his main area of research. He is a member of various learned societies in the UK, France, Italy and the USA.

 

Daphné Cousin-Martin

Université de Rouen

An investigation of coastal associations in Val McDermid’s crime novel The Distant Echo.

Archaeological imagination has been applied to investigating inWelsh crime fiction (Ippendorf, 2023); extractive industries in novels by Fife-born crime fiction writer Ian Rankin have been previously discussed (Leishman, 2010). Fife, Scotland, is a land of coalfields and mines but it also boasts a coastal path with a view onto the sea and the Firth of Forth, with its water-related activities.

The 2003 crime fiction novel The Distant Echo written by Kirkcaldy-born Val McDermid begins in St Andrews, a town named after the patron saint of fishermen. Today, golf tourism and university studies are also synonymous with St Andrews. In The Distant Echo, plot and characters evolve close to the area called ‘the East Neuk of Fife’, famous for its traditional fishing villages and coastal tourism. In this novel, fishing takes over from digging. Drawing on a wide range of approaches such as ecopoetics, literature, cognitive linguistics and translation studies, this paper aims at exploring a coastal stylistic network in McDermid’s The Distant Echo, an echo that actually resonates with McDermid’s 2020 Still Life. This paper demonstrates how Val McDermid, navigating past and present, reality and fiction, literal and figurative, uses maritime and fishing associations to create a sense of place while playfully manipulating fishing metaphors to narrate the crime, investigation and resolution processes –stabbing is gutting, ‘to fish for clues’. Moreover, maritime associations metaphorically shape the movement of the narrative - waves of accusations, thinking someone is ‘off the hook’ but actually is not. Interestingly, the main characters are neither sailors nor fishermen, but four St Andrews university students from Kirkcaldy, and police officers in the 1970s. The former students later lead different lives, sometimes far from Scotland, and the police officers benefiting from new technologies reopen the 1970s unsolved murder case. The second part of this paper considers the relationship between Fife’s historical-social environment, place and language through the lens of conceptual associations. Indeed, idioms and synesthetic utterances show that characters may think of others or themselves in terms of coastal animals or ships, emotions or words in terms of the sea’s movements and related activities, social relationships in terms of fishing.

Daphné Cousin-Martin holds a PhD from Rouen University. Her thesis deals with the translation of hearing and touch in Scottish crime fiction, with a focus on orality, agency and synesthesia. She now teaches translation and general English (M1, M2) at Caen University, France.

 

Kathleen H.B. Cowe

St Combs: a Scottish fishing community  – Continuity and Change

I would like to present a coastal community in the far North-East of Aberdeenshire, which has remained true to its traditions and culture, unlike so many erstwhile communities which have been fundamentally changed by incomers seeking picturesque seaside villages for their holiday homes.

St Combs, and the other two adjacent fishing villages, between the major fishing ports of Fraserburgh and Peterhead, were, and to some extent still are, bastions of the local Protestant religion and its concomitant tradition of temperance.  An annual temperance walk accompanied by a flute band, is held in each village, and though less elaborate than in the past, is still a highlight for the participating villagers. 

There were plans in the 1960’s to build an hotel with a licence to sell alcohol.  This was met by huge resistance by the local community and the numerous protests and legal actions against the putative owners  were widely covered by the local newspapers, often with an ironic view of this heroic resistance to the modern world!

In the end, the licenced hotel was in fact built and over the years became popular and indeed a village institution. Yet, after the covid crisis, the owner suddenly pulled the whole hotel down - to the same local  consternation as had been present in the village at the time of the protests.  St Combs now looks the same as before: solid granite houses down towards the bents and the magnificent beach, and no shops apart from the post office and ice cream shop.

I am interested in looking at this coastal community in terms of continuity and change.  Families are still  linked by fishing, customs, traditions, the local dialect (Doric) and the same surnames. St Combs, and the other Knuckle villages are still recognisably themselves, whereas Gardenstown  or Pennan further round the coast, (and certainly Skye) are clearly tourist destinations.  Are there any parallels with Charente-Maritime fishing villages??

My father came from St Combs and my M.Litt dissertation (2022) at the Elphinstone Institute of Aberdeen University was about this topic.  I will include some interviews with local informants. Kathleen H.B.Cowe B.A.(hons) Dip. Ed., Dip TEB (dist), M.Litt (com). I am an English teacher/trainer in Düsseldorf, with my own company. Clients have included companies and universities. My M.Litt in 2022 was in Ethnology, Folklore and Ethnomusicology.

 

Edwige Camp-Pietrain

Université Polytechnique des Hauts-de-France, Valenciennes

Crown estate properties on the Scottish coast under devolution: political and economic issues

Scotland’s seabed, and half of its foreshore, belong to the Crown estate. These properties used to be run by a UK-wide commission, without much Scottish control. Devolution to Scotland’s devolved institutions, requested by multi-party commissions, was granted in 2016. However, even though politicians from most persuasions have been committed to land reform, the Crown estate retains its distinctive legal status. SNP governments have widened its aims, so as to involve local communities and to include environmental issues. But profits, which have been soaring thanks to renewable energies, remain a priority.

This paper, based on parliamentary sources, deals with the administration and the revenues of Crown estate properties on the Scottish coast. It contends that although local control has been growing, many issues remain unsettled.

Edwige Camp-Pietrain is a Professor of British politics and society at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France (Valenciennes). Her research focuses on contemporary Scotland, ie politics, institutions and devolved public policies. She has published extensively on these topics.

 

Rémy Duthille

Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Seaweed and the Scottish Enlightenement: a study of Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (1791-1799)

This paper is concerned with aspects of the environmental, social and economic concerns of the Scottish literati in the second part of the eighteenth century. It tries to connect intellectual history and recent trends in environmental history by examining how seaweed, and especially kelp, was an abiding concern of the local elites and of a major actor of the practical,  ‘improving’ drive at the core of the Scottish Enlightenment. Sinclair’s massive Statistical Account will discussed in the context of other discussions of seashore management, including articles like ‘varech’ in Diderot, d’Alembert and Jaucourt’s Encyclopédie (vol.16, p.839b, 1765) and Scottish encyclopaedic ventures.

Sir John Sinclair’s 22-volume Statistical account of Scotland, drawn up from the communications of the ministers of the different parishes was published in Edinburgh from 1791 to 1799. The Old Statistical Account, as it is known, starts with “Queries drawn up for the purpose of elucidating the Natural History and political State of Scotland”; about a fifth of them concern the resources and management of the sea and seashores. The returns from dozens of parishes give a wealth of information on a variety of matters including the local lexicon of seaweed (‘tangle’, ‘ware’…), legal practices (the right to seaweed and wreck found between low ebb and high tide), health issues (toxic gas emanating from kelp) and the management of coastal estates.

Particular attention was paid to kelp, a variety of seaweed that was commonly collected along the shores of many parts of Scotland to be burnt into alkali and later used in the manufacture of soap and glass. Kelp-gathering (or ‘kelping’, a term attested in 1822) could be an emblem of the ‘four stages’ of human evolution dear to Scottish literati. It was both an ancient practice and an asset for modernizing improvers keen to rationalize natural resources in the process of the Highland Clearances. Kelp was both intensely local and enmeshed in geopolitical conflicts, since the market for kelp boomed during the Napoleonic wars under the protection of tariff duties, only to go bust because of massive imports of cheaper Spanish barilla. The examination of Sinclair’s Account reveals a large consensus over the need for improvement, but also anxieties about the decline and dangers faced by the Scottish seashores.

Rémy Duthille is Professor in British studies at Université Bordeaux Montaigne. His work bears on British radical ideology and sociability, from about 1760 to 1850. His recent habilitationsschrift bore on the celebration of revolution by English and Scottish activists from 1789 to 1848, including the Revolution of 1688-1689, the three French Revolutions and several uprisings in Europe. Rémy is moving into Scottish history, the Scottish Enlightenment and increasingly looking at nineteenth-century visions of the eighteenth century.

 

 

Gabrielle Fath

University of Limerick

The ‘Cailleach’ and coastlines in Iain Crichton Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s poetry and fiction

In the Gaelic literary tradition, the figure of the old woman, or Cailleach, has been a literary archetype since the early Irish period, in poems like the “Lament of the Old Woman of Beare” in which sea metaphors are employed to signify the passing of time. In twentieth-century Scottish Gaelic literature, the legacy was continued in the works of many writers of the period, most significantly, Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn, (known in English as Iain Crichton Smith). In his works, older women often occupy a liminal role, between past and present, as well as land and sea, in the insular context of Lewis, where Iain Crichton Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn was raised.

Through a selection of poetic and prose works in which the motif of the Cailleach appears, this paper will investigate the ways in which sea imagery is used to describe women’s ageing, particularly through the image of the coastline, as a symbolic edge between past, present and future. Firstly, sea imagery reflects the passing of time, as older women are symbols of the past, separated from younger generations. However, the coastline is also a space of contact, which allows the author to reflect on older women’s roles in cultural transmission to younger generations. Finally, as symbolised by coastlines, one can view older women as liminal figures in Crichton Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn’s works more generally, as they are caught between traditional Gaelic culture and modernity.

This paper will draw on existing scholarship on Iain Crichton Smith/Mac a’ Ghobhainn (Jean Berton, 2010; Moray Watson, 2004), in Gaelic and Scottish studies (Meg Bateman & John Purser, 2020), as well as in ageing studies (Schrage-Früh & O’Neill, 2017).

Gabrielle Fath is a PhD student at the University of Limerick, where she researches the representation of women’s ageing in post-war short fiction by writers from Ireland and Scotland. She was awarded the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship by Research Ireland for the project, co-supervised by Dr. Michaela Schrage-Früh and Dr. Philippe Laplace.

 

Julie Gay

Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale

“We are still here upon the water side”: Terraqueous Shores and “Blue” Coastscapes in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Fiction.

In his famous essay “A Gossip on Romance”, Robert Louis Stevenson explains that he is particularly interested in “the fitness of events and places” and describes his creative process as a constant attempt to “fit” places with “the proper story”. Among the few types of places he mentions, coastal and terraqueous ones feature prominently, as he evokes “low rocks that reach into deep soundings” which “particularly torture and delight [him]”, as well as “coasts” that seem “set apart for shipwreck” (233-4). More than just background settings for the action, these transitional “waterside chronotopes” (Cohen 648) seem to take on an active role in Stevenson’s creative process but also in his narratives’ plots, fostering action, encounters and transformations. Within the framework of “inclusive” blue humanities and in line with Steve Mentz’s call for the development of a “poetics of planetary waters”, this paper thus aims to understand the central place held by littoral spaces and shores in Stevenson’s fiction, as well as their function within the narratives and more generally within Stevenson’s poetics. Focusing in particular on “The Pavilion on the Links”, “The Merry Men” and The Master of Ballantrae, I shall analyse how the liminality of terraqueous spaces such as “links”, swamps or “Roost”, where the boundary between sea and land is blurred, leads to the development of an all-encompassing sense of confusion which not only affects the place’s topography and geology but also comes to bear on its inhabitants, and even seeps into the narratives’ form and aesthetics. I will focus in particular on the sonic dimension of this coastal poetics, and on the way the author’s synesthetic focus on sound as much as on vision enables him to create eminently haunting“coastscapes”, i.e. coastal landscapes and soundscapes, for his fiction.

Julie Gay is a senior lecturer in British literature at the Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale and a member of the research team HLLI. She completed her PhD at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne in 2019 under the supervision of Nathalie Jaëck, and she holds the French “Agrégation”. She explores the relationship between space and literary form at the turn of the 19th century, focusing on authors such as R.L. Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and H. G.Wells. Her thesis was recently published with L’Harmattan Editions under the title L’île dans la literature d’aventures victorienne : Explorations insulaires et renouveau littéraire à la « Fin de siècle », and was awarded the SELVA book prize. She has also published several articles in peer-reviewed journals as well four chapters in collective volumes by Brill Publishers, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Paradigmes Editions and in the Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad (2024), and she has coedited the latest issue of the online Journal E-Rea, entitled “Shifting lines in Travel Writing”.

 

Katie Garner

University of St Andrews

Title: Resounding Myths in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, 1800-1900

The Gulf of Corryvreckan (coire bhreacain), between the islands of Jura and Scarba on Scotland’s west coast, is home to the third largest whirlpool in the world. Its turbulent and dangerous waters have attracted many mythical stories, including the Older Scots tale that it was a favoured spot for the Cailleach, a weather spirit taking the form of an old woman or hag, to wash her great plaid in a process that marked the beginning of Scotland’s winter. The nineteenth century saw other legendary water creatures take up residence in the deep of the whirlpool itself; firstly, the mermaid, in John Leyden’s ballad of the same name (1802), included in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and secondly, the kelpie, or water horse, in Charles Mackay’s ‘The Kelpie of Corrivreckan’ (1851). The inclusion of a whirlpool referred to as a ‘minor Corie Vrekin’ in Jane Porter’s historical novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810) indicates how writing that preceded Walter Scott’s Waverley novels played an important part in saturating Scotland’s historical waters with newer-formed myths. 

Recognising the Corryvreckan whirlpool as an extraordinarily rich site for waterlore, this paper will investigate the relationship between scientific developments in sounding the bathymetrical profile of the whirlpool site in the nineteenth century and the establishment and circulation – or resounding – of new myths. Folklore, with its connections to superstition, is often seen as the antithesis to modern science, new data about water depth and the underwater profile of the Gulf of Corryvrekan may have encouraged further folkloric tales about Corryvreckan, rather than dampened interest – despite claims that by 1880 ‘Coryvreckan ha[d] had many of its horrors dispelled by a careful examination’. Drawing on poetry, novels, travel writing, and geological and oceanographic discussions in contemporary periodicals, this chapter uses the whirlpool as a case study for examining the complex relationship between the study of Scottish waters and myth.

Dr Katie Garner is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her work on Scotland’s coasts has received support from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Carnegie Trust. She edited John Keats and Romantic Scotland (with Nicholas Roe, 2022) and is the author of a recent article on the mysterious Caithness mermaid of 1809. With Asha Hornsby, she is editing a collection entitled Sounding Scotland’s Waters, 1800-1900: Literature, History, Science, which brings together literary scholars, linguists, marine biologists and geographers to study the complexities of Scotland’s waters in the nineteenth century.

 

 

Clément Guézais

Université d'Artois

Dangers d’écueils, rencontre des vents, incertitude et sables mouvants : La carte écossaise du géographe Nicolas de Nicolay

C’est en 1583 que s’éteint Nicolas de Nicolay ; navigateur, soldat, érudit et géographe du roi de France Henri II. Il a juste eu le temps de publier son dernier ouvrage : La navigation duy Roy d’Escosse Jacques Cinquiesme du nom autour de son Royaume, & Isles Hebrides, & Orchades, soubz la conduicte d’Alexandre Lyndsay, excellent Pilote Escossois. Dans l’introduction de son texte, Nicolas de Nicolay raconte avoir pu mettre la main, en 1546, sur un document remarquable : une authentique carte marine de l’Écosse, fiable et précise, établie à la suite de la navigation du roi d’Écosse Jacques V autour de son propre royaume. À en croire Nicolay, c’est grâce à ce document qu’une flotte française a été capable d’assiéger avec succès le château de St Andrews en 1547, alors occupé par les meurtriers protestants du cardinal Beaton (auxquels se joint un certain John Knox).

Le texte de Nicolas de Nicolay constitue une remarquable plongée dans la représentation de l’Écosse du point de vue français au XVIe siècle. L’ouvrage, outre la célébration auto-satisfaite de son auteur, contient effectivement une des premières représentations cartographique moderne précise d’une région du monde encore mal connue. Ce n’est pas tout. À l’exploration méticuleuse des lignes côtières de l’Écosse s’ajoute un texte qui traduit l’étendue des connaissance de Nicolas de Nicolay. Le géographe avait accès à la somme des savoirs accumulés depuis l’Antiquité relative à l’Écosse : Tacite, Ptolémée, John Major et Hector Boece sont cités. À la fois érudit et sensationnaliste, son récit propose une étonnante synthèse : il est à la fois précis et factuel, tout en véhiculant son lot de légendes et de récits fantasques, ainsi que certains des tropes écossais les plus tenaces (notamment la dimension irrémédiablement « double » du pays). L’inventaire des fleuves, des caps, des îles et des péninsules suit de près les témoignages relatifs aux sauvages en kilt qui peuplent les Hautes-Terres, l’écho des légendes arthuriennes et les rumeurs au sujet d’oies étranges, nées la putréfaction du bois emporté par la mer. L’étude attentive de ce texte, divisé en plusieurs parties distinctes, permet d’appréhender l’Écosse sous plusieurs angles, reflets de la personnalité complexe de Nicolas de Nicolay : curiosité scientifique, érudition, recherche de prestige personnel et dimension stratégique s’y mêlent à un goût certain pour l’inconnu, l’étrange et le périlleux.

Clément Guézais est titulaire d’un doctorat en Civilisation Britannique et d’un PhD en Histoire Médiévale délivré par l’Université de St Andrews (RU). Ses travaux ont initialement porté sur les échanges entre la France et l’Écosse au Moyen Âge. Il s’intéresse aux thèmes de la diplomatie, de l’amitié, de la représentation de l’autre et de l’ailleurs ainsi qu’aux premières dynamiques d’affirmation des identités nationales. Les notions de centre(s) et de périphérie(s), l’émergence des États modernes et de la première Europe sont au cœur  de ses recherches. Ses interventions plus récentes ont questionné le rôle de la tradition et de l’histoire médiévale dans les échanges contemporains entre la France et l’Écosse, ainsi que la place occupée par les spécificités géographiques dans les discours de célébration de l’espace national.

Clément Guézais holds a PhD in British Civilisation and a PhD in Medieval History from the University of St Andrews (UK). His initial research focused on the exchanges between France and Scotland in the Middle Ages. He is primarily interested in the themes of diplomacy, friendship, the representation of the other and of the elsewhere, as well as the affirmation of national identities. The notions of centre and periphery, the emergence of modern States and early European politics are at the heart of his research. His more recent works have examined the role of medieval tradition and history in the contemporary exchanges between France and Scotland, as well as the place occupied by geographical features in discourses celebrating national space.

 

 

 

Euan Healey

University of Glasgow

"Have they not sent us down to the rocks, and the shore of the sea?": exploring experiences of coast, shore and sea in the Highland Clearances

Most study of the Highland Clearances (c1750-c1884) is dominated by discussion of crofts, land politics and emigration. What can we learn about the long nineteenth century of the Clearances when we walk beyond the byre wall, over the head dyke and down to the tideline? Utilising landscape archaeology, archival material, and oral testimony to the 1883 Napier Commission, this paper will explore the experiences of ordinary people who experienced the Clearances in the spaces of the dry and wet spaces of the littoral and maritime Gàidhealtachd. With a focus on labour- and environmentally-minded methods, this paper will highlight how bottom-up studies which take seriously the lives, economies, beliefs and imaginations of ordinary Gaelic people can bring us new and innovative ways to unsettle conventional understandings of the Highland Clearances. Starting in the soil, sand and sea, and working upwards, we can uncover the lives and experiences of fishers, crofters, cottars, women, and children as they happened between the tidelines, aboard open boats, and in the planned fishing village. In doing this, we are permitted access to underexplored spaces of post-Clearance communities allowing us a deeper understanding of the agencies, environmental changes and capitalisms which defined the Highland Clearances.

Euan Healey is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His work focuses on labour, maritime and environmental histories of Gaelic Scotland through the Highland Clearances period. He is broadly interested in exploring and reconsidering the lives of people marginalised within historiography, particularly in maritime and rural contexts.

 

Asha Hornsby

University of St Andrews

Fishing for Meaning: Nineteenth-Century Whaling Surgeons, Shetland, and the ‘High North’ 

Scotland dominated British Northern whaling from the early-mid nineteenth century until the  depletion of Bowhead stocks (Balaena mysticetus) precipitated the industry’s irrevocable decline. The trade was an essential footing of regional economies, especially in the country’s rural northeast. Existing accounts of Scottish whaling tend to be concerned with economic and historical factors and are often narrowly focused on particular port towns such as Aberdeen, Peterhead, and Dundee (Archibald, 2004 & 2013; Watson, 2003; Buchan 1993). When featured, shipboard diaries tend to be used to extract information about the industry (or to explore it impacts) rather than being approached as representationally complex works (Sanger; 2016).

My paper offers a literary-critical analysis of a selection of whaling surgeons’ diaries – a neglected body of literature which provides rare insights into the many cultural encounters on the journeys between the Scotland and the Arctic. These journals are by no means straightforward: hybrid texts, they combine poetry, travel literature, sociology, autobiography, and medical commentary. While some formed the basis of published volumes, many remained private, or privately circulated. My talk foregrounds manuscript journals sourced from Scotland’s archives which have, thus far, received little or no scholarly attention.

Following an overview of Scotland’s position in Greenland and North-Sea fishing and an introduction to surgeons’ roles and writings, I direct attention to the Shetland Isles: a ‘relatively neglected part of the imagined British north’, but one which loomed large for whaling surgeons (Perkins, 2017). Captains stopped here for practical purposes: to gather supplies and engage hands. For medical seafarers, however, most of whom resided or were educated in lowland towns and cities, Shetland’s peripheral position – neither quite ‘home’ nor ‘abroad’ – prompted engagement with ‘feelings of up- or un-rootedness, with a lost or neglected historical tradition, and with questions of belonging and borders’, especially those centring around geographical, cultural, and colonial ‘otherness’ (Packham, 2019). I argue that, by representing Shetland via ‘Scottish Gothic’ frames and motifs, surgeons anticipated the ‘alien’ Arctic seascapes as well as their encounters with Inuit traders. Visits to the Shetland Isles often prompted surgeons to reflect upon matters of national, regional, class, and professional identities. Meanwhile, uneasy doublings and uncanny echoes between Shetland and the ‘High North’, disrupted conceptions of Scotland as a coherent land, people, and culture, and thereby destabilised understandings of her role within Imperial Britain.

Dr Asha Hornsby is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews whose work has been published in the Review of English Studies, the Victorian Review, and the Journal of Victorian Culture. Her research scrutinises the interplay between scientific medicine, public health anxieties and nineteenth-century culture. Her monograph Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 2025) is the first interdisciplinary literary-critical study of animal experimentation. Another major research strand concerns global seafaring and disease, and she is laying the foundation for her second book titled Contagious Crossings: how marine medicine made waves in Victorian culture. With Katie Garner she is editing a collection titled Sounding Scotland’s Waters, 1800-1900: Literature, History, Science which brings together literary scholars, linguists, marine biologists, and geographers to study the complexities of Scotland’s waters in the nineteenth century.

 

David Leishman

Université Grenoble-Alpes

Steaming through the sea of books: Steamboats, Scott and North British consumer nationalism

This paper seeks to address how early marketing in the maritime sphere contributed to the articulation of a North British identity in late nineteenth-century Scotland.

At a period when a North British commercial identity was frequently evoked via company naming, one high-profile vector of such Unionist consumer nationalism in Victorian Scotland was the North British Railway Company. Between 1844 and 1923 the NBR main-line network spanned between Carlisle in the South and Mallaig and Aberdeen in the North.

However, the everyday societal impact and geographical reach of the North British railway was extended further via the sea. The NBR reached onto the shoreline of Scotland and beyond via stations located at coastal resorts and ports, providing onward connections to destinations as far north as Stornoway and Orkney via shipping companies. In addition, the North British Railway built bridges spanning bodies of water such as both Tay Bridges, and the Firth of Forth, a project launched by the North British Railway in 1873. 

But this maritime presence was primarily strengthened when the North British Railway began purchasing and operating steamship companies in 1863. This led to its promotion of both sea freight services and littoral tourism using its steam-powered shipping lines operating under the name of the North British Steam Packet Company. Although much of its activity involved tourist services in the Clyde estuary, the company helped to connect a geographically diffuse “North British” coastal territory by serving destinations which included Silloth (England), Douglas (Isle of Man), and Dublin (Ireland).

This study of the commercial expression of late 19th century Scoto-British identity will thus focus on the North British Railway company’s shipping subsidiary.

We will contrast the efforts to project a North British commercial and cultural identity onto Scottish waters with the image of rival steam packet firms, highlighting different strands of the national narrative leveraged in early marketing and branding efforts.

In the context of naming North British ships and promoting littoral tourism, the maritime impact of the works of Sir Walter Scott is strongly present. We will thus also address the cultural legacy of Scott in the creation of an everyday North British commercial identity which bridged land and water to link Scotland to a wider sense of British identity.

David Leishman is senior lecturer in English applied to business at Université Grenoble-Alpes. His initial research studied how Scottish national identity was constructed through the mediating discourses of contemporary literature. He now focuses on advertising, branding and popular consumption to examine how these offer powerful vectors for the everyday articulation of Scottishness. He has focused particularly on beverages such as whisky, Buckfast Tonic Wine and Barr’s Irn-Bru, the latter being the focus of several articles as well as a book, entitled Consumer Nationalism and Barr’s Irn-Bru in Scotland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

 

Camille Manfredi

Université de Bretagne Occidentale, HCTI

Figurations of the Scottish Coastline in Pro- and Anti-Wind Turbine Art and Discourse

This paper will focus on the representation in text and images of the environmental and cultural issues associated with the installation of onshore and offshore wind farms on the Scottish coast, mainly but not exclusively in the Northern Isles and Outer Hebrides. Drawing on a selection of pro- and anti-wind energy media and artistic materials, the presentation will seek to reveal the strategic and emotional drivers behind the discourse of local communities and artists in the context of the climate emergency.

The coastline, because it is seen and experienced sometimes as a resource, sometimes as a landscape of identity (‘spiorad nan Gàidheal’), raises issues related to the assessment of the landscape, environmental, economic and cultural ‘impacts’ of wind farm infrastructure, which are most often expressed in divisive media discourse and measures. These discourses pit technology against aesthetics, rupture against resistance, the human against the non-human, the concept of ‘energy transition’ against its objects, the local against the colonial, the liminal against the central, the long term against the short term, the material against the immaterial... and, of particular concern to us, social acceptability against social unacceptability.

Camille Manfredi is a Professor of Scottish studies at the University of Western Brittany. She is the author of two monographs on contemporary Scottish literature, including Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She has co-edited the collective works Intermedial Art Practices as Cultural Resilience (with Lindsay Blair, Routledge, 2024), and Scottish Writing after Devolution: Edges of the New (with Marie-Odile Hédon and Scott Hames, Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She co-edited the journal issues Re-Viewing and Re-Imagining Scottish Waters in Word and Image (with Lindsay Blair, Angles 17, June 2024), Relating: Scotland in Relation (with Annie Thiec and Pierre Carboni, E-Rea 19:2, June 2022) and Acknowledging, Understanding, Representing Environmental Emergency (with Sylvie Nail, E-Rea 18:2, June 2021).

 

Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet

Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne

Le littoral dans « le nouveau cinéma écossais

La représentation du littoral est assez fréquente dans le cinéma britannique mais, si les plages anglaises ont très souvent été associées aux stations balnéaires, en haute ou en basse saison, de leur période d’apogée d’après-guerre à leur déclin contemporain (Kerry, 2012  Cale, 2019 ; Győri, 2021), les rivages écossais convoquent un tout autre imaginaire Le « nouveau cinéma écossais » qui débute, selon les études, à la fin des années 1970 (Craig, 2009, p. 56) avec le premier film de Bill Forsyth (That Sinking Feeling, 1979) ou au milieu des années 1990 (Petrie, 2000 ; Murray, 2015) avec l’explosion du nombre de film produits dans le sillage du succès de Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), montre a priori deux grandes tendances. Les films à caractère social ou réaliste, sans qu’il s’agisse d’un genre spécifique puisque certains films font des incursions dans le merveilleux ou le fantastique, ancrent leurs histoires dans un littoral (dés)industrialisé (conserveries, pêche, docks, fin des chantiers navals) qui témoigne de la relation socioéconomique de l’Écosse à la mer. Les films de genre à caractère historique, de science-fiction à tendance horrifique ou thrillers perpétuent l’image d’une Écosse sauvage, isolée et peu anthropisée, quelle que soit l’époque représentée, celle-ci s’apparentant presque à un chronotope malgré un recours aux mêmes lieux de l’imaginaire littoral (port, phare, village côtier, etc.).

Ces films qui contribuent à construire la diversité de l’Écosse à l’écran se rejoignent pourtant dans le réseau d’associations (« nexus of meanings » Handyside, 2014) qu’ils entretiennent avec le littoral. Celui-ci peut être vu comme un topos du cinéma en général puisque, quelle que soit la nationalité des films étudiés, la liminalité qui lui est inhérente a souvent été interprétée comme un passage, un seuil, un entre-deux, le site d’une transition identitaire, la spatialisation des états émotionnels des personnages (Handyside, 2014 ; Thouvenel, 2019), une interprétation qui prend toutefois tout son sens dans le contexte écossais (Petrie, 2016 ; Petrie, 2024) puisque la représentation de la vie des communautés côtières ou îliennes renforce un certain nombre des caractéristiques historiques ou esthétiques nationales : Écosse-bout du monde, poids de la religion et du folklore, etc. Mais le littoral écossais donne également lieu à des visions qui vont parfois à l’encontre des schémas établis. Un exemple serait le retournement de la perspective truffaldienne à la fin des 400 coups. Nombre de films du « nouveau cinéma écossais » figurent ainsi leur héros/héroïne, en bout de course, face à la mer. Mais si celle-ci peut symboliser l’incertitude voire une impasse, leur avenir se trouve à l’intérieur des terres (vers la métropole, la Central Belt ?).

Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet est agrégée d’anglais et maître de conférences à l’Université Jean Monnet de Saint-Étienne. Elle travaille sur la civilisation et le cinéma britannique contemporains, principalement sur les questions de classes sociales, de genre et de minorités toutes formes d’identités qui peuvent s’exprimer par le prisme de l’espace, et donc de l’urbain et des territoires. Elle est l’auteur de Working Class Hero, La figure ouvrière dans le ciném britannique depuis 1956 (PUP, 2022), co-directrice de l’ouvrage La ville industrielle  l’écran, Objet cinématographique à identifier (PUFR, 2022) et de De l’invisibilité à l'invisibilité : représentations des marges diasporiques (APU, 2023). Elle a publié divers article en lien avec l’Écosse, notamment à propos de l’impact du genre sur la représentation de la nation (Études écossaises, 2021), les adaptations cinématographiques de Macbeth (Étude écossaises, 2023) et des romans d’Irvine Welsh (in Writing Scottishness, SLI, 2023).

 

Mathieu Mazé

Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin

Le tourisme culturel sur les littoraux écossais (1770-1850)

L’attrait exercé par les montagnes, les lochs ou encore les îles sur les premiers touristes en Écosse est bien connu. Par rapport à ces milieux ou types paysagers, le littoral semble bien moins présent dans les représentations de ces voyageurs. Certes, il a connu une mise en valeur dans le cadre du tourisme balnéaire à partir de l’extrême fin du XVIIIe siècle. Mais on est moins bien renseigné sur les formes de tourisme culturel qui pouvaient se pratiquer sur les littoraux dans la période du premier essor du tourisme en Écosse, entre les années 1770 et les années 1840. Dans quelle mesure les littoraux exerçaient-ils un attrait esthétique sur les voyageurs ? De quel patrimoine historique ou littéraire étaient-ils l’écrin ? Venait-on les scruter pour y lire in situ l’histoire naturelle de la Terre ? Les plages de sable ou les falaises suscitaient-ils la même attention que les côtes rocheuses ?  On tentera de répondre à ces questions à l’aide des récits et guides de voyage produits au cours de cette période. L’objectif de cette contribution sera d’établir si, en certains points du littoral, un seuil de signalement dans la littérature consacrée au voyage a été franchi, et que la fréquentation a été telle que l’on puisse parler de l’émergence de véritables sites touristiques, dont l’attrait se fondait sur leur valeur esthétique ou géologique, ou encore sur les associations historiques ou littéraires auxquels ils donnaient lieu, et non seulement sur la pratique des bains de mer. Si le fait paraît bien établi pour la grotte de Fingal, sur l’île de Staffa, « merveille » de la nature qui attira en nombre les visiteurs dès que la navigation à vapeur fut établie, il reste à voir si l’on peut observer, en d’autres points du littoral des phénomènes similaires qui, sans atteindre la même ampleur, témoignent néanmoins du passage du statut d’espace traversé ou frôlé sans être contemplé, à celui de site où l’on s’arrête pour observer, se souvenir, imaginer ou s’émouvoir.

Mathieu Mazé : Chercheur associé au laboratoire DYPAC (Université Versailles-Saint-Quentin). Auteur d’une thèse d’histoire sur le premier essor du tourisme en Écosse parue aux éditions Vendémiaire en 2017 et intitulée L’Invention de l’Écosse. Premiers touristes dans les Highlands. Domaines de recherche : histoire des représentations du territoire écossais, du tourisme, de l’hôtellerie et des débits de boisson en Écosse.

 

Matt McDowell

University of Edinburgh

Coasts, islands, and international networks in Scottish sport: a contemporary-historical reinterpretation

This paper will discuss the international dimensions of Scottish sport during the post-World War II period. The two case studies examined will involve: 1) world-class surfing events being held on the sea coasts of Caithness and Sutherland, on the Pentland Firth and the North Sea; 2) the membership of Orkney and Shetland in the Island Games sporting tournaments since 1985, with special attention given to the 2005 Island Games in Shetland and the 2025 Games in Orkney. In doing so, this paper elucidates Scotland’s relationship with (international) sport, and its continuing international relationships more broadly, in a setting beyond Scotland’s cities and towns.

Surfing arrived on the shores of Caithness and Sutherland following the creation of Dounreay Experimental Research Establishment (DERE) west of Thurso; its first “scene” was cultivated by employees at the doomed nuclear research facility. In the ensuing years, world-class events were held on the north coast, including the 1981 and 1993 European Surfing Championships and a series of events from 2006 through 2011 organised by kit manufacturers O’Neill. These events beamed pictures and memories of the north of Scotland’s landscape worldwide; here, I will discuss the tension between the “tourist” images of “historic” Scotland sold within the events, and the surfing itself, a sport which reflects modernity, mobility, and a north of Scotland which has consistently been “on the move”.

Those who surfed in the north of Scotland emphasised Caithness’s Nordic identity and “Viking” history. Similarly, in Shetland and Orkney, participation in the Island Games from 1985 onwards stressed several overlapping identities involving “Nordic-ness”, “Scottish-ness”, and “British-ness”. The first Island Games were held in 1985 as part of the Isle of Man’s Year of Sport: organisers prioritised inviting islands with similar political constitutional relationships with the UK as the Manx (notably Jersey and Guernsey), along with islands and territories which connected the crown dependency with its Nordic roots (most significantly the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Åland, and Gotland). Shetland and Orkney were present at the first 1985 event, and have been present ever since: sport in both reflected a shifting economic relationships with coasts, notably with the presence of multinational oil companies and the creation of charitable funds. The presentation and iconography of Shetland 2005 and Orkney 2025 built heavily upon the idea of the north of Scotland’s maritime history, international connections, and relationship with water.

This paper thus uses coastal and island history to explore broader undercurrents within (the north of) Scotland’s history – undercurrents which provide a novel means of exploring identity and politics during the post-1945 years.

Dr Matthew L McDowell is a lecturer in sport policy and management at the University of Edinburgh, Moray House School of Education and Sport. He is the author of two books on the history of Scottish sport – A Cultural History of Association Football in Scotland, 1865-1902 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2013) and Surfing and Modernity in the North of Scotland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024) – and is currently working on another book examining the history of the Island Games. Dr McDowell is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an editor at the International Journal of the History of Sport, and a former Chair of the British Society of Sports History.

 

 

Morag Munro-Landi

Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

C for Calmac or for ‘calamity’? f for Ferguson (marine), or for ‘fiasco’? the ongoing coastal connectivity crisis in north Ayrshire

Our interest in participating in this conference has led us to consider tourist and non-tourist coastal connections and “point to point” links in North Ayrshire (which includes Arran).

One serious issue among others today, indeed over the past few years, has been the maintaining of reliable, on-schedule lifeline ferry services by Caledonian MacBrayne (CalMac), the Scottish government-owned company operating the Clyde and Hebrides Ferry Services. CalMac has, nevertheless, recently been directly awarded a new contract for these runs by the Scottish Government.

The difficulties for the operator do not arise solely for reasons of climate change, bringing about more severe weather conditions more often and the ensuing cancellations. There are also problems with the fleet itself, as well as with harbour infrastructures, notably in Ardrossan: the port facilities are no longer fit for purpose:  the new “green”, dual-fuel Glen Sannox ferry, which (though very much overdue as we shall see) began its runs early this year, cannot safely berth there. The harbour is still privately owned, by Peel Ports Ltd, but is to be bought over by the Scottish Government, to ensure the rehabilitation of the harbour, and proper installations for the storage of the alternative liquid natural gas to be used by Glen Sannox and her sister ship Glen Rosa, which is due, according to the very latest updates from Ferguson Marine (FMEL) to begin service in spring 2026. The transactions over the Ardrossan port purchase have been lengthy and have thus engendered protest given the time-scale involved, but these are seemingly now, in autumn 2025, reaching a point of conclusion.

Thus, the traditional Ardrossan to Brodick route (A-to-B), vital to islanders and mainlanders alike (therefore not just to tourists) has had to be given up, quasi sine die. Alternatives, via Troon, have not been well-received nor adequate. The economic future of the town of Ardrossan itself is at stake. The future of tourism on Arran, even, and in the wider area is at stake. A compensation fund put in place in the spring to help some, but not all,  island communities in the Hebrides does not apply to Ardrossan.

There has understandably been much public outcry, from residents and residents’ protest groups and businesses on both sides of the firth, as well as much negative comment in the local and national largely “unionist” press, aimed directly at the SNP government itself… not to mention former FM Nicola Sturgeon, and all the various issues have come up for discussion and accountability in Holyrood. The management of the Scottish Ferries is a complex public set up, one that has also been called into question, and the direct responsibility of the Scottish SNP Government being pin-pointed for this connectivity crisis, John Sweeney has had to,publicly express the government’s apologies to the island communities concerned.

Morag J. Munro Landi, M. A. (French and German (Hons) - Aberdeen University), studied Scottish Literature in France. She obtained a Master’s degree in linguistics and literature, her dissertation being on The Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.  Concomitantly with her teaching in lycée and university (Pau) as professeur certifiée then agrégée d’anglais, she obtained an MPhil (DEA) (1992) and then a PhD (Docteur d’études anglophones) on the representation of woman in the novels of Neil Gunn (2003). In 2004 she was appointed senior lecturer at the university in Pau. She has published several articles on the fiction of Neil Gunn, has published briefly (2014) on James Robertson’s novel And the Land Lay Still and in 2016 on Alan Bisset’s poems, plays and novels, with links to representations of Scottish history, society and politics. A thematic shift in her research in 2016, brought the organisation of two day conferences in 2016 and 2017 on the political and constitutional future of Scotland and then the of UK as a whole (cf From Devolution to Brexit. Triggering Uncertainty and Upheaval, PUPPA 2018).  She retired from the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour in September 2021. She has been a member of the SFEE for over 20 years.

 

Glenda Norquay

Liverpool John Moores University

Landlocked: counter-coastal narratives

Writing to her American publishers in 1925, Scottish novelist Lorna Moon described her recent writing as ‘coastal works’. She defended the choice of a cliffside fishing village rather than an inland small-town setting for her (1929) novel Dark Star’s dramatic conclusion, explaining: ‘the fishing people and the land people in Scotland don’t mix, they are widely separated in their sympathies, even their blood isn’t the same.’ Over the next hundred years such oppositional associations – of Celtic supernaturalism with fishing folk, of libidinal energies with coastal spaces, of release and rebellion with the force of the sea – have continued to be dominant tropes in Scottish fictional landscapes, with a concomitant contrast to claustrophobic and convention-bound rural communities inland. From Moon, through fiction by Eric Linklater and George Mackay Brown, to more recent instantiations such as The Outrun (2015) by Amy Liptrot and Clear (2024) from Carys Davies, the dramatic fluidity of coastal spaces has been deployed to provoke reflection, challenge repression and, often, generate release.  Sea-edged topographies and the in-between spaces they offer have enabled imaginative questioning of national and individual subject formations in experimental fiction, popular novels, memoir and nonfiction and have increasingly generated critical attention (Worthington, 2017; Manfredi, 2019; Szuba, 2023.) What happens, however, when the oppositional thinking facilitated by the positioning of land against sea is abandoned, but the ambition to recontour and reimagine identified with coastal writing remains?

This paper addresses the possibilities offered by departure from both coastal liminality and bounded rurality. It considers three ‘landlocked’ novels: Wild Harbour (1936) by Ian Macpherson; Alan Warner’s The Man Who Walks (2002); and Thirsty Animals (2023) by Rachelle Atalla. All three imaginatively engage with unbounded, amorphous and, arguably, degraded spaces that are neither securely bordered nor coastally fluid, that are in one way or another ‘landlocked’. Although with different moments of production and specific agendas, all incline towards the dystopian and speculative in form. Each suggests the potential for radical geopolitics in a movement away from established and oppositional patterns of topographic thought. This paper therefore examines the aesthetics and politics of ‘counter-coastal’ writing in fiction which is still informed by that desire to unsettle most associated with ‘coastal works’.

Glenda Norquay is Professor Emerita of Scottish Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published extensively on Scottish women’s writing (including editing The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (2012)), and on Robert Louis Stevenson: Robert Louis Stevenson and Transatlantic Literary Networks (2021); Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading (2007). Her study of Stevenson for Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series is forthcoming (2026) and she is currently engaged with a longer project on topographies of identity in the Scottish novel for Edinburgh University Press.

 

Rebecca Wilkieson

University of Strathclyde

The development of Scotland’s maritime infrastructure through the transatlantic trade, 1690-1750

Scottish participation in the transatlantic slave trade has garnered significant attention in historical research over the past two decades. This research has established the significance of transatlantic slaving markets, and products produced using enslaved labour, to the industrial and economic development of Scotland in the eighteenth century. Existing research, however, has focused predominantly on landed developments and the circulation of goods and peoples, without placing emphasis on the fundamental maritime dimensions of these developments. Given the recognised impact of the transatlantic slave trade on Scotland’s economic and industrial development across rural and urban areas, it is crucial to analyse its role in Scotland’s maritime evolution too.

Presenting the early findings from my doctoral research and focusing especially on the connections between rural and urban spaces, this paper explores how the growth in transatlantic trading opportunities shaped Scotland’s maritime development in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, the paper will focus on two broader themes linked to the expansion of transatlantic trade. First, the circulation of commodities between rural and urban markets linked to expanding transatlantic trade, including fish and boatbuilding materials, which encouraged infrastructural developments and maritime growth beyond the major transatlantic ports that dominate the current historiography. Second, the mobility of labourers between rural and urban centres by those seeking employment opportunities in transatlantic or adjacent trades. This includes the host of seafarers whose employment centred on the circulation of goods through the significant but understudied coastal carrying trades; more seafarers were employed in these short-distance, heavily-trafficked routes along coastal stretches than in long-distance deep-water voyages.

With a particular focus on coastal and insular ports, particularly in the West of Scotland, this paper will consider how Scotland’s relationship with the coastal sea—as a space of extraction, circulation, and mobility—was impacted by expanding transatlantic trading opportunities between 1690 and 1750. Rather than view this relationship at the point of long-distance exchange, this paper emphasises the intra-Scottish maritime and mobility networks that were crucial to the expansion of transatlantic trading networks centred on slaving economies.

Rebecca Wilkieson is a first-year PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Her PhD project “Maritime Scotland and the Transatlantic Trade: An analysis of the development of Scotland’s maritime infrastructure through its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, c. 1690-1750” builds on her interest in maritime, imperial, and Scottish history. Growing up on the Isle of Gigha, Rebecca aims to centre the local histories of place within transatlantic histories of trade and enslavement. Her project is supervised by Dr David Wilson and Prof Churnjeet Mahn

 

John R. Young

University of Strathclyde

The Covenanters and the coast: coastal and maritime security and military intervention in Ireland in the War(s) for the Three Kingdoms

This paper will focus on maritime and coastal security during the Covenanting period in Scottish history, with a focus on the aftermath of the 1641 Irish rebellion and Covenanting military intervention in Ireland, when a Covenanting army of 11,000 troops was sent into Ireland in 1642. Largely based at Carrickfergus in north-east Ulster, it played an important strategic role in both Ireland and Scotland as respective theatres of war, c.1642-46, and was defeated at the Battle of Benburb in County Tyrone in 1646. This paper draws on research from the Scottish Privy Council and parliamentary records for examining both the policies and policy-making processes in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion and preparing military intervention in Ireland. Likewise in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion return migration from Ulster to Scotland took place via the western ports and Ayrshire, for example, was faced with a humanitarian aid problem of large numbers of returning migrants. Scottish parliamentary policy in the aftermath of the rebellion had a detailed focus on coastal and maritime security, which also included a pressing need for the reliable numbers of available ships and the nature of those ships that could be used to defend the coast. The River Clyde and key strategic locations such as Dumbarton Castle were crucial in this context. An analysis of the key political actors and parliamentarians involved in this process is also important. Hence employing the research methods of the history of political institutions reveals important research findings that can be applied to coastal and maritime security. The Scottish Privy Council in 1642 made preparations for military intervention, including for example, the use of herring from Loch Fyne to feed the army, and the awarding of contracts to Hugh Kennedy (Ayr) and George Porterfield (Glasgow) for the supply of shoes and biscuits for that army. Simultaneously, the Privy Council dealt with the influx of returning migrants and the establishment of a humanitarian aid system for providing relief.

The army that was sent into Ireland was to be paid for by the English Parliament, but it was undoubtedly an army in distress. The 1643 Convention of Estates, which proceeded to negotiate the Solemn League and Covenant as a British confessional confederation and the Treaty of Military Assistance, ostensibly met to discuss the condition of the army in Ireland. The Convention was faced with the problem of piracy and privateering that disrupted the supply lines of the army and it legislated to deal with that issue. The records of the Convention have details of coastal security, including individual ships and captains. Specific legislation, committees, warrants and political actors can be identified.

Conceptually, within the wider context of Scottish history, it is also legitimate to place the Scottish coastal history, in this instance the North Channel, within the framework of the seas and oceans. The work of Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols (1972 and 1973, English translation of the original works), as well as more recent work of David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (2020) and The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2014), can therefore be used and applied in this conceptual context, in addition to other relevant scholarship.

Dr John R. Young is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He is a double graduate of the University of Glasgow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He specialises in early modern Scottish History, including the history of the pre-1707 Scottish Parliament, the 1707 Act of Union, the Covenanters, and Scotland’s relations with Ulster. He is the editor of the journal Parliaments, Estates and Representation, published by Taylor and Francis. PER is the journal of The International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions. His work on Scottish parliamentary history has been published in publications of The French National Assembly and the parliaments of Catalonia, Poland and Portugal. He has appeared on several television programmes talking about Scotland and Ulster, including Plandáil/Plantation (BBC Northern Ireland/TG 4) and Born Fighting. How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (STV/UTV/PBS America). He has also given talks at the Ulster American Heritage Symposium in Northern Ireland and the USA and The Tower Museum, Derry/Londonderry as part of the 2013 Derry/Londonderry UK City of Culture programme. His publications on Ulster include:  John R. Young and William Kelly (eds), Ulster and Scotland 1600-2000: History, Language and Identity (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2004); John R. Young and William Kelly (eds), Scotland and the Ulster Plantations: explorations in the Scottish settlement of Stuart Ireland (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2009); ‘Refugees in Scotland in the aftermath of the 1641 Ulster Rebellion’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violent Death and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2007), and ‘Scotland and Ulster Connections in the Seventeenth Century: Sir Robert Adair of Kinhilt and the Scottish Parliament under the Covenanters’, The Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies, volume 3, No. 4, (2013).

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