Marginal Scotland

This is Early Modern Scotland in all its complexities - land, resources, people, ideas and loyalties - as cultural revolution derived from the wider Protestant Reformation shaped a national destiny and twin engines of conciliar government in church and state. Based on extensive archival material, embracing the whole canvas of England and Scotland in relation to the Continent in the years 1560 to 1650, this work represents a major reassessement stressing the inescapable reality of English power and advance. So deeply were the foundations of that revolution implanted that Cromwell's more ruthless laicizing regime and a second wave of sacerdotalism failed to eradicate what had been sown in Scotland, giving it distinctive characteristics only gradually eroded by modern pluralism. Dutch King William III put his imprimatur on it and Adam Smith and David Hume are its heirs.