The "Nation Epidemicall": Scotland and the Rise of Anglo-America

FAIN: FB-50531-04

Arthur H. Williamson
California State University, Sacramento (Sacramento, CA 95819-2694)

An NEH Fellowship would enable me to complete a substantial book, now tentatively titled, Scotland and the Rise of Anglo-America. This work would be a study of Scottish cultural and social thought as it developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from radical nominalism to political economy. It will run from the religious and scholastic thinking of John Ireland and John Mair in the 1490s to the economic ideas emerging with the Scottish architects of the Williamite revolution two centuries later. But, much more than an intellectual and political history of Scotland during this period, the book's central concern, like that of so many Scots at the time, is the creation of Britain and of the British Atlantic. Among the achievements of this remarkably fecund period was the ideal of the citizen, a tissue of values central to the rise of Anglo-America. The period also witnessed the emergence of the British state. The future of both now appears uncertain, and an exploration of their foundations and historical role surely speaks with special cogency to the contemporary moment.

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