The Enlightenment in the Highlands: Natural history and internal colonization in the Scottish Enlightenment, 1760--1830

My dissertation examines the central role of the ideology of internal colonization in the development and decline of the Highland economy between 1760 and 1830. Two generations of Scottish magnates and intellectuals looked to the sciences of natural history and chemistry for the tools to fashion the Highlands and Hebrides into a prosperous internal colony. Lobbying the government and the landed class for support and funds, they presented their Scottish frontier as a patriotic substitute for the loss of the thirteen American colonies after 1783. My dissertation investigates the emergence and circulation of their ideology at multiple levels: as a formidable alliance of landowners and intellectuals within the Scottish Enlightenment, a scientific project of resource inventory and environmental engineering in the upland ecosystems, and an alternative mythology of northern exoticism, which challenged the invented tradition of the martial Highlander and the allure of southern colonies. The overarching aim of the Enlightenment in the Highlands was to foster an alternative modernity on the northern periphery, but in practice this ideology instead served to legitimate and diffuse the disastrous social system of crofting. Through the intended and unintended consequences of internal colonization, these northern improvers thus set the ideological pattern for the decline of the Highland economy in the nineteenth century.