1 - Covenants, Clans and Unions in Context: Celebrating the Scholarship of Allan I. Macinnes

Summary

Across a remarkable forty-year career that has continued apace since his retirement in 2014, Allan Macinnes has made a hugely significant contribution to Scottish, British and early modern historical scholarship. Across five monographs, nine edited books and innumerable essays and articles, Macinnes honed a distinctive style as a historian, renowned for his unrivalled coverage of Scottish and international archives and a take-no-prisoners approach to intellectual inquiry that recalled his days as a shinty player. This was later captured in the nickname he acquired among British historians in the early 1990s – Ice Pick – on account of his ‘direct’ style of engagement. Yet despite this fearsome reputation, Macinnes was also a committed teacher and advisor. As an early adopter of what is now accepted as an essential requirement of all professional historians – research-led teaching – he had incomparable success in producing a new generation of historians, many of whom remain active scholars today.

Macinnes was integral to the transformation of Scottish History as a discipline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In his own words, he sought to avoid what he perceived to be the excessive insularity and introspection of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries by emphasising comparative history and the promotion of Scottish History internationally. Much like his historical sparring partner Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, Macinnes has been comfortable operating in Scottish, British and overseas theatres. This has been reflected similarly in his many collaborations with early modernists in Europe and North America and in the wide-ranging contributions to this collection.

Evaluating Macinnes's wide-ranging scholarship is no easy task: any attempt to do so is liable to fall short when trying to fully capture its breadth and depth. Rather than auditing a prolific and ongoing publication record, then, we have opted instead to trace three fundamental elements of his work that also serve to illuminate the broader historiographical landscape of the last half-century, and which remain major interventions in Scottish and British historiography. These elements are: (i) the study of Scottish history in a comparative international context and a rejection of Anglocentrism in British history; (ii) the study of the Scottish Highlands without recourse either to sentimentalism or the over-privileging of governmental perspectives; and (iii) the study of political economy and Scottish commerce before and after the Treaty of Union.