Colin Kidd

Colin Kidd is a professor of modern history at St Andrews. He co-edited Beyond the Enlightenment: Scottish Intellectual Life, 1790-1914, which was published in May. His books include British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600-1800, Unions and Unionism: Political Thought in Scotland 1500-2000 and The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography 1700-1870.

Most historians​ nowadays are suspicious of ‘constitutional history’, in part because they’re uneasy about its associations with the Anglocentric arrogance of what is sometimes called Whig history, a self-satisfied celebration of England’s relatively smooth progress towards liberal outcomes. The historical reaction against Whig triumphalism also exposed the...

Antidote to Marx: Oh, I know Locke!

Colin Kidd, 4 January 2024

Among​ the enduring riddles of American exceptionalism is the absence in the political mainstream of an overtly socialist party. Whereas in Europe socialist and social democratic parties emerged to tame the excesses of private enterprise, the much rawer, more carelessly exploitative forms of capitalism found in the United States failed to provoke a political response of a similar character...

Until​ the last half-century, reconfigurations of the literary and historical canon largely involved the insertion, repudiation or reordering of a cast of dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential...

Intimated Disunion

Colin Kidd, 13 July 2023

Theissue of losers’ consent has come sharply into focus in recent decades, most obviously in the US presidential elections of 2000 and 2020, but also closer to home: how many Remainers immediately accepted the democratic verdict of the Brexit vote, and moved on? In Northern Irish politics a perverse variant of this phenomenon obtains: the problem of winners’ consent. The Good...

Contemporaries recognised Samuel Adams’s hand at work in a series of episodes that preceded the outbreak of the War of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the penultimate royal governor of Massachusetts, described him as ‘that Machiavelli of chaos’, responsible for stirring up anti-government sentiment along the Atlantic seaboard. Writing under more than thirty pseudonyms in the colonial press – including Vindex, Candidus, Alfred, ‘a Bostonian’, Shippen, Populus, TZ, EA, ‘a Son of Liberty’ – Adams, as Stacy Schiff notes, was adept at turning ‘a small grievance into an unpardonable insult’. 

Boris Johnson’s japes are comparable in neutralising effect to the softening charm of Tony Blair. How can such a matey, blokey person, ‘someone you could have a pint with’, possess darker, colder...

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Colin Kidd’s study of Scottish Unionism goes, as he himself insists, sternly against the prevailing ideological current, which is focused on the emergence of political nationalism in both...

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Our Slaves Are Black: Theories of Slavery

Nicholas Guyatt, 4 October 2007

In 1659, during the last months of the Commonwealth, 72 slaves from Barbados managed to escape to London. They complained to Parliament that they had been living in ‘unsupportable...

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