Rosalind Mitchison

These books are the recent work of one of the leading exponents of the ‘new’ history of the French school. The historical achievement of French academics over the last twenty years has set an example to historians in all other countries. French demographers have reopened the whole topic of population change, devising new techniques, asking new questions, and combining accurate measurement with insight into social constraints and mental pathways. Since demography is, as Ladurie asserts, one of the basic determinants of economic change, the source of ‘the immense, slow-moving fluctuations’, the enormous cycles of rising and falling pressures on supply, the French breakthrough has been perhaps the most important historiographical change of this generation. It has been aided by a new reverence for numbers: ‘history that is not quantitative cannot claim to be scientific,’ says Ladurie in an essay of 1969, and in the following year, more arrogantly: ‘modern techniques, in the age of computers have brought about a revolution in historiography: they have made possible the exhaustive processing of vast quantities of data – quantities undreamed of by past historians, however eminent, who were the prisoners of their unsophisticated methods.’ Again, ‘tomorrow’s historians will have to be able to programme a computer in order to survive.’ Still more assertive statements in which l’histoire artisanelle, the work of the solitary scholar, has been denounced in favour of the amassing of figures by teams of workers are not contained in this collection.

The first three books are studies within the narrow élite of landed society in a small, rapidly modernising country – Scotland. They concern men who took for granted the perpetuation of their society, of security for property and a due hierarchy of rank. For the most part, they are also of people who did not want this hierarchy to be totally fixed. There needed to be openings for talent or the right kind of obsequious effort to pass to a rank above. It has become fashionable to state that upper-class Scots bred in the 18th century suffered from uncertainties of identity. Their national base was changing from Scotland to North Britain, and a new system of political power and influence was being worked out, one in conflict with much of what had existed before. I am unconvinced about this problem of identity.

It is over seventy years since Max Weber put forward the thesis that the Protestant ethic was closely linked to the ethos of capitalism, a thesis which has inspired a long-standing debate among historians. In the cases held to support the theory, Weber included Scotland. Economic historians have at various times commented on the paradox of the Scottish case, contrasting the backward economy of the country in the 17th century with its monolithic adherence to an extreme form of Calvinism, but nobody has, till now, taken the trouble to make a thorough study of whether the evidence from Scotland confirms or contradicts Weber’s theory. This book sets out to do just that, and it involves the author in a careful analysis of the structure of Weber’s argument as well as a consideration of Scottish dogma and enterprise. It is a pity that the title raises the irrelevant issue of presbyteries. Calvinism was a system of belief which in Scotland and some other countries was sustained by a presbyterian church structure, but could equally well make use of episcopacy.

A book containing no reference apparatus and no bibliography is not claiming to be a work of scholarship in any of the usual senses. Carefully and spiritedly done, the interpretation and presentation of history for the general public is entirely respectable. But what we have here is neither careful nor spirited. That Dr Grimble has read, unevenly, but in places deeply, if without system or critical faculty, is shown by confused echoes of other people’s research. It is implied that he feels deeply about the wrongs experienced by Highland society over the centuries, but the extreme selectivity with which such wrongs are put forward for consideration makes it difficult to take the sentiment seriously. Fragments of various stories are put together to give a picture of a coherent, cultivated and gallant society which has never questioned the aristocratic dominance of its chiefs and which has been entirely sinned against by those beyond its borders. The important questions which historians ask about Highland society are ignored.

These volumes are issued as a pair, with a single index, and rightly, because they hold together for a coherent segment of Carlyle’s life. The dominant theme of the two is the writing of The French Revolution: in Volume VIII Carlyle is struggling with the first two volumes, in IX he produces the third, spends four months battling with the proofs and finally sees the whole book published and reviewed. It made him into a successful literary figure, justified his move to London, and gave him enough financial security to put ‘take it or leave it’ terms before his publisher. In 1835, the publisher had jibbed at the idea of an English edition of Sartor Resartus: ‘he shrieked at the very notion,’ wrote Carlyle. At the end of 1837, Carlyle was standing out for £50 a volume for his two books and a volume of reviews, five volumes in all. Reviewers might, and most of them did, complain feelingly about Carlyle’s style, but everywhere it was acknowledged that The French Revolution was a landmark in the concept of history. In 1837, Carlyle had the chance of lecturing to an expensive audience. It terrified him. Since he resolutely refused to prepare notes for it, the terror did not abate. At £135 for half a dozen lectures, he was free of financial pressure for a year.