What drove the transformation of Britain’s population, economy and environment so that by 1819 it was arguably the most rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society in the world?

Chapter 7 says that if scholars will pay more attention to political Stories, they still have to consider how to proceed. The marketplace for ideas is full of Stories, and the epistemological crisis is well funded in every direction. Therefore, Max Weber’s advice is entirely relevant: we must “choose” between Stories (or “causes,” in his term). And we must do that while critics like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Kahn, and Stephen Smith warn us that we should reject old-time Stories only if we can replace them with new ones that are equally effective.

David Hume and Adam Smith were contemporaries, interlocutors, compatriots, and friends, who, along with Hutcheson, helped shape the remarkable period of intellectual activity in eighteenth-century Scotland known as the Scottish Enlightenment. They inherited Hutcheson’s sentimentalist approach: a form of moral empiricism that is opposed to ethical rationalism and that continues to find resonance today. Hume’s version has had the greatest influence, including in contemporary discussion.

For his part, Adam Smith is, of course, best known for his writings on economics. But Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is arguably one of the greatest works on moral psychology ever written. Smith shows the ubiquity of imaginative perspective-taking in our mental moral lives, both in attributing mental states to others (and in everyday normative judgments of the fittingness, or “propriety” as Smith calls it, of attitudes to the objects they have in view). Moreover, Smith connects fellow-feeling with mutual respect and accountability. Our capacity to take on others’ perspectives and regulate our conduct toward them from an informed and impartial second-personal point of view figures centrally both in Smith’s account of justice.

The georgic in English is often said to have receded after the 1770s. This chapter argues that in the Romantic period the georgic does not disappear, but assumes a new form: the ‘rural complaint’, a lyrical lamentation on social conditions in the countryside. Georgics in a more conventional didactic and descriptive form continued to be written, such as Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy and James Grahame’s British Georgics, but these incorporated rural complaint interludes. At the same time, standalone rural complaint poems, following Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, consistently alluded to, and situated themselves within, a classical and neoclassical georgic tradition. Understanding the Romantic rural complaint as a form of georgic (rather than, or in addition to, pastoral) sheds light on the generic choices of poets such as Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and John Clare.

The construal of Apology 30b2–4 which in JHS 123 (2003) I attributed to John Bumet had appeared in print sixteen years before his edition of Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. I now suggest that it probably originated in the mind of J. A. Smith, who was an undergraduate contemporary of Burnet’s at Balliol College, Oxford, and later Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. The unexpected construal, transmitted by Balliol tradition, is typical of Smith’s cast of mind.

Chapter 1 reveals the complexity and self-consciousness of Romantic nature writing, bringing together authors who share an interest in nonhuman nature as a dynamic process. It also addresses the porousness of Romantic nature writing as a mode of engagement across different kinds of texts. A key claim is that, while Gilbert White’s localism and close field observations were influential on later nature writing, so was the strand of confessional autobiography pioneered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Romantic nature writing is often represented as a self-aggrandising masculine mode. But women writers such as Dorothy Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith were significant, particularly in their portrayals of nonhuman nature as entangled with everyday human life. The chapter also addresses labouring-class writers, bringing John Clare’s natural history prose into dialogue with the work of the artist Thomas Bewick and the novelist and poet James Hogg. All three resisted and lamented the forces of modernisation, but did so through developing innovative modes of representation. Even at its most backward-looking, Romantic nature writing engaged with the contradictions and conflicts of modernity. And, while influenced by natural theology, it also dared to speculate about deep time and the transience of human species.

This provides the rationale for the book and outlines the main argument. It provides a synopsis of the eight chapters and the conclusion. The central argument of the book is made explicit: the need to move beyond existing tropes, especially religion, that have defined Sikh subjectivities. It outlines the integrated approach to Sikh nationalism, identity and diaspora which offers a more comprehensive understanding of Sikh aspirations for self-determination since the late nineteenth century. The Sikh case, it suggests, provides new insights into minority religious nationalism in the colonial and postcolonial contexts and questions the centrality of the homeland in the discourse of long-distance nationalism in a globalised world, thus making possible de-territorialised nationalism.

This chapter outlines how theories of ethnicity and nationalism have been applied to the Sikhs. It reviews the distinction between primordialists and instrumentalists, the modernist and ethno-symbolic theories of nationalism and discusses the postcolonial approaches. The most recent methodological approaches applied to the Sikhs are evaluated with reference to the literature on diasporas, long-distance nationalism, globalisation and religious nationalism The approach taken in this study is integrative. It draws on theories of ethnicity and nationalism, in particular Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach, to understand the emergence of modern Sikh nationalism. It locates the nation and state-building processes in the colonial and postcolonial world which shaped Sikh destinies as a highly conscious minority in the Punjab up to 1947 and beyond. The diaspora and the politics of the Sikhs in the Punjab as seen as mutually dependent variables. And the literature on religious nationalism is taken as the point of departure for critiques of how the secular Indian state has managed the Sikh question since 1947. Like the Jews, who have struggled with self-identities of religion, nation and an ethnic minority, a reading of modern nationalism among Sikhs is possible if its religious and ethnic roots and character are acknowledged.

The conclusion summarises the core argument of the volume. It maps the nature of Sikh nationalism today within South Asia and the diaspora on a continuum of groups that seek an independent homeland of Khalistan to those that pursue autonomy within the Indian Union and others that demand equality, recognition and non-discrimination within the Indian Union and the diaspora. It also reflects on the political and social integration of Sikhs within the Indian Union and the prospects of an independent Sikh state in light of state- and nation-building in India and Pakistan and China’s growing assertiveness in north-west South Asia. The Sikh case, it is argued, raises important methodological issues for the comparative study of ethnicity and nationalism – the need to include socially complex minorities like the Sikhs and the Jews, the role of such minorities in supporting consociationalism arrangements in colonial administrations, and their contribution to the cultural democratisation of the public sphere in Western liberal democracies. The Sikh case is also an example of the ‘nationalism of small peoples’, a ‘nation without a state’ and, more recently, of ‘nation-destroying’. The work concludes with a plea to take the study of Sikh nationalism seriously.

In this chapter, I explore the topic of the economic rights of non-citizens through the lens of the history of philosophy. I make two different but interconnected arguments in this chapter. In the first part of the chapter, I examine the claims made by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich von Hayek that a well-regulated market, supplemented by robust government support, is necessary for the realization of basic economic rights. Though the views of Locke, Smith, and Hayek are important in understanding how economic rights can be realized and the role the state should play in this, they do not directly address what this might mean for non-citizens. I suggest in the next part that their views must be supplemented by the work of Hannah Arendt and her concept of the right to have rights. I suggest that her argument that the right to have rights is more fundamental than human rights can be extended to economic rights. Non-citizens need a right to have economic rights, that is, a right to belong to an economic community. I conclude by discussing the example of refugees in the Global South and some ways that we might support a right to have economic rights.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century moral debates about wealth, poverty and corruption in the emerging commercial state. In particular, it discusses four important moments in these debates: Bernard Mandeville’s celebration of avarice and vice, the fustigations of writers like Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon about the corruption they attributed to financial and commercial innovations, Adam Ferguson’s worries about the corruptions of commercial modernity, and, finally, Adam Smith’s indignation at the spirit of monopoly that threatened to undermine the moral and material gains of commercial society.

This chapter investigates whether there is a general right to conscientious exemption in US law. The chapter concludes that there is, albeit its scope varies geographically. There are at least five rules of law which ground the right. These are: (1) the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment under federal constitutional law as interpreted by the USSC in Smith (albeit this is now very narrow), and the Free Exercise clauses of some state constitutions which did not interpret their own constitutions according to Smith; (2) The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which applies to the federal government and similar state legislation that applies in the states which have enacted them; (3) the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) which applies mainly to state governments in the context of land regulation, zoning laws and prisoners; (4) Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and similar state level legislation) which requires certain categories of employers to accommodate the religious beliefs of their employees in performing their employment duties; and (5) the constitutional requirements of Church Autonomy.

In the framework of a critical illustration of the contemporary history of economics, this chapter provides a brief exposition of the main characteristics of the Classical and the marginalist approaches, including the notions of self-interest and felicific calculus and Marx’s thought

What impact did the Scottish Enlightenment have on the American founding? Given the variegated, feisty composition of the Scottish Enlightenment, this chapter resists the idea that that movement had any single, unequivocal effect on America. It instead surveys the rich array of ways in which Scottish thought found its way into America and then examines a series of interactions between particular Scottish thinkers and particular American activists. What was Frances Hutcheson’s influence on Thomas Jefferson? Did David Hume or Adam Smith have a greater influence on Madison? What lessons did various American educational leaders take away from Thomas Reid’s response to David Hume? By looking in detail at these three cases, the chapter attempts to convey the flavour, as well as the content, of the reception of Scottish philosophy in America.

From the premise that humans are social beings, the Scots develop negative and positive arguments. Negatively, they reject all contractarian/rationalistic accounts of social living and downplay any crucial role for ‘Great Men’. Positively, they emphasise the effects of socialisation and underline the factors underpinning social coherence (here called institutional stickiness). Customary ways of behaving, and the institutions thus constituted, not only stabilise but also constrain, and since habits are creatures of time, then it is gradual alterations in the sentiments of people that changes them. In contrast to any glib confidence in ‘progress’, the Scots are more cautious. They do believe in improvement, but it is not guaranteed and is a gradual process.

Adam Smith has acquired the reputation as the father of economics, but he was not alone among the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment in his interest in the emerging discipline of political economy. This chapter examines the broader context of the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment and relates it to the general move from the mercantile attitudes behind the great disaster of the Darien project to the critique of them developed by Smith in the Wealth of Nations. The economic thinking of David Hume and Sir James Steuart and others is examined in order to illustrate the breadth of the Scottish contribution to the development of thinking about the economy.

‘Historiography’ charts the profound influence the historiography of the Scottish Enlightenment has had on the way history has been understood in the Anglosphere. It charts the growth of stadial history, which introduced the codification of progress and development into historical time and now is the dominant mode of history throughout the world. The chapter locates the roots of stadial thinking on Scotland’s political and historical position in the eighteenth century and explains how these have been systematically misrepresented by the historiography designed to address them, leading to fundamental ethnic and political misunderstandings about the nature of the Scottish past.