Professor Daniel Szechi
Professor of Early Modern History
daniel.szechi@manchester.ac.uk
Career
I did my first degree at the University of Sheffield, 1976-9 and my D.Phil at St Antony's College, Oxford. After completing in 1982 I moved back to Sheffield to take up a three-year University Research Fellowship before teaching for a year at the University of Hull and then for nearly three years at St John's College, Oxford. From there I moved on to the US, where I taught for eighteen years at Auburn University in Alabama. I took up the post of Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester in August 2006.
Research
One of the most enduringly romantic images of eighteenth-century Britain is of Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") escaping through the heather after the battle of Culloden in 1746. The Stuart prince and the rising associated with him have accordingly become very familiar to many who know little else about British history. Yet nearly thirty years previously there was a larger, potentially much more threatening, Jacobite revolt against the Hanoverian regime. From September 1715 to February 1716 most of Scotland and, for a time, parts of northern England rose in arms against the political order that had prevailed since 1688. Two major battles were fought, one on Sheriffmuir near Dunblane and another on the streets of Preston in Lancashire, in which well over a thousand lives were lost. In the aftermath dozens of captured rebels were executed, hundreds more transported to be sold into indentured servitude in the American and Caribbean colonies, northern Scotland was comprehensively looted and the Catholic community in northern England was judicially ransacked and intimidated.
And it is the '15 that is the subject of my latest book, 1715. The Great Jacobite Rising (Yale University Press, 2006). It takes in all three kingdoms and the Jacobite diaspora in Europe with a view to exploring how the rebels persuaded themselves that they had come to the right time and place to overthrow the prevailing political order, and the fundamental social dynamics of the rebellion, in terms of who commanded, who obeyed and why they thought challenging the military might of the contemporary British state was feasible. I also investigated the processes of creating a shadow-state in rebel-held areas and how the Jacobites trained and armed their troops. The proof of the pudding in war is, though, who wins and who loses, so I also took a close look at the military clashes which gave the rising its beginning and end. Taken in the round, there is nothing that better exposes the pathology of a society than upheaval and the shattering of verities, and, in particular, the way civil order is reasserted in its aftermath can tell us a great deal about how the machine worked. Hence that is where the book concludes, with an analysis of the reknitting of the social order once the war was over.
New Project: the Carnegy Letters
This project is the latest stage in my exploration of the Jacobite mind. Early Eighteenth century Britain was a brittle polity. Behind the facade of political stability, politeness and commercial prosperity were deep ideological tensions that periodically expressed themselve in major uprisings. These enemies of the established order are conventionally lumped together simply as "Jacobites". Such a lumping is, however, highly misleading. Jacobitism was an evolving political movement and its meaning thus metamorphosed from decade to decade. Just as importantly, its disparate constituencies each had their own agendas. Though all Jacobites agreed the restoration of the Stuarts was a sine qua non, the political objectives they sought through the medium of such a restoration were wildly divergent. The objectives pursued by patrician Anglican Jacobites, for example, differed radically from those of plebeian Irish Catholics and bourgeois Scottish Episcopalians. The mentalité which moved each constituency was thus distinct from its peers and research on their mindsets must deal with each group on its own terms.
Over the past twenty years I have explored the Jacobite mind in a series of books and articles; now I will extend my exploration into the Jacobite heart of darkness. For at the irreducible core of the Jacobite cause in mainland Britain lay the Scottish Roman Catholics. The tiny Scottish Catholic minority was strikingly more activist and directly instrumental in making Jacobite events happen than any other group in the Jacobite movement. They were amongst the first to embrace the Stuart cause and amongst the last to desert it. Yet their role and their vision has been obscured by both contemporaries and posterity.
My primary vehicle for this exploration is a particular individual: James Carnegy, a priest in the underground Catholic church in Scotland. A regular part of his duties was to write to his superiors in Europe describing the state of the mission, news, gossip and anything else that seemed appropos. He duly wrote at least 616 letters, creating a unique archive of ideal materials for the analysis of a mentalité. These letters constitute a major portion of the Blairs Letters collection held by the Scots Catholic Archives in Edinburgh, which are basically the entire surviving record of the Scots College in Paris, the major training centre for Catholic priests in Scotland from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. The College was destroyed by a mob during the French revolution and only a small proportion of its archives were saved. Hence the special quality of the Carnegy correspondence. There is nothing like it remaining from this period.
There is, however, a major problem with Carnegy's correspondence. Carnegy was the physical embodiment of the neuroses of the prevailing regime in the British Isles. To prevent people like him communicating with their co-religionists overseas the governments of the three kingdoms regularly intercepted overseas correspondence. Carnegy accordingly wrote the great majority of his letters allusively as if he was a merchant writing from Britain to partners on the Continent and in a cant code, where the identities of those referred to were masked by innocuous invented names. Many of his codelists were subsequently lost, and the context that would enable Carnegy's readers to understand what he was talking about when he refers to the sale of particular types of merchandise, lawsuits won and lost, etc, has receded into obscurity. The consequence has been that this rich source has proved difficult to use even for a scholar steeped in the relevant sources.
I propose to tackle this problem by approaching the writing of a book on Carnegy and the Scottish Catholic mindset in two stages, as I did with my book on George Lockhart of Carnwath. Stage one will be the preparation of an edition of the Carnegy letters. Carnegy was an energetic man who added two new rôles to that of mission priest: spy and Jacobite agent. Using the Catholic underground he moved about unobtrusively assessing the mood of the country and reporting on people, events and the disposition of government forces. In consequence his letters, when deciphered, contain a plethora of material on everything from contemporary marital relationships to theological controversies, and opening this resource to historians of early eighteenth century Britain will significantly boost the breadth of sources available to scholars working in this era.
I will publish the correspondence in electronic form, with the British History Online project hosted by the Institute of Historical Research. Ultimately I plan to present the reader with a densely annotated, edited transcript of each letter juxtaposed to the scanned original, thus maximising the transparency of the editorial process and allowing revisions whenever necessary. By the time the edition of the letters is complete and on the web I hope fully to comprehend Carnegy's vision of the world, and will be able to turn to stage two, the ultimate goal of the whole project: writing the analysis of his, and the, Scottish Catholic Jacobite, mentalité.
Selected Publications
Books
1715: the Great Jacobite Rebellion (Yale University Press, New Haven, pp. xvi + 351, 2006)
George Lockhart of Carnwath 1681-1731: a Study in Jacobitism (Tuckwell Press, East Lothian, pp. x + 230, 2002)
'Scotland's Ruine': Lockhart of Carnwath's Memoirs of the Union (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Aberdeen, pp. xxxvii + 302, 1995)
The Jacobites. Britain and Europe, 1688-1788 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. xxvi + 172, 1994)
with Prof. G. Holmes, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain 1722-1783 (Longmans, pp. xvi + 439, 1993)
Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1698-1732 (Scottish History Society, Edinburgh, pp. xxxviii + 365, 1989)
Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710-14 (John Donald Press, Edinburgh, pp. ix + 220, 1984)
Articles and Essays
'"A Nation much given to changes": the French Understanding of English Politics in 1715,' Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, 32 (2004) 65-81; (
'The Image of the Court. Idealism, Politics and the Evolution of the Stuart Court 1689-1730,' in, The Stuart Court in Rome. The Legacy of Exile, ed. Edward Corp (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 49-64.
'The Jacobite Movement,' in, The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Harry T. Dickinson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 81-96.
with Margaret Sankey, 'Elite Culture and the Decline of Scottish Jacobitism 1716-1745,' Past and Present, no. 173 (2001) 90-128.
'A Blueprint for Tyranny? Sir Edward Hales and the Catholic Jacobite Response to the Revolution of 1688,' English Historical Review, cxvi. (2001) 342-67.
'"Cam Ye O'er Frae France?": Defeat, Exile and the Mind of Scottish Jacobitism, 1716-27,'
Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998) 357-90.
'Constructing a Jacobite: the Social and Intellectual Origins of George Lockhart of Carnwath", Historical Journal, 40 (1997) 977-996.
'Defending the True Faith: Kirk, State and Catholic Missioners in Scotland 1653-1755,' Catholic Historical Review, lxxxii. (1996) 397-411.
'The Jacobite Revolution Settlement, 1689-1696,' English Historical Review, cviii. (1993) 610-28.
'The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Arthur Kay,' in, Camden Fourth Series, Royal Historical Society, xxxi. (1992) 321-48.
'Scotland and the Hanoverians,' in, Subjects of the Early Modern State. The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, ed. Mark Greengrass (1991), pp. 116-33.
'The Jacobite Theatre of Death,' in, The Jacobite Challenge, eds Eveline Cruickshanks and Jeremy Black (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 57-74.
with Dr D. Hayton, 'John Bull's Other Kingdoms: the Government of Scotland and Ireland,' in, Britain in the First Age of Party, 1680-1745. Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes, ed. Clyve Jones (1987), pp. 241-80
'The First Tory Party in the Commons, 1710-14: a case-study in structural change and political evolution,' Parliamentary History, v. (1986) 1-16
'The Politics of "Persecution": Scots Episcopalian Toleration and the Harley Ministry,' in, Toleration and Persecution, Studies in Church History, ed. William J. Sheils, xxi. (1984) 275-89.
Courses Taught
War and Society in Early Modern Europe
This era of European warfare is often characterised as encompassing a revolution in military affairs, and certainly represented a break with the past in terms of the outcomes in military clashes between European and non-European powers. The course explores the origins of this momentous transition in global politics, as European states worked out better and better ways of destroying each other and then turned those same techniques outwith their own territories in the competitive pursuit of power and profit beyond the seas.
The Contours of Power in Eighteenth Century Britain
Who rules, and how? There are many different ways of controlling, or attempting to control, any society. These range from the physical to the spiritual and operate at multiple different levels from the conscious to the reflexive. Every human society embodies such a matrix of power relationships. This course will explore the outlines and working of that matrix in eighteenth century Britain.
MA Module: Jacobitism and the Making of the British Polity
This course will introduce students to both sides of the Jacobite phenomenon. Between 1688 and 1760 the prevailing political order in the British Isles was under sometimes hidden, sometimes open, threat from an underground political movement dedicated to its overthrow. The movement expanded, contracted and probed to find weaknesses in the British polity it could exploit; the defenders of the British polity expanded, contracted and reconstructed it to defeat the Jacobite challenge. The course will explore both sides of the struggle and its repercussions.
Other Interests
Politics, hill walking, good beer, good food and good cigars.