The year 2007 marked the three hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Union and the creation of the British state, and, as might be expected, this has led to an increase in scholarly interest in Anglo-Scottish relations. In the main, however, that interest has been north of the border. In contrast to the bicentenary of the American Declaration of Independence or that of the French Revolution, there was next to no official recognition in Britain of the anniversary of its origin. The tendency of the English to regard the Union of 1707 as little more than a footnote in terms of their historical continuity has meant that most scholarly interest in the multinational dimension of British culture and history has originated outside England. Indeed, recent cultural and historical explorations of Englishness regularly conflate the terms “England” and “Britain.” So hats off to Evan Gottlieb for his study, which examines the way that Britishness (in the sense of its Anglo-Scottish dimension) was constructed in the eighteenth century.

In particular, Gottlieb focuses on the role of sympathy, as propounded in the Scottish Enlightenment by Frances Hutchison and Adam Smith, as a mechanism by which Scots and English could construct a British national identity. In its Scottish Enlightenment form, sympathy was a way in which emotions and feelings could be empathized through literature and could enable the reader to share in the feelings of others. The importance of sympathy as a means of empathizing with others was a critical factor in turning British public opinion against the slave trade, and a fairly well-known use of sympathy in this context is to be found in Robert Burns's poem “To a Mouse.” Gottlieb is to be congratulated in his attempt to look at how this important concept was used to promote a sense of British identity by focusing on the work of Daniel Defoe, Tobias George Smollett, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott, among others. As this study shows, this was not an easy process, with plenty of Scottish and English critics who refused to sign up for the British project. Gottlieb provides a fascinating insight into the continuity of Anglo-Scottish hostility in the eighteenth century, and a key aspect of his work is to show that sympathy as a tool had a tendency to throw up as many problems as solutions to Britishness. Gottlieb has the simplistic model of internal colonialism in his sights and argues convincingly that Scots were active promoters of a British identity, usually in the teeth of English opposition. Rule Britannia and John Bull, for example, were two well-known Scottish contributions to Britishness in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Scottish literati were more enthusiastic promoters of a British identity than their English counterparts were, and, although Gottlieb does not put too much stress on this, it does seem to be the case that the Scots were involved in an uphill struggle.

The extent to which this created a cultural schizophrenia, as the Scots found their endeavors (and cultural sacrifices) rebuffed and retreated back into a Scottish identity, is explored. Gottlieb is wary of the cultural schizophrenia model of Scottish identity and instead posits the more sensible idea that Scots were skeptical of “fixed” identities and were prepared to mold and remold their heritage and identity in response to changing environments. In his reading of events, identity was not an “either or” model, but one that was constantly renegotiated. In this way, sympathy was a useful tool, as it meant there was a constant need to reimagine identity and shift expectations. An interesting aspect of this study is the light that it sheds on the diffuse and divergent range of identities that went into the mix of British identity (or identities) in the eighteenth century, with attention focusing on the Highlands of Scotland, colonial adventures, and the Irish. As Gottlieb argues, romanticism and Sir Walter Scott did much to undermine the usefulness of sympathy as a vehicle for the promotion of a British identity. Enlightenment faith in progress and economic modernity gave way to romantic uncertainties. At the end of the eighteenth century, celebrating national difference proved a more effective means to construct British identity in the nineteenth century. In the future, the constituent nations of the United Kingdom could take their own identities to the table of Britishness as the Union and Unionism became the dominant mechanism of British identity in the nineteenth century. As Scott was to point out, Unionism did not mean Unitarianism, as Scots would turn out to be “damned mischievous Englishmen.” In Scotland, Britishness was turned into an imperial partnership, although, as England's cultural dominance in the British Isles continued to grow in the nineteenth century, it was not a partnership of equals. This is a timely book that deserves a wide readership at a time when British identity is currently in as much flux as it ever was in the eighteenth century.