Scottish History
Subject History

Scholars connected with the University of Edinburgh have been interested in Scotland’s past ever since the University’s foundation in 1582.

In those days history was one of the things that all well-educated people needed to understand, but it usually had a more directly non-historical purpose than it does today. Scholars were mainly interested in the past as a means to understand public affairs, to understand God’s purposes in the world, or to understand their own identity. ‘Scottish’ history was often a means of explaining Scottish identity.

The University of Edinburgh was founded for the dual purposes of providing a broad humanistic education and of training Protestant ministers. One of the very earliest graduates of the University, Robert Johnston (c.1567-1639), wrote a Latin History of Scotland that covered the minority of James VI. Much better known is the massive History of the Kirk of Scotland by another early graduate, David Calderwood (c.1575-1650), a presbyterian minister whose polemical purpose was shouted from every page. A more humanistic work by another early alumnus of the University was the encyclopedic History of the Earldom of Sutherland by the courtier Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun (1580-1656).

The eighteenth century

New standards in history were set by the Edinburgh graduate James Anderson in his Historical Essay Shewing that the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland is Imperial and Independent (1705). This was written for an immediate political purpose during the negotiations that culminated in the Union of 1707, but took a sophisticated and critical approach to record sources rather than assuming that all previous statements about the past were straightforwardly factual.

William Robertson, who wrote an acclaimed History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and James VI (1759), later became Principal of the University. It was he who commissioned the present Old College building (begun in 1789), and he is commemorated today by the William Robertson Building, headquarters of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. Robertson also wrote histories of America and of the Emperor Charles V, some of the most influential historical works of the eighteenth century. By profession, though, Robertson was a Church of Scotland minister, much occupied with high-level ecclesiastical politics. History was not yet an entirely distinct subject.

Next: The nineteenth century