14 research outputs found

    Jacobitism in Scotland: episodic cause or national movement

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    The primary purpose of this article is to examine the strength in depth of Jacobitism within Scotland and to reappraise its national impact. Notwith-standing disparaging Whig polemicists and their apologists in Anglo-British historiography, there was undoubted political substance to the appeal of Jacobitism in Scotland that stretched over seven decades. But the search for this substance raises a series of questions. Was Jacobitism anything more than an occasional interruption in the body politic? Can it be viewed as a patriotic agenda that engaged Scots politically and culturally as well as militarily and subversively? Above all, was Jacobitism a sustained political movement or merely an episodic cause in Scotland? Accordingly, the distinctiveness of Scottish Jacobitism is explored through fresh archival research and extensive polemical material prior to determining whether this distinctiveness found expression more as a movement than as a cause. The focus of debate is shifted away from the Stuart courts in exile, from dynastic identification, and from espionage and diplomacy towards Jacobite communities at home and abroad, towards patriotic identification with Scotland and towards issuesof po litical economy. In the process, a political culture of Scottish Jacobitism can be sustained in terms of its confessional and intellectual development, its organizational structure and its commercial and social networking. Nevertheless, the argument favouring a movement over a cause remains finely balanced but is shaded by the distinctive capacity of Scottish as against English or Irish Jacobitism to form alternative governments, nationally and locally in the course of major risings. More than an episodic cause, Jacobitism's persistence provoked a counter movement in Scotland, that of antiJacobitism, a wholly worthwhile area of study that has yet to be examined systematically and with intellectual rigour. It is hoped that this article will provoke such an examination

    Ostracods in the Palaeozoic?

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    The attribute traditionally used to recognise the occurrence of ostracods in the Palaeozoic stratigraphic record has in essence been the presence of a bivalved arthropod carapace of small size. Discoveries offering unparalleled insight into the soft part paleobiology of tiny bivalved Palaeozoic arthropods, when taken together with the notion that a bivalved carapace is a convergent phenomenon within the Arthropoda, have in the last decade revolutionised our understanding of the nature and stratigraphic record of the major groups of ostracod present in the Palaeozoic. Evidence from appendages and other soft parts is crucial in determining systematic affinity. Evidence from the soft part anatomy of bradoriids and phosphatocopids has undermined the record of ostracods in the Cambrian, but molecular and fossil evidence implies that they may be present at that time. In the absence of soft parts the case that leperditicopids (Ordovician-Devonian) are ostracods remains uncertain. Myodocopes certainly occur in the Palaeozoic, as determined on a wealth of new palaeobiological evidence. As yet, supposed Palaeozoic podocopes are represented in practical terms only by fossil shells. The systematic affinity of palaeocopes - a major group in the Palaeozoic and hitherto recognised as a coherent taxon - remains enigmatic, and they may turn out to represent an artificial grouping
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