Prof. Murray Pittock: Scotland in Europe before Brexit

The Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures cordially invites you to a lecture by Prof. Murray Pittock who is Bradley Professor and Pro Vice-Principal of the University of Glasgow. The lecture will take place on 19 October at 2:15 pm in the main building of CU FA in the room P104.

Murray Pittock’s Scotland: the Global History begins with the war over Bohemia that marked the first stage of the Thirty Years’ War. In this lecture, he examines Scottish participation in that conflict and its still misunderstood role in defining political change in the British Isles, before examining two major themes of Scotland’s European experience: the centrality of trade and access to empire. Scottish commanders, diplomats and merchants alike sought to enrich themselves, their families and networks and their country, by creating locations for Scottish control throughout Continental Europe, learning at the same time from what they found there, and also participating in overseas colonial and trading ventures as a substitute for the power Scotland could not exert itself. The lecture concludes by looking at two examples where the Continent influenced Scotland – in the practice of composite monarchy and the theory of sovereignty over the sea-and the influence on Europe of the Scottish brand through the inheritance, practice and texts of Scottish Romanticism.