This article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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Historians have recently begun to gather round imperial, and lately “global,” contexts in which Western political thought might be better understood. John Locke has been pulled along behind them; the contours of his account of private property have increasingly been explained by his personal connections to the colonies. But in his case, the imperial context does less interpretive work than it appears to. This article attempts to show why: it tells a different, more explicitly intellectual, story about why Locke's depiction of property took the shape that it did. It does so by underlining the extent to which seventeenth-century property debates took place in the spatial and temporal dimensions inhabited by sacred history. It then tries to explain why this might have mattered to Locke.