01/08/2026
An exciting new PhD opportunity at UHI Centre for History under Dr Nicola Martin: An Environmental History of the Jacobite Risings in Scotland.
This is a fresh and fascinating filter to apply to Jacobite Studies and the programme is under the very best of direction and care.
'The project will offer a fresh interpretation of the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth century, examining how Scotland’s environment shaped, and was shaped by, the military campaigns. It will further consider cultural responses to the Scottish environment and demonstrate the role such responses played in shaping eighteenth-century understandings of identity. Historians have undertaken detailed analyses of the military campaigns in Scotland during 1715 and 1745-46 and have examined the risings and their aftermaths as part of a broader, contested, process of state formation. To date, however, the impact of the risings on the Highland landscape has either been assumed or simply ignored. This project will therefore centre the landscape in its consideration of the military campaigns and aftermaths to demonstrate how environmental factors impacted the raising, supplying, manoeuvring, and tactics of both the British and Jacobite armies and to interrogate the nature and impact of the British army’s fire and sword campaigns. In doing so, it builds on recent scholarly interventions demonstrating how the management of the Highland environment, through ‘improvement’ ideology, was a central component of eighteenth-century state formation.'
The project will offer a fresh interpretation of the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth century, examining how Scotland’s environment shaped, and was shaped by, the military campaigns. It will further consider cultural responses to the Scottish environment and demonstrate the role such responses p...
