An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Thomas Tyson (Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellow, 2024)
From Enlightened Persecution to Romantic Racism: Scottish Gypsies and Travellers in the Long Eighteenth Century
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Scotland’s Gypsy and Traveller population was subjected to exceptionally harsh discriminatory legislation, their perceived identity and way of life making them the target of criminal prosecution and state-sanctioned marginalisation. A century later, Scottish elites no longer viewed Gypsies and Travellers as a dangerous threat to the body politic, but instead as the remnants of a declining race, a picturesque reminder of the nation’s old social order.
This paper explores how the related processes of racialisation and romanticisation impacted Scotland’s Gypsies and Travellers over the long eighteenth century, c. 1670 to c. 1820. It also considers how these processes played a significant role in shaping the figure of the ‘Romantic Gypsy’, a stereotype that loomed large in the nineteenth-century European imagination. Scotland’s eighteenth-century Gypsies and Travellers have attracted almost no attention from historians, and this paper will demonstrate how the subject offers new perspectives on the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and race-making in the eighteenth century.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7