The Dundas Despotism by Michael Fry

The Dundas Despotism by Michael Fry

This volume presents a biography of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742-1811) and of his son Robert, 2nd Viscount Melville (1771-1851). With other members of their family they governed Scotland from the 1770s to the 1830s, a regime dubbed the Dundas despotism and conventionally seen as a corrupt and underhand period in British history. This account radically revises this view and shows instead that the Dundases sought and achieved good government within conventional political parameters. It charts their relationship to the Scottish Enlightenment, describing how Scots applied enlightened ideas in the spirit of progressive paternalism, believing that they would maintain a conservative social order. Above all, it sets out the Dundases' part in making the 1707 Union between Scotland and England work, after nearly a century in which it had never fully done so. The book uses primary and secondary information culled from sources in England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States, and also contains details of the part played by Henry Dundas in the Warren Hastings affair and the growth of the British Raj in India.

Fry, Michael: - Michael Fry was educated at Oxford and Hamburg Universities. He has held academic positions in Scotland at Strathclyde and Edinburgh Universities, in the US at Brown University, and in Germany at Leipzig University and the Max Franck Institute, Frankfurt. He is the author of ten books on modern Scottish history, including The Dundas Despotism (1993), The Scottish Empire (2001), Wild Scots, Four Hundred Years of Highland History (2005) and Edinburgh, a History of the City (2009). He has contributed to most major Scottish and British newspapers, and has been a regular columnist for the Scotsman, the Herald and The Sunday Times.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780748603527
ISBN 10	0748603522
Title	The Dundas Despotism
Author	Michael Fry
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
Year published	1992-11-24
Number of pages	480
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable