Official histories of parliament and the nature of the union of 1707:a forgotten episode in Anglo-Scottish academic relations

The Scottish Committee on the History of Parliament was established in 1936 as an offshoot of Col. Josiah Wedgwood's scheme for a collaborative ‘history of parliament’ researched and written on biographical lines. Circumstances, however, determined that the Scottish history would take a separate path. When Wedgwood's scheme was revived in 1951 an unsuccessful attempt was made to reintegrate the two projects. Discussions between the respective managing committees were conflicted and often bad-tempered, focussing on different interpretations of the nature of the united parliament created in 1707. The Scottish committee insisted that it was a new constitutional entity, while the English saw it as a continuation of the Westminster parliament with Scottish MPs added. This story of mutual incomprehension illustrates the profound differences between Scottish and English academics in the writing of parliamentary history, and also reveals a hitherto unobserved element in the development among leading Scottish jurists of a strain of ‘legal nationalism’ based on their interpretation of the constitutional significance of the Union.

From Francis Hutcheson to James McCosh: Irish Presbyterians and Defining the Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the disputes amongst Irish Presbyterians about the teaching of moral philosophy by Professor John Ferrie in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the early nineteenth century and the substantive philosophical and theological issues that were raised. These issues have largely been ignored by Irish historians, but a discussion of them is of general relevance to historians of ideas as they illuminate a series of broader questions about the definition and development of Scottish philosophy. These are represented in the move from two philosophers who had strong connections with Irish Presbyterianism—Francis Hutcheson, the early eighteenth-century moral sense philosopher and theological moderate from County Down, and James McCosh, nineteenth-century exponent of modified Common Sense philosophy at Queen's College Belfast and a committed evangelical. In particular, this article addresses three important themes—the definition and character of ‘the Scottish philosophy’, the relationship between evangelicalism and Common Sense philosophy, and the process of development and adaptation that occurred in eighteenth-century Scottish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century.

What is the Point of Copyright History?:Reflections on Copyright at Common law in 1774 by H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui

Copyright history has long been a subject of intense and contested enquiry. Historical narratives about the early development of copyright were first prominently mobilised in eighteenth century British legal discourse, during the so-called Battle of the Booksellers between Scottish and London publishers. The two landmark copyright decisions of that time – Millar v. Taylor (1769) and Donaldson v. Becket (1774) – continue to provoke debate today. The orthodox reading of Millar and Donaldson presents copyright as a natural proprietary right at common law inherent in authors. Revisionist accounts dispute that traditional analysis. These conflicting perspectives have, once again, become the subject of critical scrutiny with the publication of Copyright at Common Law in 1774 by Prof Tomas Gomez-Arostegui in 2014, in the Connecticut Law Review ((2014) 47 Conn. L. Rev. 1) and as a CREATe Working Paper (No. 2014/16, 3 November 2014).

Taking Prof Gomez-Arostegui’s extraordinary work in this area as a point of departure, Dr Elena Cooper and Professor Ronan Deazley (then both academics at CREATe) organised an event, held at the University of Glasgow on 26th and 27th March 2015, to consider the interplay between copyright history and contemporary copyright policy. Is Donaldson still relevant, and, if so, why? What justificatory goals are served by historical investigation, and what might be learned from the history of the history of copyright? Does the study of copyright history still have any currency within an evidence-based policy context that is increasingly preoccupied with economic impact analysis?

This paper provides a lasting record of these discussions, including an editorial introduction, written comments by each of the panelists and Prof. Gomez-Arostegui and an edited transcript of the Symposium debate.

Tracking the invasive history of the green alga Codium fragile ssp. tomentosoides

The spread of nonindigenous species into new habitats is having a drastic effect on natural ecosystems and represents an increasing threat to global biodiversity. In the marine environment, where data on the movement of invasive species is scarce, the spread of alien seaweeds represents a particular problem. We have employed a combination of plastid microsatellite markers and DNA sequence data from three regions of the plastid genome to trace the invasive history of the green alga Codium fragile ssp. tomentosoides. Extremely low levels of genetic variation were detected, with only four haplotypes present in the species’ native range in Japan and only two of these found in introduced populations. These invasive populations displayed a high level of geographical structuring of haplotypes, with one haplotype localized in the Mediterranean and the other found in Northwest Atlantic, northern European and South Pacific populations. Consequently, we postulate that there have been at least two separate introductions of C. fragile ssp. tomentosoides from its native range in the North Pacific.