The '45
Presentation of the past as a seed-bed of modernity gives it bogus relevance to modern concerns. Two hundred and fifty years after the battle of Culloden Jeremy Black looks at a classic instance – the military challenge of the Jacobites.
Modernisation is a central theme of historical studies, a major, if not the major, way of approaching and presenting the crucial topic of change – not least because cyclical methods of understanding history are no longer in fashion. Modernisation is a particularly popular way of treating the 'long eighteenth century' because it offers a way in which the period can be incorporated with, and made significant to, modern concerns: the past can be appropriated to the present. Thus the prominence given to, and treatment of, topics such as economic change, the rise of the novel, gentility, enlightenment and constitutional change establishes an agenda and frames a discourse of period. In such an analysis Jacobitism can be seen and presented as anachronistic and obsolete. Scholars who seek to demonstrate the 'modernity' of Jacobite views on, for example, marriage or estate management, contribute to this discourse by implicitly or explicitly accepting its assumptions.
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