The word ‘Whig’ is a tricky word, but very useful. It is a political word, but also a historical world. It is arguably the best word to sum up the particularly English psychosis. So it is worth an explanation.
In the 18th century it was common in Europe to say that “the English” were the best historians. Europeans did not distinguish: for most of ‘the English’ were, in fact, Scottish: the Europeans meant Hume, Robertson, Ferguson. David Hume was the author of the History of Great Britain (1754), later renamed by him, History of England, as he got bored of Irish and Scottish history. (I don’t know who wrote the elaborate Wikipedia page about Hume, but they refer to the history as the History of England throughout, only adding in footnote, “sometimes referred to as History of Great Britain”. Nay.) William Robertson was the author of A History of Scotland (1759), History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, with a View of the Progress of Society in Europe (1769) and The History of America (1777). Adam Ferguson was the author of Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Hume famously thought that the “English” couldn’t write this sort of literature, and wrote to Gibbon on the publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) to say that it was remarkable to see an Englishman writing history so well, a bit like a dog dancing on its hind legs. Men like Voltaire, when asked to write a history of France, said, sullenly, that the “English” had the advantage that English history was interesting – Magna Carta, Civil War, all that – whereas French history was “insipid”.
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