THE DANGEROUS TRADE
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Dundee University Press
University of Dundee
Dundee DD1 4HN
http://www.dup.dundee.ac.uk/
Copyright Individual contributors severally 2010
ISBN: 978 1 84586 060 8
eISBN 978 1 84586 155 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
Typeset by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
Printed and bound in Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
In memory of Roger Absalom (19292009)
Contents
Daniel Szechi
Michael J. Levin
Steve Murdoch
Alan Marshall
Daniel Szechi
Christopher Storrs
Paolo Preto
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Michael J. Levin received his PhD in Renaissance Studies from Yale University in 1997. He is currently Associate Professor of History and Director of Humanities at the University of Akron. He is the author of Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cornell University Press, 2005).
Alan Marshall is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Head of Humanities at Bath Spa University. He has written a number of books on the early modern period: The Death of Nicholas Fairles: Law and Community in South Shields (NEEHI, 2010); Oliver Cromwell, Soldier: The Military Life of a Revolutionary at War (Brasseys, 2004); The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey: Plots and Politics in Restoration London (Sutton Publishing, 1999); The Age of Faction: Court Politics, 16601702 (Manchester University Press, 1999) and Intelligence and Espionage in the reign of Charles II, 16601685 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). In addition he has published a number of articles on seventeenth-century history. His current research in progress is on Killing Cromwell: The Death of the Leveller Party, 16491658 (History Press, 2011), which examines the nature of the transition of the Levellers from a moral force to a physical-force group and focuses chiefly on the series of plots to assassinate the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. He is also working on a volume in the Palgrave History of Britain series: Seventeenth-Century Britain, 16031707 (Palgrave, 2011).
Steve Murdoch , FSA Scot, FRHistS, is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews. His research interests include migration from the British Isles in the seventeenth century and all forms of interaction between early modern Scotland and the wider world. He has published extensively on the subject and his major publications include Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Association in Northern Europe, 16031746 (Leiden, 2006) and The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare, 15131713 (Leiden, 2010). His major edited collections include Scotland and the Thirty Years War, 16181648 (Leiden, 2001) and with Alexia Grosjean, Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, Brill, 2005). Also with Alexia Grosjean he has produced the widely acclaimed Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Biographical Database, online at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/ssne.
Paolo Preto was born in 1942, and received a degree in Italian literature at the University of Padua, where he has been Professor of Modern History since 1980. He is the author of several monographs, including: Venezia e i turchi (Sansoni, Firenze, 1975), Peste e societ a Venezia nel 1576 (Neri Pozza, Vicenza, 1979), Epidemia, paura e politica nellItalia moderna (Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1987), I Servizi segreti di Venezia (Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1994), and Persona per hora secreta . Accusa e delazione nella Repubblica di Venezia (Il Saggiatore, Milano, 2003). He is also author of various articles on the history of the council of Trent, on the Jacobin era in Italy, and on intelligence services in early modern Europe. He has also written a number of bibliographical entries for the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani . He is currently working on a book on the subject of falso storico (counterfeit sources) in the early modern era, a topic on which he has already published various articles.
Christopher Storrs is Reader in Modern History at the University of Dundee. He is the author of War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy 16901720 (Cambridge, 1999), The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 16651700 (Oxford, 2006) and editor of The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Essays in Honour of P. G. M. Dickson (Farnham, 2009). He has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European history, and is currently preparing a study of the resurgence of Spain as a power in the western Mediterranean and Italy in the generation after the War of the Spanish Succession.
Daniel Szechi is a graduate of the University of Sheffield and St Antonys College, Oxford, and after eighteen years as a Professor at Auburn University in Alabama, was appointed Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester in 2006. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society. His books include: 1715. The Great Jacobite Rebellion (Yale University Press, 2006), George Lockhart of Carnwath 16891727 : a Study in Jacobitism (Tuckwell Press, East Lothian, 2002); The Jacobites. Britain and Europe, 16881788 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1994); with Professor G. Holmes, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain 17221783 (Longman, 1993); and Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 171014 (John Donald, Edinburgh, 1984). He has also published articles in Past and Present, English Historical Review, Scottish Historical Review, Journal of British Studies, Historical Journal, Catholic Historical Review, Parliamentary History and Studies in Church History, and a number of essays in collective works.
Acknowledgements
This book was inspired by Professor Chris Whatley, Vice-Principal of the University of Dundee. It was he who perceived there might be something here worth writing about, and asked me to consider the project. Like most of my generation, I had been raised on tales of desperate deeds of derring-do by heroic spies and special forces in World War II, to say nothing of the James Bond fantasy industry, yet it had never occurred to me to write about espionage or covert operations per se. Which is a bit strange, because I am best known for my work on Jacobitism. This was the underground movement dedicated to restoring the exiled main line of the Stuart dynasty, chased out by the revolutionaries of 1688, and it obviously operated for the most part in the twilight world of the dangerous trade. Before I finally decided to work on Jacobitism I had also contemplated working on a Jewish terrorist organisation, the Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel; better known as the Stern Gang), who fought the British in Palestine between 1940 and 1948, and in the mid-1980s I was very briefly considered as a potential recruit by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Yet these moments had become curiosities of my youth, and my focus on Jacobitism was so tight that I had not realised how many of its activities were simply manifestations of a much larger phenomenon. Chris Whatleys suggestion thus came as a surprise. With typical perceptiveness he saw that my familiarity with the workings of the Jacobite underground was tolerably good preparation for thinking about the secret world of espionage and covert action as a whole, and urged me to take the project on. I am very glad he persuaded me to do so, and I owe him my happy thanks for getting me into the intriguing, frustrating, compellingly nasty world of the dangerous trade.
