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The portrayal of the Gaels as noble savages did not begin in the Romantic era - earlier writers who used this trope include Boece (1527) and Buchanan (1583). The rehabilitation of Gaels as valuable national subjects also began before the eighteenth century, for example in Jacobite discourses from the 1690s onwards: as the Stuart cause relied heavily on Highland armies, its anglophone supporters came to see Gaels in a more positive light, as patriotic heroes and potential saviours of their country from illegitimate rule (Donaldson 1976; Pittock 1994: 41-42, 81-82). But the full establishment of such idealised images of the Highlander only happened later in the eighteenth century, after the final subjugation of Jacobitism and in connection with the increasing integration of Gaels (and Scotland as a whole) into Britain's culture, society and government army.
The very thoroughness of social transformation and of the intraBritish "civilising" and homogenising mission now became the basis for a new romanticisation of tradition, rural life and local difference - for instance as an aesthetic alternative to Classicism, or a moral reaction against the negative sides of progress, such as urbanisation, industrialisation and the economic insecurity that capitalism could entail. This forms part of the general framework of European Romanticism, which idealised not only peasant and folk cultures in mainstream languages, but also minority cultures within Europe itself as well as certain indigenous peoples encountered during overseas colonial ventures, such as Native Americans, Maori and Pacific Islanders. Where they were not (or no longer) dangerous, such cultural Others underwent a discursive transformation from ignoble to noble savages. Conquest and domination over nature, culture and people could go hand in hand with the romanticisation of what had been subdued. Subjugation could even be a prerequisite for romanticisation.
The closeness of romantic images of noble savagery to more openly hostile colonising discourses is also reflected in the fact that they are based on similar assumptions, such as a hiérarchisation of cultures, as well as an association of the "centre" with order, rationalism, progress and the conquest of nature, whereas the peripheries are associated with disorder, irrationality/emotion/instinct, backwardness/stasis, and closeness to (or even one-ness with) nature. The main difference is in how the sides of this binarism are evaluated; for example, whether the...