THIS week around the world people will be celebrating the 258th birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard and one of the greatest poets and lyricists of all time. But why has the ploughman poet from rural Ayrshire retained such universal affection to the extent that folk around the globe will gather publicly to toast his name?

Robert Burns was not just a great poet – he spoke for his times. And because he spoke for his times, he spoke for all time about the better human society we all want to live in. Including a free and independent Scotland.

Rabbie was born in the year 1759, arguably the birthdate of the modern world as we know it today. It was only 52 years since Scotland lost its nationhood. Many were still alive who were born in a free Scotland. It was from talking to such folk that Burns could write:

The English stell we could disdain,

Secure in valour’s station;

But English gold has been our bane-

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

That English gold was the money supplied by the English Treasury to indemnify those Scottish aristocrats who had lost money in the ill-fated Darien Scheme. The company set up to funnel this cash was later re-named the Royal Bank of Scotland. I wonder what happened to that?

In 1759 it was hardly more than a decade since the abortive Jacobite uprising led by Charles Edward Stuart had almost toppled the British state. The Highlands were still under military occupation. In Burns’ lifetime, Scotland was ruled on behalf of a nervous Hanoverian monarchy by the Dundas family, in particular Henry Dundas (aka Harry the 9th) who also opposed the abolition of slavery and made himself rich through the colonisation of India. Tellingly, there is a statue of Dundas in St Andrews Square, the city’s tallest monument. These were dangerous times to be a free-thinker like Burns.

The 1759 was also important because it marked a turning point in the Seven Years War between France and Britain, the first ever global conflict. In 1759, General Wolfe took Montreal, destroying French power in North America and securing the foundation of the British Empire and British trading supremacy for the next 150 years.

As a result of these political developments, 1759 sees the floodgates open on the Industrial Revolution. It is the year Josiah Wedgwood opens his pottery factory, Arthur Guinness opens his brewery in Dublin, and the Carron Company ironworks opens in Falkirk marking the start of Scotland’s industrialisation. Burns would later describe the Carron works as a vision of hell on Earth, a fitting vision of the plight of the industrial workforce being herded into the new urban factories.

If 1759 marks the rise of a new capitalist world order, it also gave birth to its critics. In that year are born not only Burns but Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) marks the foundation of modern feminism – a book Burns read and quoted. Georges Danton, a central leader of the coming French Revolution that will overthrow the French monarchy. William Wilberforce, who will lead the successful campaign to abolish slavery. And Friedrich Schiller, the great German romantic poet whose Ode To Joy is the European national anthem.

Burns is part of a stellar generation of new writers, poets and critics who are on hand to explain and criticise this new modern, industrial world. This explains Burns’ concern with collecting songs, poems and stories in the Scottish vernacular. He is determined to save and revere a popular culture and way of life that is being trampled on by the new, brash urban culture – chiefly London metropolitan one. Nothing changes there. Burns’ concern with collecting the vernacular culture touched off similar work all over Europe – one reason he came to be revered by the German Romantics such as his contemporary Friedrich Schiller.

The European success of Burns’ music and poetry – he was translated into German in his own lifetime and into Russian by 1800 – led to the emergence of an artistic and political movement we now call Romanticism. Romanticism was a conscious reaction to the horrors of the industrial revolution. It emphasised emotion and individualism and the appreciation of nature. Burns’ impact on German humanist literature and liberal political thought would be profound in the 19th century, only eclipsed with the growth of extreme nationalism in the decades before the Great War.

Burns’ artistic and political influence also spread to the Americas. Famously he wrote an ode to America’s first president, George Washington. It was in 1794 at the height of the repression of pro-revolutionary British democrats orchestrated by then home secretary Henry Dundas. But it was the greatest American to occupy the White House who revered Burns the most: Abraham Lincoln. When practising law before his first election to Congress, a copy of Burns was Lincoln’s inseparable companion on the judicial circuit. Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln named their third son William Wallace, partly in honour of the great man and partly because of Lincoln’s affection for Burns’ rendition of Scots Wha Hae.

During darkest days of the Civil War, whenever people gathered in the White House during an evening, Lincoln would read aloud to them from either Shakespeare or Burns as Confederate guns sounded just across the Potomac River. Sadly, of course, Lincoln was assassinated before he could come to Scotland to visit the birthplace of Robert Burns, his long-expressed wish. However, his widow Mary did make the pilgrimage to Ayrshire in 1869, so the shades of Burns and Lincoln finally did meet.

How overtly political was Robert Burns? In the early 1790s, Burns wrote to one patron, Robert Graham of Fintry, rejecting allegations that he was a radical as “a lie” and insisting he was “most devoutly attached” to the “glorious” British constitution. But any close reading of Burns poetry, letters and journals of his friends suggests otherwise. The 1790s was a dangerous, reactionary period and we can’t blame Burns for keeping his head down when home secretary Dundas was transporting radicals to Australia.

Radicals like a young lawyer from Glasgow called Thomas Muir, a central leader of the pro-democracy Friends of the People movement. Muir, with four others, was convicted in 1793 of sedition and sentenced to transportation Australia for 14 years. By this time Burns was an exciseman, and in trouble if he was too publicly sympathetic to the reform cause. However, shortly after Muir’s trial Scots Wha Hae appeared anonymously in the Morning Chronicle, the leading London opposition newspaper. Only after Burns was dead, two years later, was his authorship safe to announce:

Lay the proud usurpers low!

Tyrants fall in every foe!

Liberty’s in every blow!– Let us do or die!

It was Burns who, on April 10, 1790, wrote: “I have long said to myself, what are the advantages Scotland reaps from this so-called Union that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence and her very name?” Many of us still ask that same question. Perhaps one day, in the not-too-distant future, we will replace the statue of Henry Dundas in Edinburgh with that of Robert Burns.