The Origins of Scottish Nationhood

Neil Davidson

Description

The traditional view of the Scottish nation holds that it first arose during the Wars of Independence from England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although Scotland was absorbed into Britain in 1707 with the Treaty of Union, Scottish identity is supposed to have remained alive in the new state through separate institutions of religion (the Church of Scotland), education, and the legal system.



Neil Davidson argues otherwise. The Scottish nation did not exist before 1707. The Scottish national consciousness we know today was not preserved by institutions carried over from the pre-Union period, but arose after and as a result of the Union, for only then were the material obstacles to nationhood – most importantly the Highland/Lowland divide – overcome. This Scottish nation was constructed simultaneously with and as part of the British nation, and the eighteenth century Scottish bourgeoisie were at the forefront of constructing both. The majority of Scots entered the Industrial Revolution with a dual national consciousness, but only one nationalism, which was British. The Scottish nationalism which arose in Scotland during the twentieth century is therefore not a revival of a pre-Union nationalism after 300 years, but an entirely new formation.



Davidson provides a revisionist history of the origins of Scottish and British national consciousness that sheds light on many of the contemporary debates about nationalism.
Preface

Introduction

1. What is National Consciousness?

2. From National Consciousness to Nation States

3. Was there a Scottish Nation before 1707?

4. Highland vs Lowland Scotland vs England

5. Scotland After 1707: Oppressed or Oppressor Nation?

6. British Imperialism and National Consciousness in Scotland

7. Scottish History and Highland Mythology

8. The Reality of the Highlands: Social Assimilation and the Onslaught on Gaelic Culture

9. Burns and Scott: Radical and Conservative Nations

10. Class and National Consciousness in the age of Revolution

Conclusion

Afterword

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Histoire
• Escocia
• History of Europe
• Great Britain
• History
• Scotland
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715695
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Origins of Scottish Nationhood
Neil Davidson

The Origins of Scottish Nationhood
First published 2000 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
Copyright © Neil Davidson 2000
The right of Neil Davidson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1609 3 hbk ISBN 978 1 7837 1569 5 ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1570 1 Mobi
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Davidson, Neil, 1957–
The origins of Scottish nationhood / Neil Davidson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0–7453–1609–3
1. Scotland—History—18th century. 2. Nationalism—Scotland— History—18th century. 3. National characteristics, Scottish—History— 18th century. 4. Scotland—History—The Union, 1707. I. Title.
DA809 .D38 2000 941.107—dc21
99–089799
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the European Union by TJ International Ltd, Padstow
Contents
Preface, Acknowledgements, Dedication
Introduction 1 . What Is National Consciousness? 2 . From National Consciousness to Nation States 3 . Was There a Scottish Nation Before 1707? 4 . Highland versus Lowland, Scotland versus England 5 . Scotland After 1707: Oppressed or Oppressor Nation? 6 . British Imperialism and National Consciousness in Scotland 7 . Scottish History and Highland Mythology 8 . The Reality of the Highlands: Social Assimilation and the Onslaught on Gaelic Culture 9 . Burns and Scott: Radical and Conservative Nations 10 . Class Consciousness and National Consciousness in the Age of Revolution

Conclusion
Afterword
Notes
Index
Preface, Acknowledgements, Dedication
This book was originally part of a study of the Scottish bourgeois revolution which I began early in 1993 and completed late in 1998. 1 It became apparent during my research that the Scottish experience was distinct in two ways from that of the other European countries which underwent their revolutions before 1848. In the United Netherlands, England and France the transition to a capitalist economy and the formation of national consciousness were preconditions for their respective revolutions taking place, in Scotland they were outcomes of the revolution. My attempt to deal with these issues began to extend the chronological and thematic boundaries of the work in successive drafts. The first (1995) did not deal with them at all. In the second (1997) they shared a final chapter on post-revolutionary developments. By the third (also 1997) they demanded a chapter each, but the chapter on the nation could no longer be accommodated in that book and had itself to be expanded to book length. The reasons why this aspect of the Scottish Revolution required such expansion are set out in the Introduction.
Any writer who uses the word ‘origins’ in the title of a book should keep in mind what the French historian, Marc Bloch, called ‘the idol of origins’. Bloch complained that his fellow-historians failed to clarify whether they used the term ‘origins’ to mean ‘beginnings’ or ‘causes’. 2 I am concerned with both. The Scottish nation did not always exist (it began during a specific historic period), nor was it inevitable that it should exist (it was caused by a specific combination of economic, social and political events). My precise title, The Origins Of Scottish Nationhood , is a homage to an important essay of the same name by George Kerevan which appeared in The Bulletin Of Scottish Politics during 1981. Given the limited circulation of that journal, it is unlikely that more than a few hundred people ever read the piece, but when I first came across it in the second-hand box of Clyde Books in Glasgow early in the 1990s, it impressed me as one of the few serious attempts to outline a Marxist analysis of Scottish historical development. 3 It remained in outline since Kerevan ultimately abandoned his original orthodox Trotskyism (which was not without its own problems) for the free-market Scottish nationalism he currently advocates through his weekly column in The Scotsman . Nevertheless, it would be sectarian folly not to acknowledge that his earlier incarnation at least asked the right questions of Scottish history, some of which I have tried to answer here.
Those answers were presented publicly as contributions to three very different events: the London Socialist Historians Society annual conference, Political Change , at the Institute of Historical Research in May 1998; the Supplementary Studies Programme of the Open University Foundation Course Society And Social Science Summer School, at Stirling University in August 1998; and the week-long event, Marxism At The Millennium , organised by the Socialist Workers Party at the University of London in July 1999. I am grateful to the organisers and to the historians, students and comrades who attended these meetings and participated in the discussions. Parts of my argument were rehearsed in two articles for the journal International Socialism . The editor, John Rees, was kind enough to allow me to reproduce passages which originally appeared there. 4
My thanks are particularly due to the two people who, more than any others, were on the receiving end of my pleas for fraternal criticism. Alex Law read and commented on the various drafts and his intellectual solidarity with the entire project was invaluable to me throughout. Cathy Watkins read the final draft with a view to improving my English (although I fear this may have proved beyond even her powers) and asked the kind of sensible questions of the contents that a normal person who is neither an academic nor a political activist might ask.
I knew three of my four grandparents: Helen and William Farquhar and Mary Davidson. They belonged to a generation which formed perhaps the last direct link with a rural Scotland – the farming communities of Aberdeenshire – that came to an end during their youth in and around the First World War, a process later recorded in literature by Lewis Grassic Gibbon and in historiography by Ian Carter. 5 All three lived in the great metropolis of Aberdeen from the 1920s onwards, but to me, growing up in the town during the 1960s, their cultural identities always seemed to be that of the countryside from which they came, rather than those of the Scottish or British nations whose origins are discussed here. This book is dedicated to their memory.
Neil Davidson Edinburgh 22 December 1999
Introduction
If it were possible to draw a graph showing the strengthening of Scottish national consciousness over the last 20 years, it could be charted in relation to the Conservative party general election victories of 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, and would show the curve ascending more steeply with the announcement of each result. The latter two were particularly significant in this respect, for the moment when our imaginary graph would take the sharpest upward swing would be after the 1987 election, when the cycle by which Labour governments replaced Conservative ones in succession appeared to have been permanently broken. In other words, this heightened sense of Scottishness was not an assertion of primordial being but a response to a particular political conjuncture, often described as involving a ‘democratic deficit’ whereby the majority of Scots regularly voted for parties other than the Conservatives, but nevertheless ended up with Conservative governments. There is nothing unusual or shameful about this: nationhood is never asserted for its own sake, but always in order to achieve some economic, social or political goal. Opposition to Thatcherism was, however, probably no greater across Scotland as a whole than it was in, say, northeast England or Inner London. (It is worth noting, in this connection, that although the Conservative party received the largest number of votes in England between 1979 and 1997, the majority of English people also voted for other parties throughout that period.) Because Scotland is a nation, however, and not a region or an urban district, opposition took a form which was impossible in most other parts of Britain. The key issue was less the abstract question of democracy and more the concrete consequences of continued Conservative rule, in the shape of increased unemployment, attacks on the welfare state and the introduction of the Poll Tax. Since the Labour party seemed unable to win general elections (and how often was the impossibility of a Labour victory asserted as an incontrovertible fact during these years!) for many Scots the only solution seemed to be a national one, in the form of a devolved Scottish Parliament or an independent Scottish state.
For some writers, such as Tom Nairn, the Thatcher and Major years had the effect of awakening a nationalism that was missing, presumed dead, but in fact merely sleeping. 1 Yet what was interesting about the ‘awakening’ was the form which it took. Over the last 20 years there has been a greater flourishing of Scottish culture than at any time since the 1920s and 1930s, and on a far broader basis than the largely literary focus of those decades. Yet this has not been accompanied by any significant or sustained increase in support for the Scottish National Party, which has never returned to, let alone surpassed, the high point of 30.4 per cent of the vote in the general election of October 1974, several years before the renaissance of national identity began. This is not to suggest that Scottishness is only registered at a cultural level, but at the political level it focussed on the demand for a Scottish Parliament, not a Scottish state. In other words, there appears to be a division between Sco