Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present

by Murray Pittock

Scotland’s highly developed institutions and professions in law, medicine, banking, education and the army, among others, created an associational network structure which rested on, reinforced and complemented longstanding kinship and geographical networks in a small country with strong regional, family and civic identities. In the nineteenth century, previously politically contested areas of Scottish culture (tartan, military piping, Scots language and literature) became the vehicles for a unified cultural narrative of the performance of Scotland abroad, a theatrical memory created by language, music and spectacle. This was the Scottish world created by Scottish Romanticism which – if it did not create a political nationalism as was the case elsewhere in Europe – nonetheless became the foundational story of Scotland in the world, and remains to this day key to the Scottish brand.

The extent of Scottish experience abroad was historically driven by three main factors: Scotland’s relative overproduction of educated men and the inability of the country to offer scope for their ambition; the impossibility of expanding territorially because of a disproportionately powerful neighbour; and the country’s economy, which not only lacked bullion and required foreign currency to maintain monetary circulation, but also stood in need of a proactive trade policy.

The Tour largely depended – at least implicitly – on a particular vision of Italy as backward and in decline, a valuable lesson of the ruins of a great Empire undermined from within by Catholic luxury and weakness: a view of the fall of Rome most eloquently taken by Edward Gibbon (1737–94). Even those from more modest backgrounds in Scotland, such as the novelist and surgeon Tobias Smollett (1721–71), began to view Continental Europe through this new British prism, one far removed from those of the Scoto-Irish Jacobite merchants of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bordeaux or Livorno.

The Scottish higher education system gave its model to the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere: today, university provision in the United States is truer to the history of Scottish higher education than Scotland is itself, both in its generalism and in the provision of professional subjects such as law as a second rather than a first degree. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Scotland enjoyed a lead through the development of its native higher education tradition rather than being a ruletaker from an increasingly centralized British system, its strong focus on links between business and study, and later in some universities between study and industry, were important in driving innovation.

For a long time, American Scottish societies were seen as orthogonal to today’s Scotland, and unrealistically nostalgic and detached from the realities of the country as it now is: this was most seriously the case in the South, where a large minority of Americans identifying as of Scottish ancestry or heritage live. The right-wing nature of US society in these states and the undoubted investment in Scottishness as a form of ‘respectable’ white cultural identity has led over the last thirty years to a number of journalists making ‘a genre out of articles that simplistically link the Scottish heritage movement in the United States to a white supremacist conspiracy’: this is, though not entirely without foundation as this book has indicated, a reductive and negative frame in which to view the complex nature of diasporic relationships.

Research carried out in the 1990s indicated that North Americans of Scottish heritage usually remember their families as having left Scotland for reasons of economic betterment even if historically they were cleared off the land, while those of Irish heritage recollect displacement and oppression even if their ancestors left for economic betterment. Victimhood, which tends towards unifying the political views of a diaspora, is not often found in the Scottish diaspora or in those who adhere to it, and indeed there is sometimes a degree of self-congratulation to the extent that it is not unknown for American Scots to be of the view that all the most able Scots have already left the country, however much they may invoke it in performative memory. This view is not of course incompatible with the general view of the Scotland brand as lacking in technology and innovation. For many, Scotland is what it used to be, not what it has become.