Scotland: The Global History: 1603 to the Present

by Murray Pittock

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.