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.