Abstract
The subject of this book is Scottish nationality, defined in the broadest sense in terms of the external, objectifiable ways in which ideas or feelings of Scottish difference are and have been articulated or displayed. In this Introduction, I shall outline the major issues surrounding Scottish identity today, before going on to examine the historical development of the Scottish nation and the cultural and political manifestations of Scottish distinctiveness which have accompanied it through time. In doing so, a brief summary of what seem the salient and contributive points of Scottish history will be provided: insofar as the interpretation of these is controversial, this controversy is most often itself a function of Scottish nationality and the debate over what it means. History is produced and consumed on at least three levels: the professional, the popular and the sociocultural. Academics, popular historians and the cultural interpretation of certain historic moments (e.g. William Wallace, the Rising of 1745) in Scottish society at large, are more or less open to controversy in direct proportion to the event’s importance to the present.
Whoever — whatever man — be he black, white, red, or yellow, the moment he identifies with the institutions of Scotland, that moment he became a member of the Scottish nation …
Patrick Dove (1853)1
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Notes
Cited in Graeme Morton, Unionist-Nationalism (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 147.
Angela Morris and Graeme Morton, Locality, Community and Nation (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), 9.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 15
John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds), Nationalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 47
G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976 (1965)), 322
Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 21.
Robert Tombs, review of Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, in Historical Journal (June 1999), 583–4 (583).
Geoffrey Barrow, Robert the Bruce and the Scottish Identity (Tillicoultry: Saltire Society, 1984), 18.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 15–41.
Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Century, 1991), 299.
Cf. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Kennedy Index IX: 61, 362, Aberdeen City Archives; David Ditchburn, ‘Who are the Scots?’, in Paul Dukes (ed.), Frontiers of European Culture (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 89–100.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Doran Gray ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1981), xxiii.
Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Virgil, Aeneid i:33.
William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 306.
Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey, with an introduction by T. C. Smout (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1979 (1935)), 227.
For this kind of view of the Scottish soldier, see Stephen Wood, The Scottish Soldier (Manchester: National Museums of Scotland, Archive Publications, 1987).
Alice Brown in Brown et al. (eds), Politics and Society in Scotland (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1996), 211; cf. Sunday Herald, 20 February 2000.
Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary’, American Historical Review (April 1999), 490–500 (491).
Sir Henry Newbolt, The Island Race (London: Elkin Mathews, 1914 (1898)), 54, 56, 67.
Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: NLB, 1977), 152.
Richard Hoggart, The Way We Live Now (London: Pimlico, 1996 (1995)), xi–xii.
John Osmond, The Divided Kingdom (London: Constable, 1988), 127.
Murray G. H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1997), 139–40.
Mark Hauppi, ‘Scottish Nationalism: A Conceptual Approach’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Colorado (1980), 112.
Yves Meny, ‘The Political Dynamics of Regionalism’, in Roger Morgan (ed.), Regionalism in European Politics (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1986), 1–28.
Paul Scott, Defoe in Edinburgh and Other Papers (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1995), 164.
David McCrone, Understanding Scotland (London: Routledge, 1992), 60; Hauppi (1980), 128–9.
Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
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© 2001 Murray G. H. Pittock
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Pittock, M.G.H. (2001). Introduction. In: Scottish Nationality. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62906-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62906-6_1
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