Should an
independent Scotland
be part of NATO?
The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
Tom Devine
The Scottish Review online is four years old today. The first edition included a diary by Professor Tom Devine. To commemorate this SR anniversary, here is an extract:
In 1914 over 700 million people made up the British Empire and it is now abundantly clear that Scotland (population in 1911 just over four million) played an absolutely central role at all levels of the imperial administration, commerce, professions, identity and, by no means least, the military machine: ‘they, the Scots, claimed not simply a reasonable but a quite indecent share of the imperial spoils’, as one scholar has put it.
An aspect which particularly intrigues me is the national memory of empire, or perhaps more accurately, the lack of it, until very recently; Scotland’s collective amnesia from the 1960s to 2000 about its imperial past is indeed very striking. Between 1937 and 2001 not a single book addressed a subject now regarded by historians as important as the Reformation, the Enlightenment and industrialisation in the formation of the modern nation.
Looking back, it is plain that Scottish readers for much of that period preferred the ‘victim history’ books of John Prebble, on such topics as the Highland Clearances, Culloden, Glencoe and the Darien Disaster, all of them selling in large numbers, to the frustration and chagrin of the Scottish history academic establishment of the time which scathingly dismissed them as an unpalatable mix of fact and fiction, while probably at the time time secretly envying Prebble’s sales and royalties.
But what does the popularity of this genre tell us about the national mentality of the 1960s and 1970s? It certainly produced a deeply distorted version of the Scottish past which the schools were incapable of correcting.
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Islay’s Scotland
The Hermitage, Dunkeld
I was told to get back
on the bus. That’s
what I did
Gary Dickson
Gary Dickson is formerly a reader in history and is an honorary fellow at the school of history, classics and archaeology, University of Edinburgh
