LALKAR

The National Question in Scotland

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Introduction

The continuing decline of British imperialism,
combined with the continuing decline of the working-class movement, has over
the past at least three decades pushed the national question in Britain to the fore.  It is not the first time in history that such a period of reaction
and decline has brought in its train disillusionment and a lack of faith in the
common forces of the working class.  This lack of faith in a common bright
future has caused sections of the British proletariat, particularly in Scotland, to take shelter under a national tent.  Even some organisations and individuals,
calling themselves ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ have not been immune from the
disease of creeping nationalism.

To the rising tide of nationalism, and the increase
in the electoral support for the Scottish National Party (SNP), the Blair
government responded by a devolution plan, endorsed in a referendum of 11
September 1997, which devolved some powers to a Scottish Parliament set up
under this dispensation.  A Welsh Assembly, though with fewer powers than the
Scottish Parliament, was also brought into existence.

The SNP is programmatically committed to Scottish
independence, a referendum on which is scheduled to be held in 2014, marking
the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, a battle won by the feudal
barons of Scotland against those of England.

To the extent that the British ruling class has
accepted that Scotland is a nation, and has conceded its right to secede and
constitute an independent state, writing on the question of Scottish nationhood
might be regarded as an exercise in futility.  Although our views will have
absolutely no effect on the holding of the referendum on Scottish independence,
they may prove to be of some significance in the actual outcome of that
referendum if we manage to spread them among the working class in Scotland.  If nothing else, writing on the question, albeit belatedly, may bring
theoretical clarity to a subject which has become enveloped in so much emotion
and obfuscation.

In order that a thing or a phenomenon may be
usefully discussed, it is necessary to define it, for without such a definition,
without an agreement on the essential characteristics and properties of the
phenomenon being discussed, all discussion about it becomes meaningless, with
the disputants talking at cross purposes and ending up hurling abuse at each
other.  This is especially so with regard to the national question, on which
people are so little informed and which, therefore, gives rise to such heated,
not to say fruitless, debate and release of emotion.  To avoid this, we shall
start with a definition of what constitutes a nation.

Definition
of a nation

The most scientific and world-famous definition of
a nation was given by Joseph Stalin.  Writing in his 1913 pamphlet, Marxism
and the National Question, Stalin defines a nation thus:

“A nation is a historically
evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and
psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.” (FLPH, Moscow 1940, p 5) (Stalin’s
emphasis)^[1]

Thus, a nation is a definite community of people. 
This community is not racial, nor is it tribal, but a historically constituted
community of people; nor is it a casual or ephemeral agglomeration, as for
instance the great empires of Cyrus and Alexander, but a stable community of
people.

However, not every stable community can constitute
a nation,  For instance, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, India, etc., are stable
communities but no one with any knowledge of the question calls them nations –
they are states and political entities.  What, then, distinguishes a national
community from a political community?

One of its distinguishing features is that a
national community is impossible to conceive without a common language, whereas
a state does not necessarily have a common language.

So, “community of language is one of the
characteristic features of a nation” (ibid p5).

From this one must not conclude “that different
nations always and everywhere necessarily speak different languages, or that
all those who speak one language necessarily constitute one nation.  A common
language for every nation, but not necessarily different languages for
different nations” (ibid pp5-6).  While there is no nation which
speaks at the one and the same time several languages, this does not exclude
that there may be two or more nations speaking the same language.

Thus, for example, the British, the American and
Australians, notwithstanding a common language – English – do not constitute
one nation.  They do not constitute a single nation because, inhabiting
different territories, they do not live together.  A nation comes into being
through lengthy and systematic intercourse between people living together for
generations.  In the absence of a common territory, naturally people cannot
live together for lengthy periods.  “Thus community of territory is
one of the characteristic features of a nation” (ibid p 6).

Community of territory is by no means sufficient to
create a nation.  What is required, in addition, is “an internal economic
bond which welds the various parts of a nation into a single whole” (ibid
p.6).

To prove his point, Stalin gives the example of his
native Georgia before the latter half of the 19th century.  At that time,
although the Georgians inhabited a common territory and spoke one language,
they did not constitute one nation, for, being split up in a number of
disconnected principalities, there was no common economic bond to weld them
together.  For centuries they indulged in internecine warfare, inciting the
Persians and Turks against each other.  Georgia only appeared on the scene as a
nation in the second half of the 19th century, with the abolition of serfdom
and the growth of capitalism, with the resultant development of the means of
communication and the institution of a division of labour between the different
parts of Georgia, which served to completely shatter the economic isolation and
self-sufficiency of the principalities, binding them together into a single
whole.

The same is true of every other territory which
went through the stage of feudalism before going on to develop capitalism. 
Thus, we may confidently assert that, in spite of the fact that there were
people inhabiting a geographical entity known as England in the 12th and 13th
centuries, or even 14th and 15th centuries, there was no English nation at that
time.  Nor could there be one, considering the splendid isolation in which the
various disconnected principalities carried on their existence.  This,
notwithstanding the fact that from time to time a successful King may have
managed to bring about their transitory amalgamation, which in time
disintegrated owing to the fortunes of war, “the caprices of the princes and
the indifference of the peasants” (ibid, p 6).

“Thus community of economic life, economic
cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation” (ibid
p5).

In addition to the above-mentioned features of a
nation, there is yet another which must be taken into account, to wit, the
specific spiritual complexion of the people constituting a nation.  This
spiritual complexion manifests itself in the peculiarities of national culture,
resultant upon conditions of existence over generations.

This psychological make-up, commonly referred to as
the “national character”, in so far as it reveals itself in a
distinctive culture common to the nation, for all its indefinability to the
observer, is definable and cannot be ignored.

We hasten to add that “national character”
is not something fixed forever, but it changes with the changes in the
conditions of life.  However, since it exists at every given moment, it leaves
its stamp on the physiognomy of the nation.

“Thus community of psychological make-up, which
manifests itself in a community of culture, is one of the characteristic
features of a nation”.

The above, then, are the characteristic features of
a nation, which Stalin summarized in his pithy definition cited at the
beginning of this section.

None of the above characteristics is by itself
sufficient to define a nation, although it is sufficient for a single of these
characteristics to be absent and the nation ceases to be a nation.

Nation:
a historical phenomenon

Nations have not always existed, nor will they
exist forever.  On the contrary a nation is a historical phenomenon and, as
such, it is subject to the law of change, has it history, its beginning and
end.  More precisely, a nation is not merely a historical category but a
historical category belonging to a definite epoch, the epoch of rising
capitalism.

The process of the destruction of feudalism and the
development of capitalism was simultaneously a process of amalgamation of
people into nations.  This, for instance, is how the British, French, Germans
and some others constituted themselves into nations at the time of the
triumphant advance of capitalism and its victory over feudalism.  The formation
of nations in these instances at the same time signified their conversion into
independent national states – British, French, etc.

What took place in Western Europe earlier (roughly
between 1789 and 1871 – earlier still in Britain) took place in Eastern Europe
and Asia, where capitalism was late in developing, a century later, i.e., from
the turn of the 20th century.  In the East, however, multi-national states were
formed, comprising several nationalities as, for instance, in Russia.  In the East, owing to the continued existence of feudalism, hand in hand with the
feeble development of capitalism, nationalities which had been forced into the
background had not yet managed to consolidate themselves as economically
integral nations.  Here the role of welder of nationalities into a state was
assumed by the politically most advanced group – the Great-Russians in Russia, the Magyars in Hungary, and so forth.

At long last capitalism also began to develop in
the Eastern states, resulting in the economic consolidation of nations.  “Capitalism,
erupting into the tranquil life of the ousted nationalities” (p.12),
aroused them and stirred them into action, but, although stirred to independent
life, the ousted nations were in no position to constitute themselves into
independent national states owing to the powerful opposition of the ruling
strata of the dominant nations, which had much earlier assumed the control of
the state.  They were, so to speak, too late!

The same process is taking place under our very
eyes in Africa today, where various politically strong peoples and tribes have
taken upon themselves the task of amalgamating various peoples and welding them
into nations.  Not all the tribes are destined to emerge from this process as
fully-fledged nations.  Some, nay the majority, the weaker ones, are bound to
be assimilated by others, the stronger ones.  That is in the very nature of the
development of capitalism and the process of nation formation.  And no one but
the most sentimental reactionaries will moan at the obliteration of certain
tribes as distinct entities.  And in this process of nation-formation,
historically the bourgeoisie everywhere plays the leading role.  Nor could it
be otherwise, for, as Stalin says: “The chief problem for the young
bourgeoisie is the problem of the market.  Its aim is to sell its goods and
emerge victorious. … Hence its desire to secure its ‘own’, its ‘home’
market.  The market is the first school in which the bourgeoisie learns its
nationalism” (ibid p 13).

In his article, The Right of Nations to
Self-Determination, Lenin makes the same point in the following terms:

“Throughout the world, the period of the final
victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked with the national
movements.  For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie
must capture the home market, must have politically united territories with a
population speaking a single language and all obstacles to the development of
this language and to its consolidation in literature must be removed, such is
the economic basis of national movements.  Language is the most important means
of human intercourse.  Unity of language and its unimpeded development are the
most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commercial
intercourse on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and
broad grouping of the population in all its various classes and, lastly, for
the establishment of a close connection between the market and each and every
proprietor, big or little, and between seller and buyer” (Collected Works
(CW) Vol 20, p394, Feb-May 1914).

Lenin was in complete agreement with Stalin and
highly, even effusively, appreciative of the latter’s theoretical contribution
on the all too important national question. Towards the end of 1913, in his The
National Programme of the RSDLP, he stated that there was “no need to
dwell” on the question of “why and how the national question” had at
the time been brought to the fore as the “fundamentals of a national
programme” of the Bolsheviks “have recently been dealt with in Marxist
theoretical literature (the most prominent place being taken by Stalin’s
article*)” (*‘Marxism and the
National Question, written at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913 in
Vienna and published in the magazine, Prosvesheheniye (Enlightenment),
nos. 3, 4, 5 for 1913 under the title ‘The National Question and
Social-Democracy’).

Already in February of that year, in his letter to
Maxim Gorky, Lenin wrote exuberantly “We have a wonderful Georgian here who
has sat down to write a big article for Prosvesheheniye after collecting all
the Austrian and other material”.

Soon after, on finding that Stalin’s article was
proposed to be published with the sub-heading that it was for discussion only,
Lenin expressed his outrage thus: “Of course, we are absolutely against
this.  It is a very good article.  The question is a burning issue, and we
shall not yield one jot of principle to the Bundist scum”.

Again, when in March 1913 Stalin was arrested,
Lenin sent this message to the editors of Sotsial Demokrat: “Arrests
among us are very heavy.  Koba [Stalin] has been taken. …He
managed to write a long article … on the national question. Good!  We must
fight for the truth against separatists and opportunists of the Bund and among
the Liquidators”.

In the light of the above Marxist-Leninist theory
of modern nations, how and in what historical circumstances do they arise, let
us now delve into the question of Scottish nationhood.

Scottish
nationhood

Scottish nationalism – of the right and left
variety – starts from the assumption that Scotland was a nation from medieval
times, if not earlier.  Some even go to the ludicrous extent of tracing the
origin of Scotland to the time of the ancient Picts, or the arrival of Scots
from Ireland, or MacAlpine kings in the 9th century.  The more intelligent,
among the nationalists, while not going to these extremes, assert that Scotland achieved nationhood in high medieval times.  In support of this assertion, they
refer to Scotland’s alleged war of independence against the ‘English’, the
grandiloquent Declaration of Arbroath (1320), William Wallace’s victory at
Stirling Bridge (1297), the battle of Bannockburn (1314), and the ‘holy trinity
of the Kirk, the education system and the law.  Even the Jacobite rebellions of
1715 and 1745 are pressed into service in this narrative, not for what they
really represented, namely a dynastic fight between the deposed Stewarts and
the recently ensconced Hanoverians, but as expressions of Scotland’s national resistance against encroaching English colonialism.

John Foster, a leading light of the Communist Party
of Britain (CPB) and a well-reputed academic, supplied theoretical
embellishment for this historically inaccurate and absurd narrative.  While
Marxism-Leninism, as outlined at the beginning of this article, quite correctly
associates the rise of nations with the development of capitalism, the
‘Marxist’ historian Foster asserts, in the face of contrary historical
evidence, that the Scottish ‘nation’ was almost completely a “feudal
creation” (see J Foster, ‘Capitalism and the Scottish Nation’, in G Brown
(editor) The red paper on Scotland, Edinburgh 1975, p.142).

The “founding elements” of Scottish law,
language and literature, he says, all “stem from the last three centuries of
the middle ages” (ibid).

And elsewhere: “Most comrades … agree that by
the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries at least four … groupings had fused
themselves into a nation that identified itself as Scottish; long before any
moves towards modernisation and at a time when Scots society was anything but
civil” (J Foster, ‘Nationality, Social Change and Class: Transformations of
National Identity in Scotland’, D McCrone, S Kendrick and P Straw (eds), The
making of Scotland, culture and social change, Edinburgh University
Press/British Sociological Association, Edinburgh, 1989, p.35).

Some of the protagonists of this theory go further,
asserting that Scotland was not only a nation prior to the Union of Scotland
and England in 1707, but incorporated into England as an oppressed nation – a
status which allegedly it has maintained ever since. Not surprisingly, then, in
this view Britain and Britishness are disdainfully dismissed as no more than an
elitist unity and a fragile imperial construct, behind which lurk real
‘nations’ of England, Wales and Scotland, thirsting to be freed from its
suffocating embrace.  The ‘leftist’ version of this trend of thought expresses
itself in the form of Scottish socialism or a Scottish workers’ republic.  The
Trotskyite Tommy Sheridan of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) went so far as
to protest in print against 300 years of Scottish ‘national’ oppression and
advocate the cause of Scottish independence.

The falsity of the above nationalist myth was
exposed very well indeed by Neil Davidson, in his book The Origins of
Scottish Nationalism (Pluto Press, 2000).  Notwithstanding some of its
serious shortcomings, which need not delay us here, this book has done more
than any other to our knowledge to debunk the nationalist myth and to subject
it to well-deserved ridicule and scorn.

There is, however, one question we would like to
get out of the way before dealing with the substance of Davidson’s analysis
which shows up the nationalist myth for what it is – nothing but hackneyed
twaddle.  This question concerns the definition of a nation.

The very first chapter of his book, the “purpose”
of which, he says “… is to produce a conceptual framework within which
Scottish experience can be discussed”, Davidson fails miserably, revealing
himself to be a very poor theoretician.  In his attempt to define a nation, he
ties himself in knots.  Definitions of nationhood, he opines, “rely either
on objective or subjective criteria”, adding for good measure that there is
“… no agreed Marxist position and little help to be gained from Marx or
Engels themselves”, for a precise definition of the concept is not to be
found in “their writings on the national question” (Davidson, p.8).

Davidson is far too erudite not to know that, in
Marxist literature, the precise definition of a nation given by Stalin (cited
above) has been accepted as the only scientifically correct definition and as
such held sway for a whole century in the international working-class
movement.  He also knows fully well that Stalin’s definition met with Lenin’s
enthusiastic approval.  Far from being pleased when encountering a precise
definition which could serve him in achieving his declared purpose of producing
“a conceptual framework” for studying the Scottish experience, Davidson
is much irked by this fact.  While admitting that the “most famous
definition” of what characterises a nation was “given by Stalin in an
article of 1913 called ‘Marxism and the National Question’”, he bemoans the
fact that this definition “unfortunately has exerted an influence over the
left far in excess of its theoretical merits, which are slight”.

Davidson makes not the slightest attempt to prove
the correctness of his assertion that the theoretical merits of Stalin’s
definition are merely slight, considering that his definition served as a guide
to the Bolshevik programme on the national question, both prior to and
following the Great Socialist October Revolution; considering also that the
Bolshevik policy on the national question was one of the crucial factors in the
victory of the Bolsheviks.  He dismisses Stalin’s definition as “merely an
extensive checklist of criteria”, under which, he says, “many nations
which are currently recognised as such would be denied the title …” (p8).

In substantiation of this assertion, he has the
misfortune to choose the example of Switzerland which fails “the Stalinist
criteria on at least two counts: those of language … and religion”,
adding that, nevertheless Swiss territory did not change from 1515 to 1803,
during which time “the vast majority spoke dialects of German”; only at
the “latter date” did Switzerland incorporate Italian speakers, and not
until 1815 “did it acquire territories with significant French speaking
populations.  The Swiss state was formed in 1815 only and right up to 1848 “it
was enforcing religions within the cantons”. In 1891, the Swiss state
decided “… that the 600th anniversary of the founding of the original
confederation of Schwyz, Obwalden and Nidwalden in 1291 constituted the origin
of the Swiss nation”.  Being very pleased with himself, Davidson
triumphantly declares: “It should be clear even from this brief account that
the Swiss nation exists in the absence of [Davidson’s emphasis]
of the elements which are supposed to constitute nationhood, not because of
them” (pp8-9).

On the contrary, it is clear that such a Swiss
nation, as imagined by Davidson, exists only in Davidson’s head and not in
reality.  No Swiss nation has ever existed in the past, nor does it exist
today.  It could not have existed in feudal, pre-capitalist, Switzerland, for the rise of nations is inextricably linked with the development of
capitalism; nations are formed through the intermingling of sundry tribes,
ethnic groups and nationalities, brought about in the wake of capitalist
development.  There were at that time diverse groups occupying Swiss territory,
which itself underwent changes, but no Swiss nation, for there was no “common
economic life” (Stalin) which might, other conditions being present, have
given rise to the formation of a Swiss nation.   This being the case, no
decision of the Swiss state could have served to constitute a Swiss nation in
1291 anymore than the decision of the British state in 1891 could have
constituted an English or British nation in 1291.  If decisions of the state
could replace all historical development, all discussion on the subject would
be pointless; for it would be ever so easy to conjure into existence all manner
of entities which have no historical foundation.

There has not existed a single Swiss nation since
1815 either, for Switzerland is a multinational state, with four languages,
which enjoy equal status.  Apart from the economic cohesion consequent upon the
development of capitalism what secures this state the loyalty of its citizens
and inculcates in them a sense of being Swiss in relation to the non-Swiss, is
the degree of democracy that has permeated the Swiss state since 1848.  In the
words of Lenin: “… there is only one solution to the national problem
(insofar as it can, in general, be solved in the capitalist world, the world of
profit, squabbling and exploitation), and that solution is consistent democracy.

“The proof – Switzerland in Western Europe, a
country with an old culture, and Finland in Eastern Europe, a country with a
young culture” (‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’, CW Vol 20,
p202)^[2].

It is clear from the above remarks of Lenin, that
he is firmly, and correctly, of the view that the Swiss state was a
multinational state, which had been able to solve the national question, to the
extent it is capable of a solution under the conditions of capitalism, through
the application of consistent democracy.  Had the Swiss state been a nation
state, there would self-evidently be no national problem within its borders.

As if not to leave anyone in doubt, a mere two
months earlier, in his article ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’,
arguing against the opportunists on the national question Lenin specifically
says this: “to be sure, Switzerland is an exception in that she is not a
single-nation state” (Collected Works, Volume 20)

Probably having a sneaking feeling that he was
wrong, and in order to cover his theoretical nakedness, Davidson enlists the
services of a witness, just as naked theoretically as Davidson himself.  In
note 6 of chapter one of his book he drools thus:

“It is perhaps appropriate that Leon Trotsky,
the man who did most to uphold the classical Marxist tradition against Stalin,
also offered an alternative to his checklist procedure using precisely the
example of Switzerland:

“… ‘the Swiss people, through their historical
connection, feel themselves to be a nation [our emphasis] despite
languages and religions.  An abstract criterion is not decisive in this
question, far more decisive is the historical consciousness of a group, their
feelings, their impulses. But that too is not determined accidently, but rather
by the situation and all attendant circumstances [whatever they may be! – Lalkar]’”
(p214)

If by citing the above purely subjective nonsense,
all in the name of fighting against Stalin’s “checklist procedure” and
his purely “objective” criteria for determining nationhood, Davidson may
have wanted to bring credit to Trotsky, all he has succeeded in doing is to
reveal Trotsky’s total theoretical bankruptcy and his substitution of concrete,
solid, historical processes and phenomena by historical consciousness, feelings
and impulses of a group.  Since the Swiss, goes the argument, have feelings,
etc., they must be a nation.  By this procedure, a lot of non-nation entities,
Jews, for example, can claim to be nations, whose claims must be accepted, if
for no other reason than they entertain such consciousness, feelings and
impulses.  From such a slippery and opportunist stance one quickly rolls down
the hill and finds oneself in the swamp of Zionism and the worst kind of
bourgeois nationalism.

Besides, before quoting Trotsky so uncritically,
Davidson ought to have paid heed to the following words of Lenin in regard to
Trotsky: “Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important
question of Marxism.  He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of
any given differences of opinion, and desert one side for the other.  At the
moment he is in the company of the Bundists and the Liquidators.  And these
gentlemen do not stand on ceremony where the party is concerned”.

These words were written precisely as a time when
Trotsky was speculating “on fermenting differences between the Polish and
Russian opponents of Liquidationism and to deceive the Russian workers on the
question of the programme [especially section 9 dealing with the right of
nations to self determination]” (ibid.)

Trotsky had written in the journal Borba
that the “… Polish Marxists consider the ‘right to national self-determination’
is entirely devoid of political content and should be deleted from the
programme”.

The blatant falsity of Trotsky’s assertion prompted
Lenin to respond thus: “the obliging Trotsky is more dangerous than an
enemy.  Trotsky could produce no proof, except ‘private conversations’ (i.e.
simply gossip, on which Trotsky always subsists), for classifying ‘Polish
Marxists’ in general as supporters of every article by Rosa Luxemburg.  Trotsky
presented the ‘Polish Marxists’ as people devoid of honour and conscious,
incapable of respecting even their own convictions and the programme of their
Party.  How obliging Trotsky is!”

Having dismissed Stalin’s definition as purely “objective”,
Davidson falls into the morass of pure subjectivism and wriggles like an eel as
he labours over “granting national status” to such groups as Zionists,
South African white supremacists and Ulster loyalists (p10).  He goes as far as
to approvingly reproduce the following purely subjective definition of a nation
given by the Zionist philosopher, Ahad Ha’am:

“If I feel the spirit of Jewish nationality in
my heart so that it stamps all my inward life with its seal, then the spirit of
Jewish nationality exists in me; and its existence is not at an end even if all
my Jewish contemporaries should cease to feel it in their hearts”.

The meaning of this solipsist absurdity, if it has
any meaning, can only be that the worthy Mr Ha’am will constitute a Jewish
nation on his own and will be applauded all the way to some lunatic asylum by
Davidson.

Having waded through incredible confusion, Davidson
says that he would use the word nation “to describe a human community that
has acquired national consciousness”.

“Contrary to what is written by Stalin and other
objectivist theorists of the nation”, asserts Davidson, “there is no
underlying reality of nationhood…”   Contrasting a class with a nation,
and in an attempt to be profoundly original, Davidson says that while there can
be class ‘in itself’, i.e. the working class exists as a matter of fact whether
or not its members are conscious of their position as workers, there “can
never be a ‘nation in itself’”.  Let Davidson expound his original
profundity:

“Class consciousness arises through a process of
recognising real common interests, a recognition which is only possible
as a result of social classes having material reality prior to
consciousness.  National consciousness arises through a process of constructing
imaginary common interests, a construction which can result in the
establishment of a territorial nation state, but only at that point will the
nation have a material reality outside of consciousness.  The resulting
difference in aspirations may be summed up schematically by saying that a
member of a social class may achieve class consciousness (bring their
consciousness in line with reality) and a group with national consciousness may
achieve statehood (bring reality in line with their consciousness)” (p13)
(Davidson’s emphasis).

Such idealist twaddle, according to which nations
are the product, not of a long historical process connected with the
development of capitalism, but of conjuring up “imaginary common interests”,
is worthy of a Bishop Berkeley and not of someone claiming to be a Marxist. 
This nonsense stands reality on its head, for it asserts that it is not the
material reality of the existence of a nation which produces national
consciousness but, on the contrary, it is the national consciousness which
brings forth the material reality of nationhood.  Obviously poor Marx laboured
in vain for his profound materialist teaching that it is the social being that
determines social consciousness, not the social consciousness that determines
social being, has had little effect on some of those who profess to follow his
teaching.

Having haughtily, and foolishly, dismissed Stalin’s
definition as a purely objectivist checklist, he goes on to use exactly the
same criteria which characterise Stalin’s definition of a nation, to
devastating effect in annihilating the right and left nationalist assertions as
to the existence of a Scottish nation prior to the 1707 Union with England.  As
an adherent of Trotskyism and loyal member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, an
incurably counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organisation, Davidson had
willy-nilly to perform this conjuring trick of dismissing in words Stalin’s
highly precise and scientific definition, while making use of it on the sly in
practice to demolish the absurd claims of bourgeois and ‘left’ Scottish
nationalism.  Be that as it may, Davidson has amassed a tremendous amount of
empirical evidence to reveal the hollowness of nationalist claims and shown
them to be the myths that they are.

The thrust of Davidson’s thesis is that there could
not have been, and there was not, a Scottish nation before the 1707 Act of
Union.  It is entirely mistaken, he maintains correctly, to attribute to
medieval formations, or to entities earlier still, the notions of modern
nations.  Although doubtless most states, almost invariably, surround
themselves with a mythical narrative, with roots going back to ancient history,
all the same it is entirely misplaced to project present-day nations backwards
into times long past.

Nation

Part of the problem, says Davidson, lies in the
long usage connected with the word ‘nation’, whose meanings have changed beyond
recognition over nearly two millennia.  In the Vulgate Bible, first produced in
the third century, the original Greek ethnos was rendered as the Latin natio. 
In the first English versions of the Bible (14th century), natio was
translated as nacioun, becoming in turn nation in the authorised
version of 1611.  For the authors and translators of the Bible, the word
‘nation’, far from conveying what we understand by the use of this word today,
had ethnic and racial connotations, designating ‘gens’ or ‘populus’ with a
presumed common biological descent.

Davidson says that “…if the feudal idea of a
nation was essentially defined racially, then the feudal idea of race was
itself defined linguistically”, adding that it “…was on this basis of
common language that the student fraternity in medieval universities was
usually, if not exclusively, divided into ‘nations’ from the thirteenth century
onwards” (p25).  A similar situation prevailed in the knightly orders, with
the Hospitallers in the Levant being grouped into tongues depending on their
place of origin in Western Europe.

Thus it is clear that the word ‘nation’, as used in
medieval and earlier times, far from being a source of clarity on the subject,
has caused much confusion and provided fertile ground for the propagation of
nationalist myths.

Declaration
of Arbroath

In this context, we cannot avoid referring to the
famous Declaration of Arbroath, which has been variously interpreted by some
historians as expressing “all the fierce nationalism of the fourteenth
century”^[3]; the clearest “….statement of Scottish
nationalism and patriotism in the fourteenth century” and the finest “…
statement of a claim to national independence… produced in this period
anywhere in western Europe.”^[4]

Far from it.  As Davidson rightly observes, “The
sonorous wording of the Declaration is in fact a clear statement of, among
other things, the fact that the feudal ruling class still considered themselves
to be a nation in a racial rather than the modern sense” (p.48).  This
Declaration took the form of a letter from the leading Scottish nobles “and
other barons and freeholders and the whole community of the realm of Scotland”
to Pope John XXII, asking the latter to intercede with Edward II in the
interests of peace between Scotland and England, which had been intermittently
at war since 1296.  Probably the contents of the Declaration had been settled
at an assembly of nobles at Newbattle Abbey in Midlothian in March 1320, and a
final text was prepared and sent by Bernard of Linton, the Chancellor of
Scotland and Abbot of Arbroath, dated 6 April.

The preamble to the Declaration is
characteristically medieval: it traces the wanderings of the “Scots nation”
from “Greater Scythia” to Scotland, celebrates its triumphs over Britons
and Picts, and survival from attacks by “Norwegians, Danes and English”
(p.49).  As Davidson remarks, those who assert that these statements serve to “prove
the existence of a primordial Scottish nation must logically also accept the
existence of primordial ‘British’ and ‘Pictish’ nations” (ibid.).

Apart from anything else, the names of Roger
Mowbray and Ingram Unafraville, among the signatories, are evocative of a
descent from Anglo-Normal settlers invited to settle in Scotland during the
reign of David (1124-1153), who themselves descended “…from earlier Viking
invaders of what is now France from what is now Norway – a place somewhat
removed from Scythia” (p.49).

A key passage in the Declaration runs thus: “Yet
if he [Robert the Bruce] shall give up what he has begun, seeking to
make us or our kingdom subject to the king of England or to the English, we
would strive at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own
rights and ours, and we would make some other man who was able to defend us our
king; for, as long as hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any
conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. For we fight not [for]
glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man
gives up without his life” (quoted in Davidson, p.49).

The above passage has been represented by some as
the prototype for modern nationalism.  Some have even gone so far as to assert
that this doubtlessly brilliant example of medieval bombast represents “the
first national or governmental articulation, in all of Europe, of the principle
of the contractual theory of monarchy which lies at the heart of modern
constitutionalism.”^[5]

In truth, this passage suggests the function of the
noble estate “as the defender of the kingdom against the claims of the
individual monarch in a way that was entirely typical of absolutist Europe” (p.50).  It is no more than a statement, albeit exceptionally eloquent, of
medieval regnal solidarity.  Its message was two-fold.  First, it was directed
at Edward II, informing him that it was pointless for him to attempt to depose
Robert with a more subservient king, since the remainder of the Scottish
aristocracy would not cease its resistance.  Second, it was addressed to Robert,
making it clear that they would not brook his jeopardising their interests –
which lay in their god-given right to unhindered exploitation of the mass of
the peasantry – through making concessions to Edward.  In this sense, the
message can rightly be seen as a Scottish version of the Magna Carta, imposed
by the barons of England on King John at Runnymede in 1215.

To attribute to the Declaration of Arbroath modern
connotations of nationhood is as false as to impart similar meanings to the
Magna Carta.  Both these documents should be seen for what they really were –
an expression of regnal solidarity by the barons of the respective kingdoms and
their determination to hang on to their privileges, against the monarch.  As
Davidson correctly points out, to read into the Declaration the notions of a
modern nation, not merely obscures its motives but “establishes a false
identity” and “confers legitimacy on a key element in nationalist
ideology, namely the primordial continuity of ‘the nation’ throughout history”.

Cosmopolitan feudal elite

The kings and the nobility of both kingdoms – England and Scotland – were feudal lords, who did not even understand, let alone entertain,
modern-day ideas of nationhood, nor could they.  They were possessed of a
culture drawn from the Norman French, who married across the whole of the
north-western part of Europe and were, in this sense, cosmopolitan to their
fingertips.  To them the very concept of wars of national liberation would have
been entirely alien.  Their domains of exploitation, their rivalries and their
commonalities invariably coincided.  Norman French was the first language of
the Anjou and Plantagenet kings of England, not English. They were also
paramount lords in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.  They held large tracts in France and derived most of their wealth, surplus produce and their military-political
power, from their French, not their English, domains.  In this regard, Henry II
can be best viewed as Henri of Angevin.

Long before the 1066 Norman conquest of England, invading Angles had settled along the east coast up to the north and over the Lothian
plain, which was for long part of the English kingdom of Northumbria.  The
battle of Carham (1018) added the Lothians to Scotland.  It did more than fix
the present border between England and Scotland: it determined that Scotland would not be a purely Celtic country and that it’s most fertile and economically promising
part would have a language akin to the one spoken in the north of England and open to feudal influences from the south.

After 1066 a feudal baronage grew up closely
connected with England and holding large estates in both kingdoms.  For
example, Robert Bruce, the Earl of Carrick and a vassal of Edward I, held
90,000 acres of land in Yorkshire, while his rival, John Balliol, held large
tracts of land in Normandy and England as well as Scotland.  The kings of England – the Plantagenet and Anjou – held large areas of France – Gascony, Aquitaine and Poitou, inter alia – and regularly laid claims on the French throne.  Members of the
nobility from the kingdom of Scotland, for example John Comyn, fought on the
side of Edward I in the latter’s conquest of Wales, while the armies of Edward
I and II, deployed in the wars in Scotland, which were firmly rooted in feudal,
not national rights, were recruited from their feudal realms in France, Wales
and Ireland.

Undoubtedly Edward I laid claims to the kingdom of Scotland and sought to include it into his own kingdom.  Edward got his chance
with the death in 1286 of Alexander III of Scotland.  By the Treaty of Brigham
it was arranged that Edward’s son and heir should marry Margaret of Norway, the
heiress to the Scottish throne, thus bringing the two kingdoms together in a
personal union, with each side preserving its rights and privileges.  However,
the arrangement collapsed with the death of the Maid of Norway at sea,
triggering a crisis of succession in Scotland, and Edward I moving fast to
achieve his object by other means.  With 13 rival claims to the throne of Scotland, the barons turned to Edward to settle the dispute.  He marched his army to the
border, proclaimed himself lord paramount of Scotland, and decided that John
Balliol had a better claim than Robert Bruce.  John Balliol was accordingly
crowned king and duly paid homage to Edward in 1292.

Contradictions within the feudal elite in Scotland, and harsh demands made by Edward on his vassals, drove John Balliol into revolt,
but his forces were roundly defeated at Caddonlee.  Balliol was captured and
humiliatingly stripped of his feudal trappings during a ceremony at Montrose Castle in July 1296, with his tabard, hood and knightly girdle physically
removed.  Following several shifts of alliances, the feudal elite in Scotland turned the tables on Edward I and then Edward II – at Stirling Bridge (1297) and then at Bannockburn (1314), after winning which battle the nobility of Scotland attempted to
expand its influence into Wales and Ireland. Thereafter, the so-called war of
independence turned into a mutually ruinous war between the Bruce and Balliol
families.

In substance, the conflict between the ruling
elites of England and Scotland was not much different from the Wars of the
Roses in England, that is, an internecine struggle between competing feudal
inter ests whose belief systems were based on the then-prevailing notions of
fief and vassalage, not on the present-day notions of nationhood.  The Norman
lords in Scotland were engaged in a desperate struggle to defend and safeguard
their traditional monopoly to exploit their peasant serfs against the
centralising power of Edward I.  Be it said in passing that, at the time under
discussion, both England and Scotland were mere geographical entities, with the
kings of the former waging wars in Scotland.  Neither entity constituted a
nation.

Broadening the discussion out from the Declaration
to the time in which it was drafted, participation by the peasantry and urban
plebeians in the wars at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn, says Davidson, is
frequently cited, particularly by those on the left, as evidence in the middle
ages of national consciousness.  He answers such assertions, first, by pointing
out that in fact “mass participation” had no appreciable effect on the
outcome of the battle of Bannockburn (1312), although it did at the earlier
battle of Stirling Bridge (1297).  Second, he says, it is not at all clear why
such participation in itself proves the existence of national consciousness,
since popular mobilisations in support of powerful elites “can be traced as
far back as the Greek city states”.  There is evidence, says Davidson, that
the “community of the realm”, referred to in the Declaration, viewed
itself – just like other similar groups across Europe – as a “regnal group
based on racial identity”, with little to indicate how those excluded from
this community regarded themselves.  He goes on to quote with approval George
Kerevan’s following observation:

“The notion that illiterate peasants, who lived
and died their short brutal lives within a few hundred yards of their village,
had a conception of nationalism beyond a gut xenophobia for everyone beyond the
village is stretching the imagination” (p.51).^[6]

Doubtless there were commonalities in the medieval
and earlier periods, none of which were sufficient to constitute the
inhabitants of various geographical entities into nations.  Take the ancient
Greeks, for example, who spoke the same language, shared a common territory,
and a common culture, as against the non-Greeks, but who were far from being
economically united.  They waged endless wars against each other. Their mode of
existence, characterised by scattered and self-sufficient agriculture, combined
with petty manufacture, tribal identity, and the exceptionally poor development
of the means of communication, ensured that the Greeks lived in several
competing polities.  Notwithstanding myths, propagated in equal measure by
Greeks and non-Greeks, the ancient Greeks did not constitute a nation, nor
could they, for the objective requirements for the existence of a Greek nation
were plainly absent.  And what is true of the ancient Greeks is equally true of
medieval Europe.

The defeats of the feudalists of England at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn, far from furnishing proof of a people’s war on the
Scottish side, are an eloquent testimony of feudal arrogance and incompetence
on the part of the armies of Edward I (Stirling Bridge) and Edward II (Bannockburn).  For example, at Bannockburn, if Edward II’s armies had made use of the
English and Welsh longbowmen, a tactic which soon became accepted practice and
which proved its worth against a far more powerful French feudalism, they would
have decimated any stationary force.  Instead, fighting on extremely dangerous
terrain, they unleashed a frontal cavalry charge against Bruce’s massed
pikemen, suffering a humiliating defeat.

As for Stirling Bridge, the assertion that William
Wallace led a people’s revolt in a ‘war of national liberation’ against the
‘English’ does not stand up to scrutiny.  Although the imposition by Edward I,
following his 1296 victory, of a puppet parliament and his plans for a more
intense feudalism aroused widespread resentment and opposition, including on
the part of small landowners, no natural leadership, willing an able to take up
the fight, emerged, as many aristocrats were incarcerated in England waiting to
be ransomed, others were unable to join the fight owing to injuries suffered in
1296, and still some others were temporarily overawed.

It was this vacuum that made for the emergence of
Andrew de Moray in the north and William Wallace in the south.  But it must not
be forgotten that behind these commanders of “the community of the realm”
stood the great noblemen – Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, and James the
Stewart, who was Wallace’s lord.  Following Moray’s death as a result of
injuries suffered at Stirling Bridge, Wallace came to be Guardian in Scotland, in the name of the “illustrious king” in exile, John Balliol, not the
people.  Even if, for the sake of argument, he had become Guardian in the name
of the people, it would not be sufficient ground for asserting the existence of
a Scottish nation at that time owing to the absence of a number of
characteristics of nationhood.

Stirling Bridge was to be the only victory won by
Wallace.  In July 1298 his forces were comprehensively destroyed at the Battle
of Falkirk by the army of Edward I – this time deploying longbowmen – and his
position as Guardian was severely undermined.  With their resistance much
weakened, the aristocracy opted for a peace deal, forcing Wallace to resort to
tactics of guerrilla warfare and launching raids into northern English
Counties.  He was captured near Glasgow in August 1305, carried to London, tried for treason, found guilty and executed.  Long after, he was to furnish the
theme for stirring poetry, novels and songs, his name used by working-class and
democratic forces in just the same way as the destruction of the mythical
Anglo-Saxon liberty under the Norman yoke was used by Levellers and Diggers and
many others.  But we must not allow myths, however well-intentioned, to pass
for history.  We must not see nations where none exist; and consequently, we
must not perceive national liberation struggles where nothing of the sort
exists.

The
‘Holy Trinity’

Most historians who hold the view that the Kingdom of Scotland was a nation before the Union with England in 1707 also assert that “it
was maintained afterwards through the various institutions preserved in the
Treaty, the so-called ‘holy trinity’ of Scottish nationhood” (p.51).  This
‘holy trinity’ is a reference to the Kirk, the education system and the law. 
As there was no Scottish nation before 1707, no institutions could have
preserved that which did not exist.  To assert otherwise is merely to assume
precisely that which must be proved.

Besides, the supporters of the ‘holy trinity’ never
explain precisely how, and in what way, this trinity managed to perform the
role of ‘preserving’ national identity.  If these institutions really played “the
role ascribed to them, then they must have acquired their social significance
before 1707”.  However, “… the examples which are often cited as
demonstrating their importance are from a later period, particularly in the
case of education”, the latter only gaining prominence in Scotland
following the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 (p.53).

Davidson is correctly of the view that no Scot, on
being asked to define his national identity, has ever responded with a sermon
on the beauties of the sheriff system, the merits of Scottish education, and
the marvels of Kirk homilies.  He adds that the only groups who identified
themselves with, and felt any loyalty to, these institutions “were the
cadres who ran the professions, but these men were the most Unionist of all in
their politics” (p.54).

Scotland’s status in the light of Marxist theory

Having disposed of the baseless assertions of the
existence of a Scottish nation before 1707, we now pass on to the most
important question, namely, Scotland’s status – both before and after 1707 – in
the light of the Marxist-Leninist theory concerning the formation of modern
nations and the indispensable significance of such characteristics as language,
territory, economic life and psychological make-up and culture, in the process
of nation formation.

Economy

Prior to 1707, Davidson says, “Scotland had one of the lowest levels of capitalist development in western
Europe” (p.55).^[7].  Sir James Stewart, writing in
1767, stated that Scotland could even then be compared to fourteenth century Europe.  Even if Sir James was exaggerating, his remarks would not have been misleading a
hundred years previously, according to Davidson.

All the same, the fact remains that immediately
preceding 1707, the Scottish economy was organised on feudal lines, with the
main source of ruling class income emanating from the surplus produced by the
peasantry, under threat or actual use of force, exercised “through the
territorial jurisdictions” by the use of which the feudal magnates could
bring their tenants to their own courts.  This had two-fold implications. 
First, the loyalty of the feudal lords to the Scottish Crown took second place
to their own local, particular interests.  It is hardly surprising that one of
the important concessions conceded by the English parliament during the treaty
negotiations was the inclusion of Article 20 which explicitly retained the
heritable jurisdictions which were the bedrock of the power of the Scottish
lords over their tenants.

In the absence of peasant revolts, which were not
known in Scotland until the mid-17th century, combined with the near-absence of
an urban sector, it follows that burghal support for a rural rebellion, had
there been one, was missing.  As the peasantry was by and large quiescent, the
danger from below which might have compelled the Scottish aristocracy to
strengthen the monarchy, instead of exploiting its weakness, never surfaced. 
In the absence of the need for an absolutist monarchy to suppress the direct
producers, absolutism remained weak, with the result that “the individual
lords retained a local weight unparalleled elsewhere in western Europe”
(p.58).  Between 1455 and 1662, the Stuarts attempted on no fewer than seven
occasions to outlaw the jurisdictions that were the basis of the nobility’s
power, but they failed – a failure which speaks eloquently of the balance of
power between the Crown and the nobility.

Second, it made for the absence of economic
cohesion, that is, an economy connecting all regions within the Kingdom of Scotland.  In the memorable words of Thomas Johnston: “Scotland was not a nation: it was a loose aggregation of small but practically
self-supporting communities, and scanty supplies and high prices at Aberdeen may quite well have been coincident with plenty and comparatively low prices in
Dundee and Glasgow”.^[8]

To use the words of Stalin, “…an internal
economic bond which welds the various party of a nation into a single whole”,
was characterised by its absence in pre 1707 Scotland.

Local heritable jurisdictions, by which the lords
ran their baronies and regalities (which were specifically retained in the
Treaty of the Union), this feudal particularism was one of the greatest
obstacles to the development of capitalism, the formation of a single market
connecting all the regions of the Kingdom, and hence to the formation of a
Scottish nation.

Language

Lack of a common language was another factor which
stood in the way of the formation of a Scottish nation.  Instead of being
united by a common language, the inhabitants of Scotland were divided by language. 
In addition to the remaining survivals of Scandinavian in the Orkney and
Shetland Islands, the Kingdom was split between the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders
and the “…vast majority of Scots” who, “even in 1688, spoke what was
originally the dialect of English spoken in Northumbria and brought from there
to the Lothians and beyond by trade and conquest from the tenth century
onwards, long before the border was established” (p.56).  It was the latter
(‘Scots’ or ‘Lallans’) that eventually supplanted Gaelic. Scottish literary
works of the Renaissance were written in Lallans – a language which was also
used at the Royal Court in Edinburgh.  Lallans was just one among many
dialects, and it is conceivable that it might have become the Scottish
language if the autonomy of the Kingdom had been maintained.  Since that did
not happen, Lallans (the dialect spoken in the Lothians and the south-east)
simply reverted to being “one among many Scottish dialects, and these in
turn became merely several Scottish dialects of English” (p.57).

It is notable, however, that the poets who wrote in
Lallans did not regard it as distinct from English.  In The Goldyn Targe,
an early 16th century work, William Dunbar “acclaims Chaucer simultaneously
as the finest of British authors and as one of the Makars – the contemporary
Scottish poets first given this name by Dunbar” (p.57).  Most significantly
in this regard, though, is his assumption that they share the same language.

Be that as it may, in the words of Kenneth White: “Nobody
in contemporary Scotland speaks consistent Lallans – that is part of our
historical linguistic situation.  What we speak is English with local accents
and intonations, and sprinkled with elements of Lallans, and indeed of Gaelic,
which have come down to us”.^[9] White adds: “I can see in
this no cause for lamentation, and certainly no justification for trying to
write systematically in Lallans, as some literati have done and are still
doing” (ibid.).

The process which hindered the emergence of Scots
as a distinct language was under way before the 1603 Union of the Crowns and
the departure of James VI and his court to London.  Most probably, the use in Scotland of the English vernacular Bible following the Reformation, and of the authorised version
after 1611, played a more significant role in frustrating the emergence of
Scots as a separate language than the Union itself.  Thus English became “the
language of solemnity and abstract thought, of theological and philosophical
disputation.”^[10]

It is worth nothing that the ‘holy trinity’ is so
often invoked by the supporters of Scottish nationalism as the basis for the
supposed national continuity precisely because language could not play that
role.  In the apt words of A D Smith, “Among the Scots, language long ago ceased
to play a differentiating and unifying role, once Lallans had become the
language of the lowlands”.^[11]

In the course of this historical process, in Scotland as well as in England, English superseded Latin as the language of theology and
philosophy and Norman French as the language of administration.  While
the majority of the people in both Kingdoms spoke English, they would have
equally perceived the emergent ‘Standard English’ as distinct from the everyday
English they used at home or in their localities.  Certainly, language “did
not hold the lowland Scots and the English apart, nor did it define them as
protonations” (p.57).

The
Highland/Lowland divide

The Highland/Lowland divide was not merely a
function of geography, but also of culture; in the final analysis, it was a
reflection of the prevailing social relations marked by the absence of economic
cohesion, of an economic bond which could have welded the various parts of Scotland into a single whole.

The Lowlands regarded the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders
as culturally inferior and closer to ‘Barbaric’ Ulster, while the Highlanders
themselves were riven by internal divisions and rivalries, who thought of
themselves as Scots “… only in the sense of being notionally subject to
the Scottish crown” (p72).  The word ‘Sassenach’, normally an abusive
Scottish term for the English, and derived from the Gaelic word ‘Sasunnach’ for
Saxon, was originally applied by the Highlanders to all non-Gaelic speakers, be
they Lowlanders or English who were, in the eyes of the Highlanders,
indistinguishable and both equally aliens.

The Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were regarded by
the Lowlanders, among others, as ‘wild’, ‘untamed’, ‘rude’, ‘savage’,
‘murderous’, ‘thieving’, ‘treacherous’ and plundering hordes; ‘robbers’ given
to rapine and lacking in civility; and wretches lacking in honour, friendship
and obedience.  To add further insult, their very language – Gaelic – was
considered to be a factor contributing to their supposed degradation.  As late
as 1736, an anonymous ‘Highland gentleman’, who had doubtless imbibed the
Lowland attitudes towards his fellow Highlanders, wrote thus:

“Our poor people are from cradles trained up in
Barbarity and Ignorance.  Their very language is an everlasting Bar against all
Instruction, but the barbarous Customs and Fashions they have from their
Forefathers, of which they are most tenacious, and having no other languages,
they are confirmed to their miserable Homes”.^[12]

“Given the status the Makars are given as
representing the early modern Scottish nation”, says Davidson, “poems by
William Dunbar from the early decades of the sixteenth century like ‘The
Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie’ contain a level of abuse towards the
Highlanders which suggests they were not part of it” (p.65)

The semi-official history of the 1688 revolution,
published in 1690, fares no better, characterising the Highlanders in these far
from flattering terms:

“The Highlanders of Scotland are a sort of
wretches that have no other consideration of honour, friendship, obedience, or
government, than as, by any alteration of affairs or revolution in the
government, they can improve to themselves any opportunity of Robbing and
plundering their bordering Neighbours”^[13]

From the fourteenth century onwards, says Davidson,
“the behaviour, language and, in a minority of cases, religion of the
Highlanders, led them to being described as ‘Irish’”, particularly, “all
the negative characteristics which the Lowland mind identified with the
Highlands appeared to be confirmed by the close links which existed between
Ulster and the Western Highlands”, the political implication of which
connection was made clear during the civil war (p.70).

Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, for their part,
thought of themselves as the genuine representatives of the Scottish people, in
contrast to the Lowlanders who had abandoned their original linguistic
traditions.  This is what Alexander MacDonald, the Highland Jacobite poet,
wrote of the Gaelic:

“She still
survives

and her glory
will not be lost

in spite of the
deceit

and great
ill-will of the Lowlander.

She is the
speech of Scotland

and of the
Lowlanders themselves,

or our nobles,
princes and dukes without exception”

(quoted in Davidson, p.73).

Language alone did completely explain the hostility
entertained by the Highlanders towards the Sassunachs.  In 1724, this is how
George Wade – an Irish man himself – soon after assuming the office as
Commander in Chief of the British army in Scotland, tried to explain Highland
attitudes towards Lowlanders in a report to George I:

“They have still more extensive adherence one to
another as Highlanders in opposition to the people who inhabit the Low
Countries whom they hold in utmost Contempt, imagining them inferior to
themselves in Courage, Resolution, and the use of Arms, and accuse them of
being Proud, Avaricious, and Breakers of their Word.  They have also a
tradition that the Lowlands were in Ancient Times, the Inheritance of their
Ancestors, and therefore believe that they have a right to commit Depredations,
wherever it is in their power to put them in Execution” (quoted in
Davidson, p.73).

Thus it is clear that the Highlanders fully
returned the compliment paid to them by the Lowlanders.

Be that as it may, the Highland economy was
extremely backward and the people there had a parochial and isolated existence;
by comparison, the economy of the Lowlands, particularly around Edinburgh, being commercially oriented and with close connections to the market in England, was characterised by a certain degree of dynamism.  These two parts of the Kingdom of Scotland stood poles apart.  Far from forming a single entity, they may as well
have been two separate countries.  The deep social, economic and cultural chasm
that divided the two found its reflection in politics too.  “The name Scotland”, observes Davidson, “concealed the existence of two regions whose
inhabitants had been antagonistic to each other for centuries” (p.75), with
neither able to accept that the other was Scottish.

The following few lines written in the 1720s – a
whole 20 years after the Union, by Edward Burt, an English officer serving in
the Highlands, makes abundantly clear the deep chasm that still divided the
Highlands and Lowlands:

“The Highlands are but little known even to the
Inhabitants of the low country of Scotland, for they ever dreaded the
Difficulties and Dangers of Travelling among the Mountains; and when some
extraordinary occasion has obliged any one of them to make such a Progress, he
has, generally speaking, made his Testament before he set out, as though he
were entering upon a long and dangerous Sea Voyage, wherein it was very
doubtful he should ever return”^[14]

Lowlanders knew little of the Highlanders, and the
little they did was not encouraging.  From the fourteenth century onwards, when
the Highlanders were first identified as a distinct group, the Lowlanders had
nothing but contempt for them, fearing them as lawless and outside the
constraints of state authority, with a different language and religion.

The Lowlanders had far more in common with the
English than they had with the Highlanders, and in the minds of the later the
first two were seen as Sassunachs.

In the light of the foregoing it would be
stretching the imagination to assert that before the 1707 Union with England,
or even a few decades following it, the Scots were a nation in the modern
scientific meaning of the concept, for they were lacking in a community of
language, economic cohesion and psychological make-up reflected in a community
of culture.

Bridging
the Gap

The hostility between the Highlands and the
Lowlands, on the one hand, and the suspicion between England and Scotland, on
the other hand, was only heightened by the outbreak of the 1745
counter-revolutionary Jacobite rising, which served to strengthen in popular
English thinking the identification of Scotland with feudalism and “gave the
already high level of English xenophobia towards the Scots a harder political
edge” (p.77).  All Scots came to be seen as Jacobites.

It was precisely to counter such sentiments that an
ideological counter-campaign was undertaken by spokesmen of the nascent
Scottish bourgeoisies which portrayed the Highlands as “the barbarian Other
to Lowland civilisation” (p.77).

This triangular hostility between the Highlanders,
Lowlander and the English, which had survived the Union, and had, if anything,
been heightened by the Jacobite risings, was nevertheless brought to an end
whereby the Lowlanders and the Highlanders began to regard themselves as Scots,
and all the three began to consider themselves as Britons.

From the Jacobite rising and the 1746 Battle of
Culloden, followed by the army occupation of the glens, the British state
emerged militarily victorious over clan society before going on to destroy its
feudal social structure.  The pacification of the Highlands brought peace,
civic virtue, inward investment, access to a large new market and unprecedented
opportunities for commercial profit and advancement to high and profitable
positions in the military, political and bureaucratic state apparatus of Britain.  Left to itself, Scotland most probably would have remained stuck under the
tyranny of Scottish feudal lords for a much longer period.

Unity with an England that had overthrown
absolutism at the cost of so much blood, installed bourgeois liberty, and set
upon the path of capitalist development proved irresistibly beneficial to the
rising bourgeoisie in Scotland.  Shortly after 1745, Scotland underwent a
massive economic boom and an unprecedented industrial revolution.

For the first time, the economic integration
between the Lowlands and the Highlands, as well as between Scotland and England, began to become a reality.  The Scottish component, though numerically a small
portion of the ruling class, was most keen on this integration taking place. 
The rising bourgeois elements in Scotland were at the forefront of these
attempts at integration, and the principal advocates of Britishness, for the
British state was far more important to them than to their English
counterpart.  Scottish capitalist landowners, tobacco and sugar merchants, as
well as textile manufacturers; professional groups such as lawyers and Church
of Scotland ministers – the two groups that had provided the majority of
Enlightenment thinkers and theorists; the Scottish constituent of the British
military officer class; and poets and playwrights – all greeted with enthusiasm
the new emerging society and were most insistent on being recognised as
British.

The suppression of internal reaction and the
pacification of the Highlands had opened new and compelling opportunities.  The
military and juridical onslaught on the remains of Scottish feudalism saw to it
that every landowner was obliged to enter into commercial relations with their
tenants; the destruction of the power of the nobility had cleared the path for
undreamt of commercial and industrial development in Scotland, in turn laying
the ground for the integration of the Scottish and English economies and the
construction of a Britishness, which was not simply an extended English nation
state into which Scotland was absorbed, but “an entirely new formation, a
new nation state with its own attendant national consciousness” (p.80).

Thus, from the second half of the eighteenth
century, when all the necessary conditions for the formation of a Scottish
nation had emerged, such were the dialectics of history that just at that time
the rising Scottish bourgeoisie threw in its lot with the much bigger English
bourgeoisie and devoted itself wholeheartedly to the construction of a new
British nation state, of which the Scots were an integral and crucial part.

Scotland an oppressed nation?

Scottish nationalists, in addition to claiming that
Scotland has been a nation since early medieval times, if not earlier, also
assert that Scotland has been an oppressed nation, it being variously declared
that since the Union with England in 1707, Scotland has been a victim of
English expansionism, English internal colonialism, English imperialism or
English cultural imperialism.  The natural corollary of this stance is that Scotland is ruled by an alien power, that there is a Scottish nation and an English nation,
but no such thing as a British nation.  That Britain is an artificial
construct, or simply an English racket, to imprison Scotland and Wales.  In the eyes of Scottish nationalists, the nation of Scotland languishes in the
suffocating embrace of the state and ruling institutions which are English or
British waiting for its moment of freedom with the ‘inevitable; break up of
Britain.

In this scenario, Scotland is put in the category
of heroic nations, such as Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya, Yemen, Congo, India and China – countries that fought for independence against various European colonialist
and imperialist powers.  Only through such obviously fraudulent devices, the
Scottish National Party (SNP) and their left-wing appendages can see some
equivalence in their demand for an independent Scottish state with the national
movements of colonial peoples. 

Furthermore, the nationalists make a vain attempt
to deny Scotland’s part in the construction of Britishness, or the
establishment of a global British empire, which practised slavery on a
gargantuan scale, devastated India and exploited and oppressed the vast masses
of many countries.  England/Britain did all that, not Scotland, is the national mantra.

“Unfortunately”, says Davidson derisively, “mere
facts have not deterred” the nationalist writers from confusing the issue
by making false claims (p103).  All the same, he marshals an array of facts and
irrefutable statistics to knock the bottom out of the nationalist assertions
and prove their utter falsity.

Since it is impossible to substantiate the argument
that Scotland went through an experience comparable to that undergone by the
nations that fell victim to colonialism and imperialism, the more intelligent
and cunning of the ideologues and defenders of Scottish nationalism turn for
help to the softer and more pliable concepts of ‘internal colonialism’ and
‘cultural imperialism’.

The concept of internal colonialism with regard to Scotland was the brainchild of the American sociologist Michael Hechter, in connection with his
study of ‘Celtic’ nationalism on the British Isles.  In this study he divided
the UK into two zones – the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ – the latter zone (in
which he placed Scotland) being marked by economic dependence, a retarded
development designed to complement that of the core, specialised
export-oriented industrialisation and lower standard of living than in the
‘core’.  “Internal colonialism, therefore arose out of the same systemic
needs which later spawned its more notorious overseas cousin^”[15]

The implication here clearly is that Scotland’s ‘peripheral’ position is just another version of the process experienced by
those nations subjected to colonialist and imperialist domination and
exploitation.  In the Hechter narrative, the English state successfully turned
Scotland into an internal colony with the Union of Crowns in 1603 – a state of
affairs which was continued even after the Parliamentary Union of 1707, when,
notwithstanding the formal dissolution of the existing two states (England and
Scotland), the ‘core’/’periphery’ relationship was maintained within Britain.

Hechter did point out, however, that of all the
‘peripheral’ nations, Scotland was least amenable to this type “of
categorisation” (p92). Although he retreated further still from his
original stance, it was too late to prevent his narrative becoming a
theoretical underpinning for Scottish nationalism.  For instance, the ‘left’
nationalist James Young has made this ludicrous statement “Scottish society
[was] pushed into a subordinate role [as] a victim of ‘internal
colonialism’ with an economy peripheral to the core of British capitalism, and
with institutions dominated by the ‘conquering metropolitan elite’”^[16]

Davidson demolishes the Hechter-based nationalist
narrative by empirically reviewing the progress of three leading
non-agricultural sectors of the Scottish economy in the eighteenth century –
coal, linen and tobacco.  

The output in the coal industry in the 18th century
rose as much as eight or ten times, a rate nearly double that for Britain as a whole.  And, be it noted, this industry continued to use the most advanced
forms of technology.

Linen production increased four-fold between 1730
and 1775, with the majority of this output being for sale in the English or
colonial markets, the scale of the latter was hidden by the circumstance that
perhaps half of the linen exported from England was in fact of Scottish origin. 
After 1747, the share of Scottish manufactured linen exported from Britain rarely dropped below 20%-30 %, and on occasion reached 35%-40%.  Since these
figures relate exclusively to linen which qualified for a ‘bounty’, the total
might have exceeded 50% if other linen be taken into account.^[17]

Tobacco was the most successful Scottish import,
and this rose, in just three decades, more than six-fold from 8 million lb in
1741 to a peak of 47 million lb in 1771.  By the early 1760s, Scottish overseas
tobacco trade accounted for 40 per cent of British imports.  These figures have
a particular significance since, of all the sectors of the Scottish economy,
tobacco received the most stimulus from access to the previously restricted
English domestic and overseas markets after the Union of 1707. Without the Union it is inconceivable that Scottish tobacco imports would have reached the heights they
did in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.

Thus, far from revealing retarded and peripheral
characteristics, Scotland stood ahead in terms of technique, per capita
production and capital accumulation.  Only in the absence of English coal,
linen and tobacco industries, which was not the case, would the idea of
‘complementary’ development have any bearing on Scotland.

From the early years of the industrial revolution, Scotland achieved outstanding performance in the principal exporting trades, with early
successes in tobacco, cotton and jute being surpassed by heavy industrial goods
– pig iron, steel, railway locomotives and shipbuilding.  Shipbuilders on the Clyde alone produced 70 per cent of all British iron tonnage between 1850 and 1870; in the
latter year they employed 20,000 out of a British workforce of 47,500 in that
industry.  Until the Second World War, Glasgow was the biggest exporter of
steam locomotives in the world.

“By the end of the nineteenth century”, says
Davidson, “the proportion of Scots employed in primary industry was one
third higher than in England and Wales, and 11 per cent higher in heavy industry”.

He continues thus: “Had Scotland been an independent centre of capital accumulation, it could be said to have
‘caught up and overtaken’ its one-time English rival by, at the latest, the end
of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.  By that date there were no longer ‘Scottish’
and ‘English’ economies separate from that of Britain, except in the
geographical sense which allows us to talk about the ‘southeast of England’ or ‘the Midlands’ as distinct economic regions.  Nevertheless, abstracting ‘Scotland’ as an
economic unit from Britain  as whole, these figures clearly indicate that, far
from being ‘peripheral’ to the British economy, Scotland – or more precisely,
the Lowlands – lay at its core” (p94).

The Scottish success in the field of trade and
industry was replicated in other fields, ranging from the professions to
politics and the army.

Qualified Scottish physicians moved to England in great numbers, “Without either graduating from Oxford or becoming Anglicans – both
obligatory for English physicians” (p94).  Before the mid-eighteenth
century, anyone in Britain desirous of taking up the medical profession was
obliged to go to Europe for training, often in Leiden or Paris.  The first
important medical faculty in Britain was established in Edinburgh after 1750;
by the end of the century it had become the most important institution for
medical training in all of Britain.  Subsequently, a further medical school was
opened at Glasgow.  During the first half of the 19th century, the majority of
the British medical practitioners would have received at least part of their
education in Scotland.

Turning to politics, there was a marked increase in
participation by Scots in political life, especially outside Scotland.  Whereas between 1747 and 1753 only 8 of the 45 Scottish MPs had paid state
office, by 1780 the number had risen to 23 or over half.  In addition there is
the striking phenomenon of more than 60 Scots being elected as MPs between 1754
and 1790 from constituencies outside of Scotland, while during the same period
no English or Welsh MPs represented Scottish constituencies.  Between 1790 and
1820 the number of Scots sitting for seats in England and Wales had risen to 130.  Campbell Bannerman, Asquith and Bonar Law, hailing from the
Scottish legal, banking and commercial dynasties, stood at the apex of the
British political establishment for nearly the first two decades of the
twentieth century – holding the office of prime minister.  In more recent
times, of the 23 Cabinet portfolios allotted following the General Election of
1st May 1997, six were held by Scots, including those of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Lord Chancellor.

Having furnished the above details, Davison
approvingly cites the following commendably restrained remark of Keith Webb!  “It
is unusual for a colonial nation to provide the political leaders for the
colonising nation^”[18]

Cultural
imperialism

Even while accepting the above facts, it is still
possible to cling to the belief that Scotland is the victim of English colonialism. 
The key to this antinomy lies in the notion of cultural imperialism.  As proof
of Scottish subjection, some nationalist writers refer to the thinkers of the
Scottish Enlightenment and their desire to assimilate Scottish to English
history.

“It was not the crude type of colonial
relationship that English capitalism was imposing on large parts of Africa and
Asia”, says the left national James Young, adding that “… the very
subtlety of the mediating role of the indigenous elite of the agrarian capitalists,
merchants and intellectuals in assisting the English to impose cultural
imperialism on the Scottish populace has obscured its importance in dictating
cultural, political and economic developments …”^[19]

Davidson cites a host of Scottish nationalists, who
give their backing to such claims, and draws parallels between the cultural “inferiority”
experienced by Scotland and the colonised “third world”. Even the denial
of British/English “cultural imperialism” by any Scot provokes the
accusation that the latter has become assimilated – ‘assimilado’ to use a
Portuguese term for a native who, in addition to adopting the Portuguese
language and culture, adopted too the Portuguese contempt for his native
culture.  Most preposterously, Pat Kane has attempted to draw inspiration from
black people’s struggle in the US against centuries of brutality and racism for
the Scottish nationalist project, for “… both projects serve the same
nationalistic ends; the broadening of one’s national community into its true
complex of history out of the hands of the wilful mystifiers”.^[20]

Having quoted from the writings of various
nationalists, Davidson says: “In all of these extracts it is through the
domain of culture that analogies with classical imperialism, impossible to
sustain frontally, are readmitted through the back door, so to speak”
(p97).

Davidson successfully counters the above
nationalist nonsense by demonstrating that the Scottish intellectuals played a
preponderant role in the construction of Britishness.  Adam Smith elaborated an
economic theory that served as a framework for Britain’s destiny as a
capitalist nation; David Hume and Sir James Mackintosh laid the foundations for
a modern English history; James Mill, in his History of British India,
mapped out Britain’s future as an imperial power legislating for the entire
humanity; Sir Walter Scott who provided the English with the artistic
expression of their national myth: that of the Saxon race indomitably
struggling against Norman yoke and the eventual reconciliation between the two
‘races’; Thomas Carlyle extended and developed this into a philosophy of the
English character and a critique of industrialisation; and Macaulay, the one
single writer whose view of England was more influential than that of Carlyle,
though not a Scot himself, was deeply influenced by the ideals of the Scottish
Enlightenment.

These Scots were not, nor did they regard
themselves as, agents of cultural imperialism.  The very notion that they were
culturally inferior would have been laughable to them, for they were the
architects of the new British identity.  In the words of Cairns Craig: “As
England was being transformed by the construction of a new British identity
which had significant Scottish components – to which the likes of Hume were
prime contributors – so Scotland was transformed by English elements of that
same British identity”.^[21] Thus, if England influenced
Scottishness, as it certainly did, Scotland for its part played a crucial role
in the transformation of England by helping to remould it as an integral part
of the new British nation.

James Watt, the famous inventor and one of the most
important non-literary enlightenment figures, who was proud of being a Scot,
nevertheless turned down the invitation from Catherine the Great, asking him to
move to Russia, by saying that he could never leave his own nation which was Great Britain.  “Scots like Watt”, aptly observed Linda Colley, “do not seem to
have regarded themselves as stooges of English cultural hegemony.  Far from
succumbing helplessly to an alien identity imposed by others, in moving south
they helped construct what being British was all about.”^[22]

In the light of the above facts, the proposition
that Scotland was an ‘internal colony’ of England or a victim of English
‘cultural imperialism’ rings hollow and devoid of all substance.

Highlands

Davidson concedes that the term ‘colony’ might
legitimately be used in the case of the Highlands.  He does though go on to ask
penetratingly: “But who were the colonists?” (p102).

In dealing with this question, Scottish
nationalists, not only conflate the experience of the majority of Scots with
that of the Highlanders, but also “… shift the attention from class
divisions within Scotland, on to a supposedly external national oppression”
(p104).

All the same, the claims of the nationalist
ideologues are unsustainable.  Davidson alludes to historical evidence to
demonstrate that Culloden was not a defeat inflicted on the Scots by the
English, nor was the following persecution carried out by the English – the
assertions to the contrary by the ideologues of Scottish nationalism
notwithstanding.  Nationalist assertions merely serve to blur the national,
social and class content of the struggle.

The 1746 Battle of Culloden, saw the rout of the
Stewart dynasty and the destruction of Highland clan society by the combined
forces of Lowland Scots, German and English regiments paid for by the British
state.  During the military occupation of the glens following Culloden, in “…almost
every instance it was the Lowland Scottish officers, rather than their English
counterparts”, who committed the worst atrocities (p104).

As regards the clearances, with one solitary
exception (that of the Duke of Sutherland), those responsible were not only Scottish
but Highland Scotts.  The clearances were carried out “… at the behest of
Scottish landowners, organised by their Scottish factors and, where necessary,
enforced by Scottish police or Scottish regiments” (p105).  In other words,
the Highland peasantry was mercilessly ejected from the land by their ‘own’
lairds and sent packing to the Americas in the interests of “indigenous”
capitalist accumulation (p106).

It is worth stressing that Britishness offered
alluring opportunities for betterment to the Highland gentry and, for this
reason, they turned their back on the Highland society and traditions
willingly.

The Highlands peasantry suffered terrible
oppression, but in essence the clearances were no different from the forcible
eviction of the English peasants through the enclosures carried out 400 years
earlier in England, or similar suffering of the peasants across Europe in the transition to capitalism.  The eviction of Highlands peasantry can no more be
described as colonial oppression any more than can the eviction of the English
or European peasantry.

In turn, the Highlanders evicted by their lairds
from the land, and forced to emigrate to America, soon began to assume a
colonial role in their new homelands.  “The native Americans”, says
Davidson, “to whom the Highlanders were so frequently and inaccurately
compared, might have expected different treatment at their hands than was
generally dispensed by settlers from elsewhere in the British Isles.  Alas,
this was not the case” (p105).

As a matter of fact they had no scruples about
displacing the native inhabitants “from territories the latter had occupied
for much longer than there had been Gaelic-speaking Scots in Scotland”^[23]

The Highlanders, forced off their land by an
indigenous capitalism, proceeded to establish their own control over the
inhabitants of another land, in the interests of the same capitalist class. “There
is tragedy enough here, surely, without inventing a wholly fictitious
colonisation of the Scots, either by the English or themselves” (p106).

A
junior partner?

Far from being a victim of any form of colonialism
or imperialism, Scotland was, as an integral part of the British state, a
significant component of it.  Reality has forced some of the ideologues of
nationalism to largely abandon the view of Scotland as an English colony for
one which portrays it to be a successful “junior partner” in the larger
enterprise of British colonialism and imperialism.  Apart from distracting
attention from the unity of the British state and supporting suggestions that
elements of the Scottish state survived the 1707 events to operate externally
in partnership with England, the notion of Scots as ‘junior partners’ with
England flies in the face of facts.  Since in many cases the Scots were in the
senior position, the purpose behind the “junior partner” thesis can only
be to shirk responsibility.  Scots were crucial to conquering and running the
empire.

After the liberation of the American colonies in
1783, the greatest opportunities for the relatively impoverished Lowland
landowners – at any rate their younger sons – were to be found in India.

By the mid-eighteenth century 60 per cent of
British imports normally came from India.  A small number of merchant agencies
controlled this trade.  At their peak, in 1803, of the 23 agencies based in Calcutta, the six most important were dominated by Scots.  And, in Bombay, where trade was
controlled by an even fewer number of privileged agencies, there were just five
of them, of which at least three were Scottish, exercising a degree of
political power beyond the reach of their Calcutta counterparts – in no small
measure because of their willingness and ability to make funds available to the
East India Company in times of crisis.  In 1772, one in nine of the Company’s
civil servants, one in eleven of its soldiers, and, one in three of its
officers, were Scots.  The most important economic significance of the Scottish
presence in India was the investment in Scotland of the vast amounts of wealth
accumulated by them upon their return home.

“India had an impact upon
eighteenth-century Scotland out of proportion to the number of Scots who went
there”, according to one historian.^[24]

“One might as well say”, adds Davidson, “that
Scotland had an impact on India out of all proportion to the number of Scots
who went there, although this is an impact the Indians might well have done
without”.  Davidson then goes on to reproduce the following description of
Britain’s rule in the subcontinent of India by James Callender, a radical Scot
active during the 1780s and 1790s:

“In Bengal only, we destroyed and expelled
within the short period of six years, no less than five millions of industrious
and harmless people; and as we have been sovereigns in that country for about
thirty-five years, it may be reasonably computed that we have strewn the plains
of Indostan with fifteen or twenty millions of carcasses. … The persons
positively destroyed must, in whole, have exceeded twenty millions …. These
victims have been sacrificed to the balance of power, and the balance of trade,
the honour of the British flag …”^[25]

Whatever the ideologues of Scottish nationalism may
say, it was not ‘English capitalism’ which was responsible for the bleaching of
the bones of countless Bengalis in the sun, but British capitalism, of which
the Scots were an integral part and in which they played a leading role.  On
top of being at the forefront of colonial expansion, the capitalist class in Scotland played a leading role in the export of capital – one of the characteristics of
monopoly capitalism.

At the turn of the 19th century, says Davidson, “the
Scottish bourgeoisie could legitimately have cried: yesterday, America; today, India; tomorrow, the world.  By 1858, with ‘Pax Britannica’ – or perhaps one should
say ‘Pax Caledonia’ – at its height, Williams Burns, a tireless campaigner
against real and imagined English slights to Scotland, compiled a comprehensive
account of how much the Empire owed to his native land:

“‘Allow us to ask. What portion of our present
colonial possessions belonged to England prior to her union with Scotland?  We know of none, except one or two West Indian islands – very profitable
appendages they are! – and some narrow strips on the sea-board of Hindustan.  Our Indian empire has risen under the joint energies of Scot, Irishman and
Englishman; as the names of such men as Munro, Malcolm, Wellington, Dundas,
Stewart, Burness, Napier, Dalhousie, and the recorded exploits of Scottish
soldiers assure us.  Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, Malta, Gibraltar, our
Chinese establishments, are all in the same position.  The remark, however,
applies particularly to Canada, Nova Scotia, and our other North American
possessions.  Canada was conquered by Scotsmen; Scotsmen were the pioneers of all
our operations, and now form the staple of society in that great country’”(p111)^[26]

Britishness

Now what about Britishness and a British nation? 
How did it come about?  Linda Colley has argued that Britishness was
constructed between 1707 and 1837 from four interconnected elements.  First,
popular mobilisation by the British state in its recurrent wars with France; second, the identification of France as the Catholic ‘other’ as opposed to British
Protestantism; third, the monarchy, esteem for which welded the other elements
into a basically conservative national identity; and finally, the Empire.

Davidson disagrees with Colley saying that these
factors were actually “either obstacles to the construction of Britishness
(Protestantism) or the cause of political divisions within an already existing
national framework (counter-revolutionary Francophobia, Monarchism)”, even
though he adds “the latter two factors were clearly important in making the
dominant strain in British nationalism a reactionary one after 1789”
(p89).  Empire, he agrees, certainly played an important part in the process of
the construction of a common British nation.

Whatever role these factors played, in our view the
most important factor was the phenomenal commercial and industrial development
that Scotland underwent following the defeat of the counter-revolutionary
Jacobite risings and the resultant destruction of the fabric of feudal society
in the Highlands of Scotland, followed by the industrial revolution in England
and Scotland experienced from the final two decades of the eighteenth century. 
In the case of Scotland, these developments were truly phenomenal as she was
transformed from being a self-sufficient peasant economy to one characterised
by capitalist industrialisation within a time frame of three to four decades,
whereas development of capitalism had been going on in England for a very long time.  These developments had the effect, on the one hand, of
integrating the economy within Scotland, bringing the Highlands into the maelstrom
of modern economic development, and bringing the Highlands and Lowlands closer,
and on the other hand of creating an integrated British economy embracing
England and Scotland.  This, the most important factor, underpinned all others,
including participation in the Empire, and provided the material requisites for
the creation of a British nation – one with a common language, a common
economy, a common territory, a common psychological make-up. Britain, in sum, is not an artificial construct or some casual or ephemeral conglomeration,
but a stable and historically constituted community of people.

Once the material basis for the formation of a
British nation was in place, the consciousness of this reality increasingly
began to be reflected at all levels and in various spheres of life, giving rise
to what can be described as a genuine British consciousness.  Our main
difference with Davidson on this question is that he quite often incorrectly
imputes the existence of the British nation to consciousness, rather than the
other way around, namely, explaining British consciousness as arising from the
construction and reality of the existence of the British nation although, it
must be said, in practice he frequently departs from his wrong theoretical
framework.

With the defeat of the Jacobites, and seeing the
writing on the wall, the Scottish aristocrats and the traditional elite quickly
went over to commercial agriculture and jettisoned Jacobitism for loyalty to
the Hanoverian monarchy without much difficulty.  Soon the Highlanders were to
become the super-loyal phalanx of British – not English – colonialism.

The unprecedented industrial growth in the late
18th and early nineteenth century, which has been aptly called the Industrial
Revolution; an astounding increase in capital accumulation; joint colonisation,
exploitation and administration of what was to become a vast British empire;
commercial and colonial wars with France, with the entire globe as their
theatre – all these served to form a British nation and, with it, a genuinely
British consciousness.  In the construction of the British nation, Scotland played a crucial role and was an integral part of it.

Through their participation in industrialisation,
the British market, the British overseas expansion and the British state
machine, Scottish aristocrats, capitalists and professionals prospered beyond
their dreams.  Scots were disproportionately represented in top posts in
British politics, the civil service and the armed forces.  Glasgow became on of
the principal industrial cities of Britain. 

Edinburgh rose to banking prominence, second in
importance only to the City of London.

Fictitious
Highland culture

Once the Highlanders had been defeated and
switched their loyalty away from Jacobitism, as feudal clan society faded, as
the Highlands stopped being the bandit country they had been, as loyalty to the
Jacobite cause became a forlorn memory and made way for mass recruitment of
Highlands regiments into the army, as Gaelic was superseded by English as the
principal language of the Highlanders, Lowlanders, for once felt safe and
confident to accept, adapt and rejoice in a fictitious Highlands culture,
conjured into existence through the efforts of poets and writers – most notably
Sir Walter Scott.  This inauthentic Highlandism became the prototype for a
supposedly original and common Scottish culture, now closely harnessed to the
interests of, and in the service of, British capitalism.  Highlandism, from
being something to be “disavowed as a source of shame”, was transformed
into something that was “a source of pride” (p129).  Its accoutrement –
the plaid, bagpipes and an allegedly ancient, though patently forged Ossianic
literature, and other paraphernalia, such as kilts, bonnets and differentiated
tartans – were absorbed into an emergent Scottish culture.  The fact that
tartanry, earlier on a symbol of the Stuart dynasty and its supporters, was
incorporated into the uniform of Highlands regiments, ensured its survival. 
Differentiated clan tartans did not originate in antiquity; they were
introduced to differentiate different regiments and only afterwards adopted by
the clans that spawned them.  The kilt, said Trevor Roper, having been invented
by an English Quaker industrialist to bring the Highlanders “out of heather
and into the factory”,^[27] was “saved from extinction by an
English Imperialist statesman [i.e. Pitt the Elder]”.^[28] In due
course, it spread to all parts of the empire, and wherever the Scots or their
descendants settled.

The first to suggest that the kilt had been the
traditional dress of the Highlanders was Sir Walter Scott, interestingly in an
article in 1805 in which he disputed the authenticity of the Ossianic poems. 
He was also the person who stage-managed the ceremonial surrounding George IV’s
state visit of August 1822 to Edinburgh, with the King clad in a tartan kilt,
greeted by the gathered Highland landowners (whom Scott insisted on calling
‘chiefs’) and the Edinburgh bourgeoisie, while Scott was fully aware of the
historical falsity of the undertaking.  Tartanry was simply being used as an
embellishment of British imperialism.   The King had sought to show his respect
for the customs, which had purportedly prevailed in Scotland before the Union,
by wearing what, in the words of Macaulay, “was considered by nine Scotchmen
out of ten as the dress of a thief”.^[29]

The point, however, is that it had ceased to be
so.  Although Sir Walter has been given the credit for welding together the
Highlanders and Lowlanders, the truth is that actual developments, as remarked
earlier, were driving the two regions of Scotland into fusion.  What Sir Walter
did was to give them a literary and artistic, not to say a romantic,
expression.  He was not alone in this regard.  There were several institutions engaged
in the Celtification of Scotland.  This Celtification added momentum to the
forces which were in any case serving to unite the Highlands and Lowlands. 

In the words of one writer: “The kitsch Gaeldom
of the nineteenth century would conveniently obscure the sacrifice of the Highland peasantry on the altars of political economy”.^[30] “In fact,
tartanry attained its dominance at precisely the moment in which the existing
Gaelic culture was being destroyed” (p139)

Whereas previously Highland clan society had been
associated with ‘barbarism’, after the publication of the Ossianic poems by
James McPherson it was perceived as not only characterised by backwardness, but
also by qualities of nobility and bravery.  MacPherson, as the one who had
rescued this world from oblivion, had to be defended – and was defended.  Adam
Smith was practically the only one who declined to endorse the revised view of
the clans that his colleagues were busy putting forward, saying that they were
only sentimentalising the harsh reality of social relations embodied within
clan society.

The contradiction between a realistic historical
assessment of Scottish feudal society and hankering after a mythical romantic
past allegedly representing Scottishness, was only resolved rather late in the
post-revolutionary period.  Sir Walter Scott was the foremost figure in this
endeavour.  While being aware of the historical inaccuracies of the Ossianic
poems, he was not entirely dismissive of them, saying:

“… while we are compelled to renounce the
pleasing idea, ‘that Fingal lived and that Ossian sung’, our national vanity
may be equally flattered by the fact that a remote, and almost barbarous corner
of Scotland, produced … a bard, capable not only of making an enthusiastic
impression on every mind susceptible to beauty, but giving a new tone to poetry
throughout Europe”^[31]

One historian has said that Scott was a
‘valedictory realist’. While his valediction is conferred upon a heroic but
defeated feudal past, his realism compels him to the conclusion that it would
be sheer madness, even if it were feasible, to set that past in opposition to
the unheroic but commercially and industrially successful present.^[32]

Scott was, though, engaged in using his perception
of the Scottish past to create a myth, whereby the virtues of the Highland
society could be recognised retrospectively, if only for the purposes of
pressing them into service of the British state.  He thus supplied the
ideological connection “between the deeds of the Highland soldiers and those
of their clan ancestors” (p133).

The fictitious world of the Scottish past, imagined
by MacPherson in the Ossianic poems, then by Scott in his poetry and novels,
gained much of its conviction, first, from the spread of mass tourism to the
Highlands, aptly described as ‘Ossianic touring’ by one writer, and, second,
from its former inhabitants who were increasingly the backbone of the British
army.

Doubtless, from time to time, middle class Scots
harboured grievances about their position within the Union, but they realised
only too well the advantages of the Union and the solid reality underpinning
it.  Equally, some of them occasionally harked back nostalgically to a mythical
Scottish past – a past gone for ever.  Sir Walter Scott gave literary expression
to this dual consciousness by showing them how to focus “their confused
national emotions upon inessentials.  By validating the making of a fuss about
nothing, Scott gave to middle class Scotsmen … an ideology – of noisy
inaction.” (pp184-186)^[33]

Although Scott had internalised the Scottish
enlightenment theory of historical change, and given it artistic expression in
his novels, all the same “he can be more usefully seen as the literary
representative of the class of improving landowners, who were being
replaced in the Scottish class structure by the manufacturers, who brought
factories and workers in their wake.  He admires both Union and Empire, but is
unwilling to pay the price in the transformation of the Scottish social
structure” (ibid, p 163).  Hence his constant fretting over the
possibility of armed insurrections during the great working-class
demonstrations of 1819.  His ideal is stability through a combination of
enterprise, authority, common sense, and paternalist responsibility.

With the advent of industrialisation, this was a
forlorn hope, for the bourgeoisie had “… pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘national superiors’, and … left
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous ‘cash payment’, … drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of
religious fervours, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in
the icy water of egotistical calculations”.  It had resolved “personal
worth into exchange”, and “for exploitation, veiled by religion and
political illusions”, it had “substituted naked, shameless, direct,
brutal exploitation” (pp33-34)^[34]

Scott was only too well aware of it, even if he did
not quite enjoy the spectacle of masses of wage labourers increasingly getting
organised, and increasingly becoming class-conscious, in response to brutal
exploitation and the conditions of squalor in which they lived.  Scott
understood the significance of the class conflicts which erupted after the end
of the Napoleonic wars in 1815.  It was not merely the middle class that he
hoped to imbue with an ideology of “noisy inaction”.  He also clearly
saw the usefulness of Scottish national identity to be administered to an
increasingly restless proletariat.  Scott was passionately keen to press into
service his version of Scottish national identity precisely to prevent class
divisions and class consciousness from becoming a dominant feature of the
working-class movement; in this context, the Royal visit of 1822, so spectacularly
stage-managed by him, was a fairly successful attempt.

Davidson is surely right to observe that “… the
major contribution made by Scottishness to the events of the radical years was
a component, not, as is so often claimed, of working-class militancy, but of
the ideology of a counter-revolution.  In a letter [written in 1826], Scott
suggested that only the retention of the Scottish identity prevented Scottish
people, or at least their lower orders, from becoming ‘damned mischievous
Englishmen’” (p199).

It is a matter of great pride for the British
working class that Scottish workers, ignoring Scott’s advice, and overpowering
“proud feelings” about their own romantic past, were to become militant
class fighters and “formidable revolutionists” in 1820.

A number of nationalist historians have asserted
that Britishness was a primary and permanent identity only for the tiny
minority at the top: the aristocracy and the upper rungs of the gentry, who
alone periodically intermingled in their London houses, intermarried, and sent
their sons to posh English schools; that occupationally this group belonged to
the officer corps, high officials of the East India Company, as well as
diplomatic representatives of British missions abroad.  These historians go on
to add that after the 1707 Union, Scottish identity was largely maintained by
the lower orders of Scottish society.

In view of the following, such an assertion is
devoid of substance.  Between 1746 and 1820, Scotland witnessed an industrial
transformation unprecedented in European history, the scale of which would not
be repeated until the world historic industrialisation of the Soviet Union from
1929 onwards.  “Scotland packed into about thirty years of crowded
development from 1750 to 1780 the economic growth that in England had spread itself over two centuries.”^[35]  Consequent upon this “Scottish
Great Leap Forward”^[36], the Scottish economy grew in a
remarkably short time to equal and even to exceed temporarily that of England.  As a result there was created a single British economy.

This transformation was, to repeat, only made
possible by the suppression of the 1745 insurrection and, following it, the
destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs, the abolition of
heritable jurisdictions, and the elimination of the Jacobite party, which had
long boasted as the proud guardians of Scottish manners and customs.  The
resulting influx of wealth, the expansion of trade, and the advent of
industrialisation, transformed the people of Scotland by 1805 into a class of
beings as different from their forefathers, as were their English counterparts
from those of Elizabethan times.

Though a late starter, by 1820 Scotland’s mills employed a huge 78,000 weavers, who came from the Highlands, Ireland and rural Lowlands in that order.  By 1850, with the sole exception of England and Wales, Scotland had become the most urbanised place in the whole of Western Europe – Glasgow being the second city of the Empire.

With industrialisation came the proletarianisation
and, with it the slums of Glasgow and its satellite towns, in which a mass of
humanity lived in intolerable conditions of squalor, poor sanitation and
frequent outbreaks of epidemics.  This combustible human material was
confronted by an unreformed British state in Scotland, totally unresponsive to
the needs and demands of the working class, possessed of the most narrow
oligarchical franchise, and with governmental power monopolised by members of
the aristocracy and its party – the Tory Party – to the exclusion of the
Whigs.  There was no freedom of the press, and no political activity, which was
not friendly to the existing power structure, was allowed.

The condition of the working class assumed
unbearable dimensions following the British victory in the Battle of Waterloo
in 1815, which concluded 20 years of counter-revolutionary war against France.  The result was a collapse in the demand for armaments and ammunitions and the
resultant unemployment, exacerbated by demobilisation of soldiers and renewed
immigration from the north of Ireland.  Further, the abolition of income tax
meant the transfer of taxes on to essential consumer items such as salt and
soap, which hit working-class pockets – the hardest his being the handloom
weavers.

This post-war crisis drew the mass of the workers
for the first time into the movement for political reform, hitherto the
preserve of the petty bourgeoisie and a sprinkling of the dissident members of
the bourgeoisie.  The most important demands of this movement, for franchise
for working men and annual parliaments, met with contempt on the part of the
ruling class.  As a result, on 1st April 1820, a group describing itself as the
Committee of Organisation for Forming a Provisional Government, called for a
general strike and rising in support of these demands.  The response was
nothing short of dramatic, with 60,000 workers striking along the Clyde valley.

“At no time in the history of the radical
movement between 1792 and 1820”, says Davidson “was Scottish nationalism
the predominant political ideology”.

He is able to substantiate this statement by
reference to the slogans, proclamations, oaths and actions of this militant
movement.  He alludes to the United Scotsmen’s oath, which called upon
prospective members to swear that they would persevere in endeavouring “to
form a brotherhood of affection amongst Britons of every description and to
obtain an equal, full and adequate Representation of all the People of Great Britain”.

Virtually the same formulation finds its way into
the oath of one of the secret societies which surfaced in 1815.

It is undeniable that from time to time Scottish
radicals dug into Scottish history for inspiration, however this search for
revolutionary ancestors was not motivated by sentiments of Scottish separatism,
but by an inclination to locate and emphasise every incident or occurrence,
whether recent or ancient, that epitomised, and was evocative of, resistance to
established authority.

Thus it was not uncommon at working-class
demonstration to see banners bearing the names of William Wallace and Robert
the Bruce, side by side with those invoking the Magna Carta and the rights of
Britons, to the accompaniment of the singing of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule,
Britannia’, incidentally written by the Scottish James Thomson.

Scottish radicals were just as well occupied with
the events in England.  On 11 September 1819, a meeting to demand reform was
held in Meikleriggs Muir near Paisley.  The participants marched in military
style to the venue of the meeting with slogans, accompanied by a brass band. 
The most popular song on the march was Burns’ ‘Scots Wha Ha’e’. The flags were
edged with black crepe, the platform was draped over with black cloth, most of
the speakers were clothed in apparel reserved for funerals, all in token of
mourning for those who had been slaughtered in the ‘Battle of Peterloo’.  At
the end, a collection was taken for the widows and orphans of the victims on St
Peter’s Fields in Manchester.

The most striking example of Britishness, however,
is furnished by the General Strike of April 1820.  The proclamation which
heralded the strike was addressed to “the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland”, evoking “those rights consecrated to them by the MAGNA CHARTA and
the BILL OF RIGHTS”.  The General Strike call announced that the workers in
Scotland had joined the workers in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield
and Cardiff in forming a united working class that was British.  The aim of
this insurrectionary movement was to overthrow the government on each side of
the border.

The adoption of English radical images in Scotland
was reciprocated by the adoption of Scottish radical images in England, with
the appropriation of ‘Scots Wha Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled’ as a rallying cry for
liberty in Lancashire cotton mills.

British consciousness became dominant among
Scottish people following the industrialisation and urbanisation of the
Lowlands, especially the industrial west, which became identified with Scotland as a whole through the influx of immigrants from the Highland and Ireland.  Not only did these developments unite the Lowlands and Highlands, welding them
into a single whole, they also served to make Scotland indistinguishable from England.  By 1815, there were no separate English and Scottish economies, but a single
British economy, which accelerated the process, already under way since the
suppression of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, of the formation of a single
British nation. 

The unprecedented development of capitalism, we may
say after Lenin, replaced the ignorant settled peasants of self-sufficient
agriculture in isolated communities by mobile proletarians whose conditions of
life broke down specifically local narrow-mindedness.

This material reality found its reflection among all
classes of Scottish people, who for their respective class reasons,
increasingly between 1746 and 1820 began to regard the British aspect of their
identity economically, politically, geographically and even culturally as
decisive.

In the case of the Scottish working class, the
process was facilitated by a number of reasons.  First, the Scottish workers
suffered no racial or national oppression similar to that which the Irish
workers did; had they been subjected to discrimination and oppression, joint
organisation between the English and Scottish workers in the industrial and
political arena would have been impossible.  Second, with industrialisation and
urbanisation, the industrial west became the centre of economic gravity, and
with it the very notion of what it meant to be Scottish changed.  Increasingly
the industrial west and Scotland became synonymous.  For its inhabitants and
workers, a goodly proportion of whom were of Irish or Highland origin, this was
the only Scotland they had ever encountered.  A Scottishness, of which these
migrants were an integral part, was very different from that which prevailed
even as late as 1776 – the year of publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations.  And this industrial west of Scotland was, in turn,
indistinguishable from the industrial heartlands in England.  Third, the state
which faced the Scottish as well as the English workers was a British state,
that was susceptible to reform or overthrow through their joint actions alone. 
Finally, Scottish history was characterised by a near-absence of radical values
which the rising working-class movement desired to adopt.   Neither Wallace,
nor Bruce, nor the Covenanters, were enough to provide the basis for the
construction of a radical tradition.  Thus the proletarian movement in Scotland, notwithstanding its incorporation of radical symbols from past Scottish history
into its own traditions, was just as well-disposed to English radical beliefs
and symbols.

It has been argued that the Scots display a kind of
duel consciousness, made up “partly of loyalty to the actuality and
opportunity of modern Britain; and partly of loyalty to the memory and
tradition of Scotland”, and that this duality “represents a real
emotional tension, a contradiction within the citizen which is never resolved”^[37]. 
But more important than this, as Davidson remarks, is the fact “for the
Scots, their British and Scottish identities do not merely exist in parallel,
but interpenetrate each other at every point”.  He adds that “ Scottishness
as we know it today not only emerged at the same time as Britishness, but is
part of Britishness, and could not exist … without it” (pp201-201).

If the truth be known, a lot of the most
demonstrative displays of Scottishness are just because Scottish identity
requires constant assertion, whereas British identity is just taken for granted
by the overwhelming majority of the British (including Scottish) people,
requiring no such assertion.^[38]

Conclusion

“A nation is a historically evolved, stable
community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up
manifested in a community of culture” (ibid, JV Stalin).

At the time of the 1707 Union, as Scotland lacked some of the essential characteristics of nationhood, it did not constitute
a nation then.

When, in the latter part of the second half of the
18th century, Scotland acquired all the characteristics of nationhood, the
Scottish people from all classes – bourgeois and proletarian – threw their lot
into the construction of a British nation, which was neither English nor
Scottish, and in the construction of which Scotts played a crucially important
role.  There is nothing artificial or elitist about the British nation as
such.  It is well and truly “a historically evolved, stable community of
language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a
community of culture”.

Our purpose in emphasising this material
reality, far from being motivated by an inclination to become propagandists for
British imperialist nationalism and chauvinism, is, on the contrary, driven by
the need to recognise that which is factually true and the product of real
historical development, as well as a burning desire to expose the unscientific,
divisive and poisonous nonsense spewed out by the advocates of Scottish nationalism,
and thus minimise the danger of a calamitous split in the historically
constituted British proletariat.   Our aim is to counter bourgeois Scottish
nationalism, which by its very logic and narrow interests is compelled, on the
one hand, to deny the elephant in the room – the material reality of the
British nation – and, on the other hand, to conjure into existence a phantom
Scottish nation.  It is our utmost duty to fight against bourgeois nationalism,
which “… drugs the minds of the workers, stultifies and disunites them in
order that the bourgeoisie may lead them by the halter …” (Lenin, ibid)

It is our ardent duty to wage an uncompromising struggle
against the contamination of the proletariat with bourgeois nationalism, even
of the most refined, ‘left’ and ‘socialist’ variety.  “True”, in the
never to be forgotten words of Stalin, “such nationalism is not so
transparent, for it is skilfully masked by socialist phrases, but it is all the
more harmful to the proletariat for that reason.  We can always cope with open
nationalism, for it is easily discerned.  It is much more difficult to combat a
nationalism which is masked and unrecognisable beneath its mask.  Protected by
the armour of socialism, it is less vulnerable” (Stalin, p29).

Hence our duty to fight against the ‘left’
nationalism of the ‘socialist’ Tommy Sheridans and John Fosters of this world,
as much as against the bourgeois nationalism of the SNP.

We are fully aware that this article is
only too likely to provoke the ire of our nationalist opponents and cause them
to accuse us of being British nationalist enemies of the Scottish people – “paper
will bear anything that is written on it” (Stalin) – but the interests of
the unity of the British proletariat and of its struggle for social emancipation
are far too dear to us to be deterred from stating the truth by such threats.

NOTES:

[1] J V
Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, FLPH, Moscow 1940

[2] V I Lenin,
‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’, CW Vol 20.

[3] T C Smout,
A history of the Scottish people, Fontana Press, Glasgow, 1969, p.27

[4] GWS
Barrow, Robert Bruce and the community of the Realm of Scotland, 2nd edition, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1976, p.430

[5] E J Cowan,
‘Identity, freedom and the Declaration of Arbroath’ in D Brown, R J Finlay and
M Lynah (eds), Image and Identity, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 1998, p.51.

[6] ‘Arguments
within Scottish Marxism’,  The Bulletin of Scottish Politics,
Vol.1, No. 2, (Spring 1981), pp. 111-33 at p.125

[7] Davidson’s
emphasis

[8] Thomas
Johnston: The History of the working classes in Scotland, Fourth
edition, Unity Publishing Company, Glasgow, 1946, p.146.

[9] Scotland, history and the writer, Edinburgh 1998, p.149.

[10] David
Murison, The Guid Scots Tongue, Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1977, p.5.

[11] The
ethnic origins of nations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p.26.

[12] Edward
Burt, Robert Jamieson, Sir Walter Scott, The Highlanders’ Complaint,
Transmitted by a Gentleman of that Country To his Friends at Edinburgh,
Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1737, p.24

[13] The
History Of The Affairs Of Scotland From the Restoration of King Charles II In
The year 1660.  And the Later Great Revolution in That Kingdom, Edinburgh,
1690, p.128-9.

[14] Burt’s
Letters From the North Of Scotland, with an introduction by R Johnson,
Edinburgh, 1974, Volume 1, pp4-5.

[15] Michael
Hechter, Internal Colonialism, London and Henley, 1975, pp9-10,80.

[16] J D
Young, The Rousing of the Scottish working class, London 1979, p11

[17] See
Alistair Durie, ‘The Markets for Scottish Linen: 1730-1755’, Scottish
Historical Review 153-154, 1973, pp30, 38)

[18] Keith
Webb, The Growth of Nationalism in Scotland, Glasgow, 1977, p.93

[19] J D
Young, ibid, p41.

[20] Soul
Brothers Under the Skin, Tinsel Show, Edinburgh, 1992, p168.

[21] The
Modern Scottish Novel, Edinburgh, 1999, p30

[22] Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837,
London, 1992, p125

[23] James
Hunter, A Dance Called America, Edinburgh, 1994, p237.

[24] G J
Bryant, ‘Scots in India in the Eighteenth Century’, Scottish Historical
Review 177, April 1985, p41.

[25] The
Political Progress of Great Britain; Or an Impartial Account Of the Principal
Abuses In The Government OF This Country From the Revolution in 1688,
Edinburgh, 1792, Part 1, pp1-2.

[26] W Burns, Scotland And Her Calumniators: Her Past, Her Present and Her Future, Glasgow, 1858 pp19-20

[27] Hobsbawm
and Ranger (Editors), The Invention of Tradition: the Highlands Tradition of
Scotland

‘The invention
of tradition’, p22).

[28] Ibid
p26.

[29] Thomas Macaulay and Hugh Trevor-Roper, The History of England, London and New York, 1906, Vol. 2. p452.

[30] C Kidd, British
Identities before Nationalism, Cambridge, 1999, p145.

[31] W Scott,
‘Report of the Highland Society Upon Ossian, etc’, Edinburgh Review and
Critical Journal, 12 July 1805, p462.

[32] T Nairn,
‘Scotland and Europe’, The Break Up of Britain, London 1981, pp114-17.

[33] Nicholas
Phillipson, ‘Nationalism and Ideology’, J N Wolfe (Ed), Government And
Nationalism In Scotland, Edinburgh, 1969.

[34] Marx and
Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, FLP, Peking 1965.

[35] Rosalind
Mitchison, A History of Scotland, London, 1970, p345.

[36] See
Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘One Man’s Meat: The Scottish Great Leap Forward’, Review,
Vol.3, No.4, Spring 1980.

[37]
Christopher Smout, A Century Of The Scottish People 1830-1950, Glasgow, 1987, pp239-238

[38] See Joyce
McMillon, ‘Foreign Lessons In Dressing For Home Rule’, Scotland on Sunday, 22 August 1993.