The Stone of Destiny

In the late 1960s, wise and liberal folk heard that a creature called “Scottish Nationalism” had entered serious politics. Many were uncertain whether to laugh or to weep in despair for the human race. After so many awful lessons, were there still those who had not learned that petty nationalism leads only to racism, fascism and war? And the Scots of all people, so dour and sagacious--how could they have fallen victims to this fever that had ravaged Europe in previous generations?

But time passed and the heather did not burst into flame, and by the late 1990s it came as less of a shock to read that the New Labor government in Britain had allowed the Scots to set up a sub-parliament of their own in Edinburgh. In the intervening 30 years or so, notions of Scottish self-assertion had become glamorous in the outside world. Aggressive young Glasgow painters (Steven Campbell, Peter Howson) and novelists (James Kelman, Irvine Welsh) became famous. Hollywood was penetrated by gifted Scottish scriptwriters, beginning with Alan Sharp. In the late 1970s, the granite chasms of Scottish urban landscape became a modish background for avant-garde German filmmakers; in the 1990s, there followed two American blockbuster movies about a heroic but largely imaginary Scottish past: “Rob Roy” and “Braveheart.”

This now leads to an outcome baffling to the Scots themselves, as a new stream of ultra-right American tourists professes to find in Scotland a new Montana backwoods: a nation fanatically devoted to rugged male freedom, to the virtues of the white race and to anti-government resistance by battle-ax, claymore or Kalashnikov. Some change to Scotland’s international image since those misty tartan shtetls represented in “Brigadoon”!

Neither myth was true, though. Nationalism in Scotland is not at all like the paradigm of independence struggles in most of the rest of the world. There is no need to create a new nation because the Scottish nation never ceased to exist in the centuries after the 1707 Union with England that established “Great Britain.” What was missing in those years was not nation but state, liquidated when the Scottish Parliament abolished itself. Now, when the conditions that made the old Union tolerable and even profitable for the Scots have ceased to exist (British dominance of world trade, a global British colonial empire largely managed and administered by Scots), the Scottish state has been partially resurrected in the form of a devolved sub-parliament in Edinburgh, in control of a cluster of executive departments. But that resurrection has been a decorous process, achieved by patient agitation rather than by the battle-ax. And if that process does run on into full independent statehood for Scotland within the European Union, it will happen because the devolution mechanism--by which a Scottish parliament is restored to govern Scotland’s internal affairs--cannot be made to work efficiently, not because kilted thousands are on the streets roaring for “Freedom!”

All these are conclusions that can be drawn from T.M. Devine’s big book on Scottish history. There are two general remarks to make about its scope. First, it is a study of non-independent Scotland between the Union Treaty and the return of a Scottish Parliament in 1999. These boundaries inevitably lead Devine toward an assumption that these last three centuries were definitive in forming a new Scottish identity, containing--as they do--the Ages of Enlightenment and Improvement, the industrial and agrarian revolutions, the growth of Scottish cities, and the great social tragedy of the Highland Clearances, the forcible eviction and/or assisted emigration to North America, Australia and New Zealand of tenant farmers by their landlords. This is in one sense undeniably true. To the historian and the rationalist, modern Scotland must seem overwhelmingly the product of the colossal changes of that period. But identity politics are always surprising. And in the last 10 years I have watched with fascination as the imaginative “defining moment”--the time when Scotland was somehow most intensely Scottish--has begun to slip rapidly backward toward the most remote and Braveheart-like epochs: the earliest Scottish kingdom, the enigmatic realms of the Picts with their symbol stones and heavy silver chains, the medieval struggles to defend national independence against the English, which culminated in the Scottish victory at Bannockburn in 1314. The Stone of Destiny, that scarred slab of unknown provenance on which the kings of Scotland were inaugurated, has come to weigh more than all the dazzling cosmopolitan treatises of the Edinburgh Enlightenment. One day, if this sentimental journey back through time continues, it will weigh heavier than all the iron and steel ships built on the Clyde.

The second point about Devine’s scope is that this is not a linear narrative history of what happened next. Instead, it is a tremendous study of transformations, social above all rather than political. This is not to say that Devine makes the old mistake, once universal among his predecessors, of assuming that Scotland had no authentic political history of its own between 1707 and the devolving 1990s. He tells crisply and often amusingly the tale of how Scotland was “managed,” then rather loosely governed, then represented and eventually reformed by Scottish politicians operating through the centralized “Westminster” system. But Devine’s strength is his huge learning in the field of social history, especially the story of the rural communities of Scotland, and change is the theme of this book.

But perhaps “change” is a euphemism. Within a few years of the Union Treaty, a consuming, swallowing hurricane of innovation tore down and soon obliterated almost all traces of the old Scottish rural landscape; it lined quiet rivers with industry and inflated sedate little burghs into Gustave Dore megalopolises reeking with overcrowded slums; it blasted away the semi-feudal clan relationships of the Highlands and left “distressed areas,” “congested districts,” famine and mass emigration. And maybe “hurricane” is a misnomer too. It suggests the blind forces of the market, when in fact this serial apocalypse was brought about by a small but incredibly dynamic corps of self-made entrepreneurs between about 1780 and 1880. England, the first modernizing society, took relatively long to make these changes. But Scotland imposed them with a speed and thoroughness unmatched even by Imperial Germany; the world would not see the deliberate reshaping of a whole society at such a pace until the first Soviet Five-Year Plans. It is not surprising that the new Scotland that emerged from those upheavals was traumatized, suspicious of its own emotions and tormented by uncertainties about its cultural, political and ethnic identity. In his latest book, “After Britain,” Tom Nairn, Scotland’s best political philosopher, attributes this uncertainty and trauma to ill-repressed shame about the surrender of political independence. Devine’s work confirms the feeling that the disabling sense of loss was literal, even visual, as well as political. Between 1760 and 1860, much of Scotland became physically unrecognizable. The rural Lowlands, for example, changed from an open, unfenced expanse sprinkled with tiny thatched “ferm touns” (settlements of a dozen families or less) to a checkerboard divided by hedges or dry-stone walls. The new flat fields were worked by paid plowmen with two horses rather than by the ox teams that once scratched up each family’s raised strips. The “touns” and most of their people had vanished as if they had never been, replaced by a few slate-roofed commercial farmhouses.

Urbanization in Scotland happened more rapidly than anywhere else in Europe, far later than in the Netherlands but also substantially more suddenly than in England and Wales. In 1600, about 3% of the population lived in towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants; by 1700, the figure had crawled up to 5.3%, but by 1850, it was 32%. The nearest comparison is England (from 13.3% to 40.8%). No other European nation had an even remotely comparable rate of transformation. The tribal customary societies of Gaelic Scotland, like the clan system, were disintegrating long before the campaign of state terrorism against Gaelic culture that was Britain’s reprisal for the 1745 Jacobite rising (“Bonny Prince Charlie” and all that). There followed the Highland Clearances, which completely altered the ancient agrarian society and reduced much of the Highlands to a silent, depopulated, waterlogged waste--the prospect now ironically adored as “our last natural wilderness.”

But Scotland, as Devine patiently shows, is a historical plait in which human disaster is tightly braided with astonishing success. As usual, disaster was mostly for the many and success for the few. But the personal and corporate fortunes that Scots made out of the British Empire were so enormous that, in a small country of some 5 million people, the wealth did trickle down and spread more widely. Within a few years of the Union, Glasgow dominated the British tobacco and linen trades, and Scots were colonizing the upper ranks of the East India Co. By 1914, the Clyde led the world in shipbuilding and marine engineering, while Scottish overseas investment was far higher per capita than in England. A people who often lived in shocking poverty supported a fabulously profitable export trade in finance and industrial goods, supplying investment and infrastructure to the whole Victorian global economy.

The decline, when it came, was almost equally steep. Scotland’s exporting industries made no real attempt to diversify when it was still possible, and the end of war and Empire ruined them. For nearly a century, the industries of Scotland’s “Central Belt” had been turning out either heavy engineering products (ships, marine engines, steel), which were heavy on the fickle needs of defense procurement rather than on sustainable global demand, or goods for the domestic market (jute, linoleum), which used artificially cheap raw materials from the colonial Empire. Desperate attempts to stave off industrial collapse were made in the 1960s and 1970s by Labor and Conservative governments, which subsidized new modern steel mills, vehicle factories, pulp mills and other major investments. Almost none survived longer than a few years, and as mass unemployment spread across central and western Scotland, the neglected infrastructure of housing, health care and transport fell into decay. It was in West-Central Scotland, in the 1970s, that the euphemism “multiple deprivation” was coined, meaning the social misery that is about more than lack of money.

The Glasgow conurbation had long had the worst housing conditions in northern Europe, aggravated by mass unemployment and hunger. After 1945, almost all housing, old or new, was taken over by the city authorities until “Scotland by the 1970s had probably the largest share of public housing of any advanced economy outside the Communist bloc.” I have news for Devine: Scotland in those years actually had fewer owner-occupiers than many Communist countries; a much higher percentage of Poles and Hungarians owned their homes.

Nothing is more ironic than Scottish emigration. Some 2 million Scots left their country between 1820 and 1914. Proportionate to population, this is far the highest rate of any European country save Ireland--and if Scottish migration to England is counted, then the movement is even higher than the Irish one. And yet this was not a starving peasant land or a grossly over-populated countryside: Scotland in that period was one of the most spectacularly successful economies on Earth. Why, then? Devine guesses, I think rightly, that the answer is to be found in the historic Scottish acceptance of emigration as a positive act, a cultural tradition reaching back to the enormous Scottish settlements in 16th century Poland and around the Baltic. Ambition was nearly as important in taking young families down to the waiting ships as misery and despair.

Now the unwritten bargain of the Union--prosperity in return for the surrender of sovereignty--is coming apart. Devine does not hide his satisfaction at the return of a Scottish Parliament after almost 300 years, but he hazards no guesses about what may now follow. My own feeling is that devolution will prove transient. Any attempt to “democratize” a relationship between an England with 50 million people and a Scotland with 5 million must founder on sheer disproportion; no basis for federalism or “quasi-federalism” exists. Scotland has passed through this colossal transformation and uprooting that Devine describes so well, only to end up with a stronger sense of distinct identity than before. The idea that Scotland will still be part of a United Kingdom in 2020 begins to seem unlikely. But the prospect that Scotland will emerge from such a severance with strength and confidence is beginning to look convincing.