Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far ...more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned?
The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives.
Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century.
This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris was widely acknowledged as the cultural capital of the world, the home of avant-garde music and art, symbolist literature and bohemian culture. Edinburgh, ...by contrast, may still be thought of as a rather staid city of lawyers and Presbyterian ministers, academics and doctors. While its great days as a centre for the European Enlightenment may have been behind it, however, late Victorian Edinburgh was becoming the location for a new set of cultural institutions, with its own avant-garde, that corresponded with a renewed Scottish national consciousness. While Morningside was never going to be Montparnasse, the period known as the Belle Epoque was a time in both French and Scottish society when there were stirrings of non-conformity, which often clashed with a still powerful establishment. And in this respect, French bourgeois society could be as resistant to change as the suburbs of Edinburgh. With travel and communication becoming ever easier, a growing number of international contacts developed that allowed such new and radical cultural ideas to flourish. In a series of linked essays, based on research into contemporary archives, documents and publications in both countries, as well as on new developments in cultural research, this book explores an unexpected dimension of Scottish history, while also revealing the Scottish contribution to French history. In a broader sense, and particularly as regards gender, it considers what is meant by 'modern' or 'radical' in this period, without imposing any single model. In so doing, it seeks not to treat Paris-Edinburgh links in isolation, or to exaggerate them, but to use them to provide a fresh perspective on the internationalism of the Belle Epoque.
This book places early modern Scottish maritime warfare in its European context. Its formidably broad range of sources sheds light on many previously little known, or unknown, aspects of naval ...history. It also provides many valuable new perspectives on the importance of the sea to the Scots, and of the Scots to the naval history of Great Britain.
This book makes an original contribution to the growing body of knowledge on the Scots abroad, presenting a coherent and comprehensive account of the Scottish immigrant experience in New Zealand.
In Frontiers for Peace in the Medieval North. The Norwegian-Scottish Frontier c. 1260-1470, Ian Peter Grohse offers an account of social and political relations in the frontier community of Orkney in ...the late Middle Ages.
The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Scottish and Quebec nationalisms that were closely intertwined with liberal philosophies. The Young Scots' Society and the Ligue nationaliste ...canadienne carried these liberal nationalist ideas. This book offers a comparative and historical examination of their ideas and politics, exploring the Young Scots as a movement, as well as the ideas of key Nationalistes. James Kennedy argues that the growth of the Young Scots' Society and the Ligue nationaliste canadienne was largely in response to changes within empire, state, and civil society. He suggests that the actions of the British Empire and the Canadian state not only prompted nationalist responses in Scotland and Quebec respectively, but also shaped their liberal character. His comparative analysis provides insights that would not arise from a single case study of either movement, while detailing the important roles that geopolitics, consociation and federation, and organized religion played in the creation of nationalist philosophies. The first-ever comparative history of nationalism in Scotland and Quebec, Liberal Nationalisms is an insightful study of nascent political nationalisms and a major contribution to the scholarship of nationalist movements in the early twentieth century.
Warrior dreams Hesse, David
2014, 2014., 20141101, 2014-11-01
eBook
Why does a Parisian banker re-enact the medieval wars of Wallace and Bruce in his spare time? Why do more than 20,000 people attend the Schotse Weekend bagpipe competition in Bilzen, Flanders? Why ...does an entire village in the Italian Alps celebrate a lost Scottish regiment? And why is there a Highland Games circuit of at least 30 kilted strength competitions in Austria, with dedicated athletes tossing hay-balls and pulling tractors? This is the first study of the self-professed ‘Scots’ of Europe. It follows the many thousands of Europeans who are determined to discover their inner Scotsman, and argues that by imitating the Scots of popular imagination, the self-styled European Highlanders hope to reconnect with their own ancestors – their lost songs, traditions and tribes. They approach Scotland as a site of European memory. This book explores issues of performance and celebration, memory and nostalgia, heritage and identity, and will be of interest to specialists on Scottish emigration and diaspora, Scottish history and myth, and to the ‘Scots’ of Europe themselves.
This highly readable book is a unique, ethnographic study of devolution and Scottish politics as well as Party political activism more generally. It explores how Conservative Party activists who had ...opposed devolution and the movement for a Scottish Parliament during the 1990s attempted to mobilise politically following their annihilation at the 1997 General Election. It draws on fieldwork conducted in Dumfries and Galloway - a former stronghold for the Scottish Tories - to describe how senior Conservatives worked from the assumption that they had endured their own ‘crisis’ in representation. The material consequences of this crisis included losses of financial and other resources, legitimacy and local knowledge for the Scottish Conservatives. This book ethnographically describes the processes, practices and relationships that Tory Party activists sought to enact during the 2003 Scottish and local Government elections. Its central argument is that, having asserted that the difficulties they faced constituted problems of knowledge, Conservative activists cast to the geographical and institutional margins of Scotland became ‘banal’ activists. Believing themselves to be lacking in the data and information necessary for successful mobilisation during Parliamentary elections, local Tory Party strategists attempted to address their knowledge ‘crisis’ by burying themselves in paperwork and petty bureaucracy. Such practices have often escaped scholarly attention because they appear everyday and mundane and are therefore less noticeable.
This book investigates secessionist movements within the European Union, drawing on the author's in-depth research interviews with elected members of the major pro-independence political parties in ...Flanders, Scotland, and Catalonia. The book considers shifts within party platforms as well as why these regions are not yet independent.
This book is a frontal attack on an entrenched orthodoxy. Our official, public vision of the early eighteenth century demonises Louis XIV and France and marginalises the Scots Jacobites. Louis is ...seen as an incorrigibly imperialistic monster and the enemy of liberty and all that is good and progressive. The Jacobite Scots are presented as so foolishly reactionary and dumbly loyal that they were (sadly) incapable of recognising their manifest destiny as the cannon fodder of the first British empire. But what if Louis acted in defence of a nation’s liberties and (for whatever reason) sought to right a historic injustice? What if the Scots Jacobites turn out to be the most radical, revolutionary party in early eighteenth-century British politics? Using newly discovered sources from the French and Scottish archives this exciting new book challenges our fundamental assumptions regarding the emergence of the fully British state in the early eighteenth century.
