The Scottish Nation

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1. NOV. 1999

Nearly 300 years after the Scottish parliament voted itself out of existence in 1707 as the ruling classes in Edinburgh and London forged a marriage of convenience, history has come full circle: in July 2000, the first Scottish parliament in nearly 300 years will convene amid a growing movement for partial autonomy or even independence from England. Devine (The Great Highland Famine), director of research at the Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, charts Scots' ambivalent relationship to Britain, from 1700 through the Victorian era, when Scottish pride rested on identification with union and empire, to disillusionment with England during the Thatcher years and the new service-based economy of the 1990s. Since the mid-19th century, Scotland has been one of the world's most urbanized societies, with the vast majority of its people living in the industrialized Lowlands, not in the Highlands romanticized by Robert Burns and others. To Devine, a central paradox is why Scotland, one of the most prosperous industrial and agricultural success stories after 1860, lost millions of people through emigration. The answer, he believes, is to be found in gross inequality of income and the overcrowding, squalor and epidemics to which the unlucky many were exposed. His survey explores how Scottish national identity has continually refashioned itself, from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which spawned Adam Smith and David Hume, to the adaptive creativity exemplified by poet Hugh MacDiarmid, architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and even rock bands like the Proclaimers. The pace sometimes bogs down under the weight of statistics, but for its size and ambition, this is a graceful synthesis of economic, social and political history that gives readers a wonderfully rich portrait of Scotland.