Tom Devine, doyen of Scottish historians, was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk about his most recent work, ‘Independence or Union: Scotland's Past and Scotland's Present’.
Like many of his more thoughtful colleagues, Devine eschews the single, overarching explanation in favour of more complex, sometimes seemingly chaotic causality.
Backed up with a host of statistical, rather than anecdotal evidence, his work is undoubtedly impressive, but disappoints in taking the Union of Parliaments as its starting point. Admittedly, much work has already been done on the lead-up to this event, notably by Professors Allan Macinnes and Christopher Whatley, albeit from very different positions, but Devine does not suggest his own.
Devine chooses to focus on later events, although his selection seems at times perverse; the omission of the Government of Scotland Bill (1913) is particularly odd, its suspension in 1914 fostering those breakaways from the Liberal Party (lukewarm in its reaction to ‘Home Rule All Round’), the Scottish and National Parties, which later combined to form, yes, you guessed it, the Scottish National Party.
Casualties in World War One (Scotland’s per capita death toll was surpassed only by that of Serbia) and declining industry fanned nationalist flames but did not, until the latter part of the previous century, translate into changes of political allegiance.
Although Devine remained silent on these matters in his presentation, he was forthright in his identification of the advantages some Scots obtained through their service to the British Empire (although Scots had been active in colonial enterprise prior to the 1707 Union). Their period of imperial greatness he identified as being between the 1760’s and 1830’s, and although Devine mentioned the re-publication of Blind Harry’s ‘Wallace’ and John Barbour’s ‘Bruce’, he ignored ‘The Scottish Chiefs’ by Durham-born Jane Porter, published in 1810, and its patriotism-inducing influence on Scottish children for many decades afterwards.
Porter’s hero, William Wallace, was finally commemorated in 1869 by Sir Thomas Rochhead’s memorial topping the Abbey Craig at Stirling, thirty years before a statue of Oliver Cromwell was erected, perhaps indicative of divergences in Scots and English public opinion, even at the height of empire.
Devine paid handsome tribute to the generations of historians of Scotland that have arisen since 1960, when only three doctorates in the disciple were awarded. Their largely Irish-induced revisionism has moved the study of Scottish history forward in remarkable directions.
Finally, after an unfortunate exhibition of everyday sexism, the chair for this event probed Devine’s own views on independence. Devine’s response has produced predictable comment from certain quarters, but seemed to reflect a nostalgia, regrettable in an historian, for an age we seem to have left behind, rather than addressing the ultimately unknowable future into which we appear to be heading.
Independence or Union: Scotland's Past and Scotland's Present 