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Kay, Billy. Scots: The Mither Tongue, 1986.










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. A Century of the Scottish People, 18301950, 1987.



Jonathan Hearn

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R. A. Houston

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Heather Holmes

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economic changes
social issues
highlands versus lowlands
demographic change

During a century of remarkable change, Scotland underwent some of the most profound social, economic, and political transformations found anywhere in Europe. In 1789 it was still primarily a rural society and an agrarian economy, existing politically in the shadow of its English neighbor. Yet it was separate and different in important ways, and rapid change was already underway. Scotland was a European leader in the fields of agriculture and commerce, with established coalmining and a developing textile-based industrial sector; its philosophers were changing the face of European thought; its inhabitants saw themselves as Scots, but also as Britons; its people, practices, and ideas were beginning to leave a stamp on the whole British, European, and Atlantic world. By 1914 Scotland was one of the most urbanized and industrialized countries in Europe, possessing an influential political voice within Britain and substantial wealth as well. Its people spanned the globe as traders, imperial administrators, sailors, and soldiers.

In 1789 Scotland and England shared a monarchy, parliament, empire, and an island, yet they were in many ways very different countries. The most obvious difference between Scotland and England lay in rural social structure. Scotland's rural population generally lived in dispersed farm settlements more reminiscent of Scandinavia than the nucleated villages of England. Landownership was concentrated in the hands of a few great lords and Scottish rural society was quasi-feudal. Except in some limited regions, there was no real equivalent of the English yeoman farmer. Underway since the seventeenth century in the Lothians (the most agriculturally precocious area of Scotland, thanks to its proximity to Edinburgh, the largest city until around 1790 when Glasgow took over), consolidation of tenancies and the removal of subtenants accelerated rapidly across Scotland from the 1780s. By the 1820s Lowland society had become polarized between landowners, tenants, and landless laborers, most subtenants and many smaller tenants having been swept from the land. In the Lothians, the laborers were mostly married men paid largely in kind. Elsewhere in Scotland (such as the northeast), single servants (both living-in and housed in bothies, or huts) and small-holders provided the labor that in England came from workers hired by the day. In Scotland, where mixed agriculture was less seasonal than that of much of England, females, children, and

(for the arable Lowlands) migrant workers from the Highlands met additional labor needs.

economic changes

Aristocrats and gentry (called lairds in Scotland) dominated economic, political, and cultural life, for the rural middle class in Scotland was small. In contrast, a bourgeoisie flourished in the blossoming "New Towns" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Built on the profits of law, medicine, and commerce, Edinburgh's New Town is the most famous, but comparably extensive late-Georgian developments in the neoclassical style of London and Bath can be found in Glasgow (where wealth came primarily from the tobacco trade). Later Victorian suburbs bulked out the middle-class housing stock of these and other major towns such as Aberdeen, Perth, and Dundee.

If the middle class had been made prior to 1832, new sources of wealth enhanced its importance as the century progressed. Heavy industry began to expand from the 1830s and Scotland became a world-class industrial country. The chemical complex at St. Rollox in Glasgow was the largest manufactory in the world. The thread-making firms of J. & P. Coats and Clarks of Paisley merged in 1896 to become the largest manufacturing firm in Britain (and fifth largest in the world). Coal output rose dramatically to meet the new industrial and domestic demand, to the benefit of Scotland's economy and the detriment of its environment. Scotland became an urbanized and industrialized country in the second half of the nineteenth century. Agriculture employed two-thirds of the male labor force around 1789, 30 percent in 1851, and just 13 percent in 1911.


The economic changes that created a middle class of merchants, tradesmen, and professionals early in the nineteenth century were eventually reflected in political developments. From 1707, with the Union of Parliaments, until 2000, Scotland had no representative assembly but shared its government with its larger English neighbor. Eighteenth-century Scotland was effectively managed, with little interference from London, by a system of aristocratic patronage. Scotland was able to make its own place in the British polity.

Yet the Hanoverian political consensus was being destabilized before Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the Reform Bill (1832) put an end to it. Until 1832 Scotland's parliamentary franchise was far more restricted than in England. In the 1780s Scotland had just 3,000 county electors in a population of perhaps 1.5 million (0.2 percent), whereas the English electorate may have been as large as a third of a million in a population of about 7.5 million people (4 percent). The burgh (urban) franchise was confined to town councils: Edinburgh's member of Parliament (MP) at Westminster was elected by just thirty-three men prior to 1832. The electorate in England increased by 80 percent from the pre-Reform figure; in Scotland the change was 1,400 percent. That meant 13 percent of Scotland's male population could vote compared with about 20 percent of England's. By 1867, the proportion of males enfranchised was approximately equal in Scotland and England at about one third, and in 1884 the franchise was homogenized across Britain. Women had to wait until 1918 before they, too, could participate.

However, convergence is not the whole story, for Scotland showed distinctive political values. Notable is the enduring strength of Whiggism or Liberalism from 1832 to 1914 (England was more consistently Conservative), epitomized in the Midlothian Campaign speeches (1879) of British Prime Minister William Ewert Gladstone (1809–1898). Additionally, the Union of 1707 allowed for Scottish control over the major establishments of civil society: the law, the church, and education. These peculiarly Scottish institutions provided a continuing basis for national allegiances, and this was strengthened in 1885 with the founding of the Scottish Office, which acted as a symbol of an independent Scotland.

Reformed burgh councils (from 1833) acted as a focus of local and regional independence. Reform of county government did not come until 1889 when representative county councils were established. This allowed the continuation of aristocratic influence over county politics and administration throughout the nineteenth century—and far into the twentieth. Indeed it was conservative unionism, rooted in long-established loyalty to the houses of Hanover and Windsor, which would dominate twentieth-century Scottish politics.


The Hanoverian political consensus had been based partly on the fiction of unity in religion. Scotland had indeed been officially Protestant since the sixteenth century, yet the religious history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is of schisms within the church. The early nineteenth century saw a wave of religious revival movements, coupled with a broadly based drift away from the established church, principally because of opposition to patronage (appointment of clergy by other than the flock). This ended in the Disruption of 1843 and the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland.

The religious consequences of the fragmentation of Protestantism were, on balance, positive. There was a surge in church- and school-building after the Disruption by the three main Protestant churches: Church of Scotland, Free Church, and United Presbyterian Church. Further, confessional pluralism allowed a further expansion of religious participation. Religion remained central to everyday life in Victorian Scotland, dominating organized leisure, the formation of social policy, and the moral values of temperance and self-help. Irish immigrants eventually created a coherent Roman Catholicism and a strong cultural identity, especially in the towns of west-central Scotland.

Yet there was also a negative effect. Diverging values and widening social differences were fragmenting Highland and Lowland societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The religious schism of 1843 was linked to emerging class differences, and theological disputes were taken very seriously by Scots in ways perhaps unthinkable in the twenty-first century. Protestant fragmentation and Catholic consolidation after 1829 combined with a legacy of post-Reformation anti-Catholicism to create chronic sectarian rivalries.

social issues

In addition to their cultural implications, and when coupled with radical socioeconomic change, religious divisions also affected the structure of civil society because of the church's importance to poor relief. While the Poor Law (Scotland) Act of 1845 marked a convergence with English practice, differences nevertheless persisted, notably the lack of formal institutions for the poor, which the Scots had never favored, and a preference for (cheaper) outdoor relief. In 1906, 14 percent of Scotland's pauper population received indoor relief, compared with 32 percent in England. Furthermore, Scotland's poor relief (and many other aspects of its governance), remained less centralized than in England.

Despite the reorganization of relief and growing British prosperity, Scots endured a standard of living much below their English neighbors. In 1867, 70 percent of "productive persons" earned less than thirty pounds per annum, while the top 10 percent gobbled up half the national income. Wealth polarization was especially pronounced in towns. In 1911, over half the Scottish population lived in one- or two-roomed homes (usually apartments in the towns), and in Glasgow and Dundee the figure was over 60 percent. Overcrowding was the result, with nearly 56 percent of Glaswegians living more than two to a room. The urban poor moved into the central homes the middle class vacated on their way to "New Towns," and also the newly (but badly) built "tenements" (apartment buildings) that housed the industrial labor force of mushrooming towns like Paisley.


Other social problems were addressed more successfully, at least in the long term. For example, social and economic change quickly outdated the (very successful) eighteenth-century education system. Early nineteenth-century studies showed large numbers of children excluded from education through the necessity of earning a living to help their impoverished families. Surveys also showed that, while the majority of male adults could read, very few could write, and female literacy was even less. Legislation in the 1870s and 1880s allowed

Scottish literacy to regain its relative standing, and by 1910–1911 Scotland had more children in the age group of five to fourteen attending school than all other northwest European countries except France.

In higher education, Scotland remained a leader. Around 1790, Scotland had the highest ratio of universities per million inhabitants in Europe (3.3 per million; the figure was 0.2 for England and Wales [and Ireland], 0.9 for France). The social distribution of university students was broader in nineteenth-century Scotland than in England—at least among males, for no woman was allowed to matriculate at any of Scotland's five universities until 1892. Scotland's universities produced nine out of ten British medical graduates around 1800 and, while they lacked mid-century dynamism, they were successfully reformed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Scottish law, medical expertise, and its very university system were all successfully exported to the wider world by missionaries, migrants, and imperial bureaucrats.

The universities had been the crucible of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, which left a deep and lasting influence on the ideas and practices of the English-speaking world. Bound together by a shared faith in the improvability of individual and society through education, reason, and discussion, men like Adam Smith (1723–1790), the founder of laissez-faire, the concept that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century economics; Adam Ferguson (1723–1816); and David Hume (1711–1776) celebrated and promoted commercial change by arguing that economic cooperation and exchange would promote sociability, refinement, and "taste." The effect of these ideas pervaded nineteenth-century Scottish society and they help to explain the lower levels of popular protest there than in England. The radical working and middle classes were much influenced by ideas that stressed the importance of reason and argument over violence and irrationality.

A shared faith in the value of education (whatever its actual achievements) and in the improvability of civil society made Scotland's people more interested in treading a positive and peaceful path toward betterment. This is not to say that the Scots were a quiescent people: rather they coped better with change than some. Coupled with this was a darker force ensuring passivity: the power of paternalistic landlords and capitalists to shape individual lives and to break organized labor. Harsh brands of evangelical Protestantism also counseled quiescence.

highlands versus lowlands

Not all of rural Scotland was as prosperous and peaceful as the Lowlands. Highland agriculture had long been geared to providing subsistence rather than growing productivity and Highlanders were affected by famine in the 1840s, though less severely than the Irish. Highland society had long been very different from Lowland. The great landowners left estate management to middlemen, who rented to subtenants and then to crofters. Highland society too underwent change as the landlords' priorities shifted during the eighteenth century. They effectively repudiated centuries of being not just landlords, but also chiefs in charge of clans built on the bonds created by kinship (real or fictive), feuding, and feasting. Leaving the land was thus a far more traumatic process in the Highlands.

Initially landowners responded to population growth, economic shifts, and their own changing priorities by trying to redistribute labor supply, as their power enabled them to do. However, over time they resorted to wholesale evictions, plantations in overcrowded and economically marginal fishing villages, or to industrial enterprises that lacked staying power (like harvesting kelp from the sea to make fertilizer), and later by emigration schemes. Highland Scotland was progressively stripped of people. The empty landscape was filled by deer forests, which by 1884 covered two million acres or one tenth of the area of Scotland. The changes in landholding and the forcible clearance of sections of the peasantry from the land fomented collective resistance, which reached its apogee in the Crofters' Wars of the 1880s, and left a legacy of betrayal that had no Lowland equivalent. The nineteenth-century Highlands experienced social upheavals that, in their depth and breadth, were without parallel anywhere in Europe.

During the nineteenth century, distinctions between Highland and Lowland Scotland became increasingly blurred. The 1872 Education Act banned school lessons from being taught in Gaelic, but Highlanders were already won over to the benefits of English as a result of seasonal migration to the Lowlands and imperial service in the British army. Never the majority language (most Scots spoke a variation of English), Gaelic was the first tongue of just a fifth of Scots in 1806 and a tenth in 1900. Levels of literacy in the Highlands were much lower than in the Lowlands throughout the nineteenth century.

demographic change

Such important cultural changes as the decline of Gaelic stemmed partly from demographic forces. Population trebled to 4.5 million inhabitants between 1789 and 1911, a modest rate of growth that disguises the massive redistributions of people that came out of agrarian change. As late as 1789 just under half of Scotland's people lived north of an imaginary "Highland Line." By 1911 this had

fallen to just a sixth. One Scot in eight lived in a large town in 1790, one in three by 1831, and three out of five in 1911, by which date Scotland was the most urbanized country in Europe after England. In the 1890s, a quarter of the adult population of Glasgow—then a city of 700,000 people—had been born in the Highlands and another quarter in Ireland.

In addition to redistribution and Irish immigration, emigration accelerated in the nineteenth century, when nearly two million people left Britain from Scottish ports. The majority went to North America (28 percent to Canada, 44 percent to the United States) and 25 percent to the Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand). One sort of migrant came from those dispossessed by the Highland clearances, but Lowland (disproportionately urban and industrial) emigration was every bit as significant as Highland (rural agrarian). Indeed, most nineteenth-century emigrants from Scotland were not escaping a backward rural economy, but were voluntary exiles from a vital, industrializing and urbanizing society with plenty of employment opportunities and an improving standard of living.

Despite this, narratives of Highland dispossession dominate conventional understandings of Scottish migration, just as Highland images play a disproportionate part in modern conceptions of Scotland's past. In fact, the association of the material aspects of Highland life and regional identity—heather and thistles, bagpipes and tartan—with the symbols of being Scottish was invented during the Romantic period by the great Tory and monarchist, Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), and perpetuated by George IV (r. 1820–1830) and Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901). In reality, Highlanders between 1789 and 1914 were feared, romanticized, misunderstood, and then denigrated by the majority Lowlanders. A more representative symbol of late-nineteenth-century Scotland's people and its industrial success is the Forth Rail Bridge of 1890.

It is no myth that Scots were among the most mobile people of Europe. They had other demo-graphic peculiarities. Mortality remained high and disease-dominated, but it was falling. Smallpox was conquered by the early nineteenth century, but typhus and cholera continued to decimate urban populations until mid-century and influenza until 1918. Infant mortality rates were lower in Scotland than England but still alarmingly high, and they did not fall as they did in England from the 1890s. Of those born around 1871, a quarter would not live to the age of five. The fertility regime was distinctive. Women married exceptionally late by European standards (a fifth did not marry at all), but, once married, fertility was high. This changed in the late nineteenth century, when Scotland participated in the fertility decline that characterized all of western Europe. The introduction of widespread knowledge and/or use of family limitation techniques produced a pronounced fall in family size. Two-fifths of marriages made in the 1870s produced more than six children, compared with less than 2 percent for 1920s marriages. Scotland's illegitimacy was among the highest in Europe, and in one part of rural northeast Scotland, four-fifths of women marrying in the late nineteenth century had their first child before, or within three months after, marriage. Throughout the nineteenth century, Scotland's was a young society: a third of its people were aged fourteen years or under and just 5 percent were sixty-five and over.

By 1911, the overall balance of the Scottish economy replicated the economic pattern found in the rest of Britain, mixing industrial, textile, and service industries. The first years of the twentieth century marked the zenith of power and influence of Scottish capitalists, who—despite comprising only 10 percent of Britain's gross domestic product—controlled the biggest concentration of heavy industry in Britain and exerted substantial political influence. Their wealth, nestling in a separate Scottish banking system, enabled them to invest in shipping lines, railway companies, mining ventures, and vast expanses of farmland in North and South America, Australia, and South Africa. At no time before or since had Scotland been so closely integrated into the power structures of the empire it had helped to make and run. At no other time had it been so economically important. The society was peaceful. But there remained problems. Scotland had some of the worst slums in Britain. Social alignments and political allegiances were changing too. The stability produced by industrial expansion and benevolent paternalism was being replaced by the tensions of class and nation. Coupled with a harsher economic climate after World War I, these forces would create a very different twentieth-century Scotland.

See alsoGreat Britain; Ireland; Wales.


Anderson, Robert D. Education and the Scottish People, 1750–1918. Oxford, U.K., 1995. Mostly about institutions, but the definitive study.

Brown, Callum G. Religion and Society in Scotland Since 1707. Edinburgh, 1997. Does the same for religion.

Devine, Thomas M. The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000. London, 1999. A good overview, best on economic and political topics.

Devine, Thomas M., and Rosalind Mitchison, eds. People and Society in Scotland, 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1988. A wide-ranging edited collection.

Harper, Marjorie. Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus. London, 2003. Lively and readable account of emigration, full of human detail.

Houston, Robert A., and W. W. J. Knox, eds. The New Penguin History of Scotland. London, 2001. A comprehensive and readable overview, which replaces all earlier texts.

Hutchison, Ian G. C. A Political History of Scotland 1832–1914: Parties, Elections, and Issues. Edinburgh, 1986. The basic work.

Tranter, Neil L. Population and Society, 1750–1940: Contrasts in Population Growth. London, 1985. A useful if dry overview.

Whatley, Christopher A. The Industrial Revolution in Scotland. Cambridge, U.K., 1997. A worthy overview.

R. A. Houston

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In 1914, Scotland appeared to be a nation with a historic identity; a comfortable part of the United Kingdom, a powerful contributor to the British Empire; buttressed by an economy based on the production of raw materials and metal products. The Presbyterian churches were key institutions and their General Assemblies important forums. In politics, the general elections of 1910 had seen the endurance of a Liberal hegemony largely unbroken since 1832. By the end of the twentieth century, much of this had changed.


Industrial strength hid latent weaknesses: superficially bolstered by World War I, recession struck in the interwar period. Problems were compounded by an antiquated structure and failure to develop new industries: the production of coal, metal, and textiles dominated. Although the coal and iron industries of the west of Scotland were closely integrated, the more important relationship between iron and steel was poorly developed, leading to endemic inefficiency in that sector. Closer links existed between Clydeside shipbuilding and the steel industry, but that proved problematic by the 1920s as the latter contracted.

Unemployment rose to unparalleled levels (27.7 percent in 1932), especially in areas of western and central Scotland where the bulk of these heavy industries were located. The bulk of Scottish output was destined for the export market, inducing extreme vulnerability to international economic fluctuations, but during the 1920s and 1930s the protection of home markets in Europe and the United States exacerbated this. The Scottish workforce, although containing a core of skilled workers, was poorly paid and unable to generate domestic demand for high-value products that would have aided economic diversification. Key sectors of the economy, such as the banks and insurance companies—so important to Edinburgh and the east of Scotland—and the indigenous railway companies were taken over by metropolitan concerns.

World War II further exposed these weaknesses with its demand for more sophisticated products, but they were also masked by the state intervention of that conflict and its aftermath. The program of nationalization undertaken by the Labour government elected in 1945 had a profound effect in Scotland where so much heavy industry remained, despite the vicissitudes of the interwar years. The influence of government profoundly affected the shape of the economy in the postwar years, through nationalization and the regional policies implemented from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.

The penetration of the Scottish economy by foreign multinational corporations, mostly in the electronics industry, has led to a swath of central Scotland being labeled "Silicon Glen." These enterprises have tended to conduct fairly low-level, branch-plant operations and have proved to be "footloose," as an early twenty-first-century rash of closures by firms such as Motorola has demonstrated. The sum total of these changes has been the alteration of an economy largely based on heavy industrial processes to one dominated by bureaucracy and services. There were nearly 750,000 workers in manufacturing in 1901, only around 350, 000 in the 1990s; services and administration employed just over 350,000 in 1901, but over 900,000 by the end of the century. A major change occurred in the late 1960s with the discovery of oil in the North Sea; this has had a particular impact on the regional economy of the northeast of Scotland, but indigenous enterprise has not fully capitalized on this and critics argue that the revenues have been squandered by U.K. governments.


Despite economic confidence, there were massive social problems in Scotland in the early part of the twentieth century, most obviously shocking housing conditions. The rapidity of urban expansion in the nineteenth century, combined with the feudal nature of Scots land law, created extreme densities of population and massive overcrowding in the traditional form of Scottish housing: the tenement block divided into multiple dwellings. Although the nascent Labour movement sought to publicize these issues, real attention was not given to the problem until a series of rent strikes during World War I. During the interwar years, both Conservative and Labour governments passed legislation to subsidize local authorities to build houses for rent and to clear slums. These initiatives saw the establishment of the vast public housing sector that, augmented by further building programs and attempts at urban renewal in the twenty years after World War II, was such a distinctive feature of Scottish society. In some areas of Scotland, 70 to 80 percent of the population lived in such houses. This was undermined in the 1980s as the Conservative government reduced support to local authorities and encouraged sitting tenants to purchase their houses at a discount.

At the other extreme of Scottish society, there has been a small landed elite: much Scottish land is of low value and agricultural potential and, partly because of this, huge estates were built up in the nineteenth century. Although the government intervened to become a large landowner in the 1920s, private land ownership has remained an important part of Scottish society and, concomitantly, anti-landlordism is a key feature of Scottish political rhetoric.

Oddly, for a society characterized by such extremes, a persistent aspect of Scotland's view of itself was that of a "democratic society" characterized by social progress, especially through the power of educational attainment. Repeated sociological investigations have found little evidence for this, but have exposed the foundation of the myth in nineteenth-century Presbyterian ideology and idealized views of the Scottish education system.

Scottish demography has also been distinctive (as the table shows), with the key features being the massive emigration of the 1920s that resulted in a population decline in that decade, and the declining population, especially in western urban areas, since the early 1970s.


In 1999, a devolved parliament and executive was established with responsibility for most areas of Scottish domestic policy, with the exception of social welfare. A coalition of Labour and Liberal Democrat ministers has controlled the executive since 1999. Scottish political history over the course of the twentieth century, however, has not simply been a discussion of constitutional options, with most debate following a British agenda and focusing on the economy, social welfare, defense, and foreign policy.

Prior to World War I, the Liberals dominated; social change and shifts in the political agenda, notably over housing, led to a breakthrough by the Labour Party at the 1922 general election and the eclipse of the Liberal Party. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the Labour Party and the Scottish Unionist Party (as the Scottish Conservatives were known until 1965) dominated elections in Scotland. A notable result came in the 1955 general election when the Unionists polled just over 50 percent.

The Scottish political map became more diverse in the 1960s as the Liberals emerged from the doldrums and the Scottish National Party (SNP)


won its first seat since 1945—at Hamilton in 1967. The excitement peaked in October 1974 when the SNP won over 31 percent of the vote and eleven seats. This prompted the Labour government to consider Scottish Home Rule, but legislation was stillborn after an inconclusive referendum in 1979 and the subsequent election of a Conservative government. During the 1980s and 1990s, nationalism waned and Scotland remained loyal to Labour as the Conservatives governed by virtue of their U.K. majority: this was perceived by some to constitute a "democratic deficit." With the return of a Labour government and a modest nationalist revival in 1997, the way was clear for the implementation of devolution.


Much writing about Scotland in the twentieth century has been pessimistic, with justification; but flickers of optimism can be discerned in the survival of Scottish identity and in cultural activity. An institutional identity based on the troika of the church, law, and education systems is no longer so powerful; neither, it seems, is an ethnic identity. But newer forms of identity, based on historical memory, sense of place, and cultural traditions are developing. Scotland is a nation of interlocking cultures revolving around the English, Gaelic, and Scots linguistic traditions enlivened by European and Asian immigration.

Literary culture evolved markedly over the twentieth century, from a parochial and moralizing "Kailyard" school of writers, such as Sir James Matthew Barrie, to the realism of such as James Kelman. Scottish writers have consistently experimented with language; none more so than Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), the self-conscious publicist of the cultural "Renaissance" of the interwar years, poet and controversialist in English and Scots. Scottish Gaelic has produced the lyrical verse of Somhairle MacGill-eain.

Popular culture provides one of the areas where Scotland is most visible as an independent identity on the international stage at sporting occasions. This can be a unifying force, but also provides for intense local rivalries, such as that between Glasgow's two leading football teams, Rangers and Celtic, which is overlain with religious sectarianism.

See alsoBritish Empire; Ireland; United Kingdom.


Bogdanor, Vernon. Devolution in the United Kingdom. Oxford, U.K., 1999.

Cameron, Ewen A. Land for the People? The British Government and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1880–1925. East Linton, U.K., 1996.

Campbell, R. H. Scotland since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society. 2nd ed. Edinburgh, 1985.

Cooke, Anthony, Ian Donnachie, Ann MacSween, and Christopher A. Whatley, eds. Modern Scottish History, 1707 to the Present. 5 vols. East Linton, U.K., 1998.

Craig, Cairns. The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination. Edinburgh, 1999.

Craig, Cairns, ed. The History of Scottish Literature. Vol. 4: The Twentieth Century. Aberdeen, U.K., 1990.

Daiches, David, ed. The New Companion to Scottish Culture. Revised and updated version. Edinburgh, 1993.

Devine, T. M. The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700–2000. London, 1999.

Devine, T. M., and Richard Finlay, eds. Scotland in the Twentieth Century. Edinburgh, 1996.

Dickson, A., and J. H. Treble, eds. People and Society in Scotland. Vol. 3: 1914–1990. Edinburgh, 1992.

Finlay, Richard. Modern Scotland: 1914–2000. London, 2004.

Harvie, Christopher. No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Twentieth Century Scotland. 3rd ed. Edinburgh, 1993.

——. Fools' Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil. London, 1994.


Hutchison, I. G. C. A Political History of Scotland, 1832–1924: Parties, Elections, and Issues. Edinburgh, 1986.

——. Scottish Politics in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke, U.K., 2001.

Knox, W. W. Industrial Nation: Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800–Present. Edinburgh, 1999.

Lenman, Bruce. An Economic History of Modern Scotland, 1660–1976. London, 1977.

Lynch, Michael, ed. The Oxford Companion to Scottish History. Oxford, U.K., 2001.

Macdonald, Catriona M. M., and Elaine W. McFarland, eds. Scotland and the Great War. East Lothian, U.K., 1999.

McCrone, David. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation. 2nd ed. London, 2001.

Mitchell, James. Strategies for Self-Government: The Campaigns for a Scottish Parliament. Edinburgh, 1996.

Scott, Paul H., ed. Scotland: A Concise Cultural History. Edinburgh, 1993.

Smout, T. C. A Century of the Scottish People, 1830–1950. New Haven, Conn., 1986.

Wightman, Andy. Who Owns Scotland. Edinburgh, 1996.

Ewen A. Cameron

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Though only a small and poor kingdom on the far edge of Europe, Scotland remained in close touch with Renaissance ideas and culture. This connection came in part from trade relations with France, the Low Countries*, and the Baltic states and in part from the readiness of Scots to travel and study abroad. Scottish political and cultural leaders worked hard to combat the popular image of Scots as ferocious barbarians constantly at war with one another. As a result of their efforts, Scotland became a center of humanist* learning and thought.

The Stuart Dynasty. Since 1371 the Stuart dynasty had struggled to impose its authority over Scotland, a country divided geographically and politically into many small regions ruled by powerful local lords. However, by the late 1400s, after years of warfare the power of the regional lords was mostly broken. The Stuart monarchs then began to seek marriage alliances with foreign powers to increase their influence abroad. Perhaps the most significant of these marriages occurred in 1503, when James IV (ruled 1488–1513) wed Margaret Tudor, daughter of King Henry VII of England. One hundred years later, Scotland's James VI would use this tie to claim the English throne as James I and unite the two kingdoms.

Before the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor, Scotland and England had a long history of hostile relations. Defending Scotland against English aggression was considered one of the key roles of Scottish kings. Many Scots viewed the marriage as a betrayal of the crown's traditional loyalties. Nevertheless, Scotland remained allied with France, another long-time adversary of the English. The French king Louis XII called on James to fulfill the obligations of their alliance by invading England. James did so, but the invasion ended with his defeat and death at the battle of Flodden in 1513.

By this time, Scotland had established itself as a united kingdom under the control of the Stuart dynasty. James IV had expressed this supremacy by adding the arched "imperial" crown to his coat of arms*. The crown represented the idea of Roman law that "the king is emperor in his own kingdom." Scots thought of themselves as an imperial monarchy on an equal with any in Europe. James IV's elegant Renaissance court, and his own interests in architecture and medicine, reflected Scotland's self-confident view of itself and its monarchy.

Scottish Humanism. Scotland's familiarity with and acceptance of Renaissance culture and learning promoted such self-confidence. Since the mid-1400s, Scottish officials within and outside of the church had been collecting classical* literature as well as the works of Italian and French humanists. Under royal secretary Archibald Whitelaw, humanist rhetorical* skills were applied in government in the late 1400s.

Scottish universities also adapted to humanist ideas. A group of Scots who studied in Paris exercised enormous influence on university curricula after their return to Scotland. Led by the University of Aberdeen, Scottish universities gradually adopted a humanist course of study aimed at serving both the clergy and the lay* students. The emergence of a group of well-educated laypeople was one of the most significant cultural developments in this period of Scottish history. Many educated Scots went on to study and practice law, often in France or Italy.

James V, barely a year old, inherited the throne on his father's death in 1513. When James assumed control of the government in 1528, he made use of the lay lawyers to reassert the crown's powers. Scotland's influence with the Catholic powers of Europe increased after the English king Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1533. James V used this power to obtain money from the papacy* and to arrange marriage alliances between Scotland and France.

James invested the rewards of his diplomacy in the royal palaces of Stirling, Falkland, and Holyrood, creating some of the first and finest Renaissance buildings in Britain. However, his glittering court was torn by tensions between church officials and educated laypersons influenced by humanism. James may have even considered following Henry's example in rejecting papal authority and establishing control of the church in Scotland. But the king died suddenly in 1542 at the age of 30.

The Reformation. Soon after James's death, his infant daughter Mary Stuart was crowned queen of Scotland. Henry VIII forced the Scots to agree to a marriage between Mary and his heir Edward (died in 1553). Mary was secretly sent to France, where she became fluent in French and married Francis of Valois, the heir to the French throne. In 1561 Mary, a Catholic, returned to Scotland to claim the throne. She was overthrown six years later. Exiled and imprisoned in England, Mary continued to hope for the overthrow of Elizabeth, Queen of England, that would result in her becoming the Catholic queen of England. Mary's trial and execution in 1587 opened the way for her son James VI, the king of Scotland, to become next in line to the English throne.

James VI was baptized a Catholic but raised as a Protestant. His education was supervised by the humanist scholar George Buchanan, who attempted to teach his pupil respect for classical scholarship and the principles of limited monarchy. As a result of Buchanan's efforts, James developed a lifelong love of learning and literature. However, he failed to adopt Buchanan's political ideas. James developed his own theory of the "divine right of kings," based on the belief that a monarch's authority comes from God, not the people, and thus cannot be limited by the people.

The king's determination to maintain the crown's supremacy over church as well as state came partly from his concern for maintaining order in a land torn by years of political and religious turmoil. Although James tried to control religious matters by appointing his own bishops, he did not try to suppress the Catholic faith. In fact, many of the king's most trusted and influential counselors were Catholics.

James's reign was marked by a drive to establish law, order, and civility in Scotland. By 1600 the decline of political violence led many rural lords to abandon fortified castles for more luxurious country estates. Upon the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, James VI of Scotland took the English throne as James I. This united the two crowns, but not the kingdoms. Although James I promoted a common "British" kingdom, Scotland remained a distinct political identity with its own culture.

(See alsoEngland. )

* Low Countries

region bordering on the North Sea, made up of present-day Netherlands and Belgium

* humanist


* coat of arms

set of symbols used to represent a noble family

* classical

in the tradition of ancient Greece and Rome

* rhetorical

related to the art of speaking or writing effectively

* lay

referring to people who are not members of the clergy

* papacy

office and authority of the pope

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