Food Safety Regimes in Scotland, 1899–1914

Abstract

One of the authors of this paper was recently discussing the historical literature on inter-war unemployment in Britain with a class of honours students, who were amused by the assertion of the scholar who characterised this as a regional phenomenon, concentrated in ‘Scotland, northern Britain, south Wales and northern Ireland’. Where, wondered the students, was this region called ‘northern Britain’, and what kind of ‘region’ was Scotland? Such eccentric and Anglo-centric conceptualisations of the United Kingdom have perhaps become less pervasive since 1991, when this example was published. The most significant general corrective here has probably been the devolution to Scotland of aspects of political power, but of great importance – when reconfiguring ideas of Britain – in academic and particularly historical circles has been the steady expansion of published research on Scotland’s varied economic, social and political development since the Industrial Revolution. Much of this research has, to an extent, revolved around the question of Scottish particularity – or exceptionalism – within the United Kingdom, and also developed understanding of the huge variety of economic and social conditions in industrial Scotland. These have encompassed differentiated experiences of class, gender and religion, and the contrasting degrees of development between rural and urban society and according to geographical location. In both cases – whether examining Scotland’s position in the Union or different experiences in Scotland – the historical literature has engaged with and, to some extent, under-mined the notion that Scotland can be viewed as a homogeneous economic, social and political ‘region’. Examples of three different kinds of historical writing commonly illustrate this trend: Clive Lee’s 1995 study of the twentieth-century Scottish economy, which places substantial emphasis on the regional as well as sectoral pattern of difference and development; Tom Devine and Richard Finlay’s edited collection of 1996 on the twentieth century, the diversely themed chapters of which bring out the huge variety of life in modern Scotland; and Ian MacDougall’s Voices from Home and Work, published in 2000. Gathering evidence from, inter alia, coal miners, laundresses,