Writing Scotland's History in the Twentieth Century: Thoughts from across the Border

Abstract

I am in no sense of the word a historian of Scottish history, though Scottish concerns frequently come to my attention in both my main research periods, the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, and the twentieth century. And I must confess, at the outset, that I have decided against attempting the fascinating, but huge, task of delivering a comprehensive overview and analysis of the vast mass of Scottish history-writing that has been produced during the present century. After all, the audience for this paper is at least as familiar with it as I am and generally, I have no doubt, much more familiar. Indeed, a significant proportion of the readers will consist of scholars who have contributed significantly towards the great upsurge of work on the history of Scotland that has been carried out during the last three or four decades. To try to review and assess their contributions to their subject would be an immensely difficult and invidious task, best left for subsequent generations in the next century.1 Instead, all I propose to do here is to provide a few fairly random observations on the issue of writing Scottish history during this century, as it appears to this particular observer from south of the Border. I must stress that I am a sympathetic observer but I have no alternative but to begin by sitting myself 'on the cuddy stooP and telling a story against myself, which will no doubt count as one of the minuses in the story of recent Scottish history-writing. When I was working on my book on British society between the Wars,2 I became conscious that Scotland's cultural history during the inter-war period was extremely vibrant and that this era of Scottish cultural renaissance had not been adequately represented in what I had already written. So I set to, and wrote several thousand extra words, using the best secondary sources available. Unfortunately, when I submitted the com pleted manuscript to the publisher, as so often happens it turned out to be far, far too long and I am afraid that the 'Scottish Renaissance'