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RACE, EMPIRE, AND THE LIMITS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH NATIONHOOD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2003

COLIN KIDD
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow

Abstract

Scotland's Unionist culture has already become a world we have lost, investigation of which is hampered by the misleading notion of a ‘Celtic fringe’. Nineteenth-century Lowland Scots were not classified as Celts; indeed they vociferously projected a Teutonic racial identity. Several Scots went so far as to claim not only that the Saxon Scots of the Lowlands were superior to the Celts of the Highlands, but that the people of the Lowlands came from a more purely Anglian stock than the population of southern England. For some Scots the glory of Scottish identity resided in the boast that Lowlanders were more authentically ‘English’ than the English themselves. Moreover, Scottish historians reinterpreted the nation's medieval War of Independence – otherwise a cynosure of patriotism – as an unfortunate civil war within the Saxon race. Curiously, racialism – which was far from monolithic – worked at times both to support and to subvert Scottish involvement in empire. The late nineteenth century also saw the formulation of Scottish proposals for an Anglo-Saxon racial empire including the United States; while Teutonic racialism inflected the nascent Scottish home rule movement as well as the Udal League in Orkney and Shetland.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I should like to thank Ewen Cameron, Ted Cowan and Hew Strachan for advice on specific points, and Dauvit Broun, Matthew Hammond, and James Coleman for informative discussions about nineteenth-century Scottish historians.