Review by:  
George Christian
University of Texas at Austin
Anglo-Scottish Relations From 1603 to 1900
T. C. Smout, ed.  (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 281 pages

Christopher Smout, Emeritus Professor of Scottish History at St. Andrews University,
has compiled this compelling volume from papers given at a 2003 symposium of the
British Academy commemorating the fourth centenary of the Union of the Crowns of
England and Scotland.  Far more than simply rehashing old debates about the
relative costs and benefits of the Union of 1707 or Scotland’s “lost” nationalism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these essays challenge some of the basic
assumptions of the historiography of the Union and Scotland’s place within both the
United Kingdom and the British Empire.

Perhaps the fattest sacred cow of this historiographical tradition is that Scots, having
lost their independence in 1707, sublimated their national aspirations by becoming
enthusiastic participants in the Empire (as soldiers, administrators, physicians, and
settlers), retrospectively “inventing” a national identity based on Highland dress,
customs, and military prowess, and building an industrial and urbanized economic
powerhouse in the nineteenth century second only to England.  While the facts seem
beyond dispute, their usual interpretation as a linear “Whiggish” progression from
regal to national to imperial union is here vigorously challenged by historians such as
Jenny Wormald, Keith Brown, Christopher Whatley, Colin Kidd, and Tom Devine.

As Wormald and Brown argue, the century following James VI’s accession to the
English throne emerges as among the most dismal and disastrous political and
economic periods in the impoverished nation’s long history.  Kidd points out that the
real virtue of the “incorporating” Union of 1707, at least in the eyes of Enlightenment
literati, was not that it offered Scotland the benefits of “British” economic protection
and political opportunity, but that it finally eradicated the oppressive regime of
Scottish lairds over their feudal domains.  The second union thus saved Scotland
from the first.  And Devine trenchantly shows that Scots penetrated the East India
Company so deeply not because of their enthusiasm for empire, but because
Walpole made a deal with the Earl of Islay in the 1720s to bring an “ungovernable”
Scotland under control by offering massive patronage to the superfluous sons of the
disaffected Scottish gentry.  Judging by the contributions to this volume, the
constitutional, political, economic, and diplomatic history of the Three Kingdoms still
has much to tell us about the nature of “Britain” and its Empire.
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Book of the Month
November 2006