Introduction

Ireland and Scotland are often spoken of as Celtic countries, but that common description tends to obscure the fact that they have had radically different relationships with the British state. In the case of Scotland that relationship has been one of compromise and union, the nature of the Scottish polity having been settled in 1707, almost a century before the arrival of nationalism on the historical stage with the French Revolution of 1789. By this latter time Scotland had become a well-rewarded junior partner in the United Kingdom, a highly profitable enterprise which was becoming the world's most economically advanced state through its eighteenth-century agrarian and industrial revolutions and its amassing of imperial booty, particularly in the nineteenth century. As Tom Nairn (1932–2023) has demonstrated, the historical role of nationalism was to allow the bourgeoisies of powerful and soon-to-be powerful European states such as France, Germany and Italy to mobilise the masses, throw off feudal overlordship (often of foreign dynasties) and emerge as competitors to the United Kingdom within the intense economic and imperial struggles of the modern world. In order to facilitate this transition, the intelligentsias of these emergent states had to fashion appropriate nationalist ideologies which would make national mobilisation possible. Hence, the turn to indigenous languages, folklore and peasant dress, all expressed through Romanticism, the cultural mode of nationalism.

Scotland was not immune to these developments, but since their role in France, Germany, Italy and Poland was to provide the ideological ammunition to further political (and sometimes military) advance, there was no obvious use for them in Scotland, given that its polity and economy had already been defined in 1707. As a consequence, the characteristic tropes of romantic nationalism were, in the Scottish context, diverted into non-political and non-military (in the sense of nationalist struggle) channels. This produced a peculiarly demented, introverted and sentimental romanticism which, since it could not focus on the future, oriented itself obsessively to the past. To the extent that this introverted nationalism found a contemporary role, it was in the service of British imperialism within which Scottish administrators and soldiers were disproportionately prominent. This fact is invariably recognised in films about, for example, British India, whether British (The Drum [Zoltan Korda, 1938]), or American (Wee Willie Winkie [John Ford, 1937] and Gunga Din [George Stevens, 1939]).