To the Ends of the Earth

"Devine has written a lot about the Scots in relation to Great Britain and the United Kingdom, and he has written about the Scots in relation to the British Empire. This is his most ambitious book yet, covering a very long span of time. He’s trying to explain why it is that Scotland is one of the great emigrating nations of the modern world, along with Ireland and Norway and not that many others. He is also interested in exploding a variety of Scottish myths, both in Scotland and elsewhere. He wants to argue, for instance, that it is not the case, as many people still think, that the Scottish emigrants to elsewhere in the world are evicted crofters from the Highlands thrown out by rapacious landlords. He argues that, actually, if you look at the big picture, most of these Scottish emigrants are in fact from the lowlands, from towns where they worked in heavy industry. He argues that most of the 19th and 20th century Scottish migration is by people like that. They emigrate to similar places overseas – places like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Australia and New Zealand. He is also interested in exploring the ways in which once they have left Scotland and gone overseas they then invent these symbols of Scottishness which they carry with them – in terms of Burns Night, Caledonian clubs and Highland Games. Many of these things are really inventions of the late 18th and early 19th century. Devine thinks that one of the problems with Scotland was that it produced this rather remarkable economic structure of a limited number of very rich people, who owned the steel mills, jute mills and the coal mines, and then there was a large working class that was urban and industrial based. But what Scotland never really produced was a large urban-based entrepreneurial middle class. And because it was a very unequal society. It therefore never produced a large service sector, either. One of the arguments that he makes is that when, in the 1970s, Scottish heavy industry collapsed in terms of the mines and shipbuilding there was nothing there except tourism. I think he develops that argument rather well and his general observations on the nature of the Scottish economy are very well made."