I.

Introduction

Scotland, country, administrative division of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain. The crowns of Scotland and England were united in 1603, and the governments of the two countries in 1707; Scotland has retained, however, its own legal system, its own Church, a substantially different education system, and the right to issue its own bank notes. Since 1999, a Scottish parliament of 129 seats has sat independently of the parliament at Westminster. Scotland is bordered on the north by the Atlantic Ocean; on the east by the North Sea; on the south-east by England; on the south by the Solway Firth, which partly separates it from England, and by the Irish Sea; and on the west by the North Channel of the Irish Sea which separates it from the island of Ireland, and by the Atlantic Ocean. As a geopolitical entity Scotland includes 186 nearby islands, a majority of which are contained in three groups—the Hebrides, also known as the Western Isles (Eilean Siar), situated off the western coast; the Orkney Islands, situated off the north-eastern coast; and the Shetland Islands, situated north-east of the Orkney Islands. The largest of the other islands is Arran, located in the Firth of Clyde, off the west coast. The land area of Scotland, including the islands, is 78,790 sq km (30,420 sq mi). The figure includes some 1,692 sq km (653 sq mi) of inland water. Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland, and a leading cultural and economic centre.

II.

Land and Resources

The spectacular topography of Scotland reflects possibly more clearly than that of any other part of the island of Great Britain the effects of glaciation—in the overdeepened valleys which produced the country’s many lochs and firths, in the glacial till which forms the fertile soils of eastern lowland Scotland, and in the many features such as drumlins and eskers that dot the rugged Scottish landscape. Scotland’s very irregular coastline is another product of glaciation. The western coast in particular is deeply penetrated by numerous arms of the sea, most of which are narrow overdeepened valleys, known locally as sea lochs, and by a number of broad indentations, generally called firths. The principal firths are the Firth of Lorn, the Firth of Clyde, and the Solway Firth. The major indentations on the eastern coast are Dornoch Firth, the Moray Firth, the Firth of Tay, and the Firth of Forth. Measured around the various firths and sea lochs, the coastline of Scotland is about 3,700 km (2,300 mi) long.

The terrain of Scotland is predominantly mountainous but may be divided into three distinct regions, from north to south: the Highlands, the Central Lowlands, and the Southern Uplands. More than a half of the surface of Scotland is occupied by the Highlands, the most rugged region on the island of Great Britain, containing most of the island’s highest peaks (300 over 900 m/3,000 ft). Consisting of parallel mountain chains with a general north-eastern to south-western trend and broken by deep ravines and valleys, the Highlands are noted for their unspoilt, wild beauty and scenic grandeur. Precipitous cliffs, moorland plateaux, mountain lakes, sea lochs, swift-flowing streams, and dense thickets are common to the Highlands, the most sparsely inhabited section of Scotland.

The region is divided in two by a depression, known as Glen More, or the Great Glen, which extends from the Moray Firth in the north-east, south-west to Loch Linnhe. To the north-west of this lie heavily eroded peaks with fairly uniform elevations ranging from 600 to 900 m (2,000 to 3,000 ft). In the Highlands south-east of the Great Glen the topography is highly diversified. This region is traversed by the Grampian Mountains, the principal mountain system of Scotland, which includes on the east the Cairngorms. The highest peak of the Grampians is Ben Nevis (1,343 m/4,406 ft), the highest summit in the United Kingdom, located near the head of Loch Linnhe, overlooking Fort William.

To the south of the Highlands lie the Central Lowlands, a narrow belt comprising only about one tenth of the area of Scotland, but containing three quarters of the country’s population. The Central Lowlands are traversed by several chains of hills, including the Ochil and Sidlaw hills, and by several important rivers, notably the Clyde, the Forth, and the Tay.

The terrain of the Southern Uplands, a region much less elevated and rugged than the Highlands, consists largely of a moorland plateau traversed by rolling valleys and broken by mountainous outcrops. Only a few summits in the Southern Uplands exceed 760 m (2,500 ft) in elevation, the highest being Merrick (843 m/2,765 ft) in the Dumfries and Galloway unitary authority in the south-west. Adjoining the Southern Uplands region along the boundary with England are the Cheviot Hills.

A.

Rivers and Lakes

Scotland has an abundance of rivers, streams, and lochs (lakes). Notable among the lochs, which are especially numerous in the Central Lowlands and Highland regions, are Loch Lomond (the largest), Loch Ness, Loch Tay, and Loch Katrine. Loch Ness, Loch Oich, and Loch Lochy run down the Great Glen, north-east to south-west, and are joined by the Caledonian Canal to provide a waterway capable of taking sea-going vessels linking the Atlantic Ocean with the North Sea. Many of the rivers of Scotland, in particular those in the west, are short, torrential streams, generally of little commercial importance. The longest river of Scotland is the Tay; the Clyde, however, is the principal commercial river. Other important rivers include the Forth, the Tweed, the Dee, and the Spey.

B.

Climate

As with the island climate of Great Britain, the Scottish climate is subject to the moderating influences of the surrounding seas. As a result of these influences, extreme seasonal variations are rare, and relatively temperate winters and cool summers are the outstanding climatic features. Low temperatures and heavy snowfalls are, however, common during the winter season in many areas, particularly the mountainous districts of the interior. In the western coastal region, which benefits more from the moderating effects of the warm Gulf Stream, conditions are milder than in the east. The average January temperature of the eastern coastal region is 3.1° C (37.5° F); that of the western coastal region is 3.9° C (39° F). Corresponding July averages are 13.8° C (56.8° F) and 15° C (59° F), respectively. The average January and July temperatures for the city of Edinburgh are 3.5° C (38° F) and 14.5° C (58° F), respectively. Precipitation, which is marked by regional variations, ranges from about 3,810 mm (150 in) annually in the western Highlands to about 635 mm (25 in) annually in certain eastern areas.

C.

Natural Resources

Scotland, like much of Britain, has significant reserves of coal. It also possesses large deposits of zinc, chiefly in the south. The soil is generally rocky and infertile, except for that of the Central Lowlands. Northern Scotland contains most of the United Kingdom’s largest hydroelectric generating stations. Following the discovery of substantial oil deposits in the North Sea in the late 1970s, a sizeable offshore oil industry grew up and became a vital component of the UK economy as well as an important part of the Scottish economy. Forestry and fishing resources are also important.

D.

Plants and Animals

The most common species of trees indigenous to Scotland are rowan, oak, and, especially, conifers—chiefly fir, pine, and larch. About 15 per cent of the country is forested, accounting for nearly half of Britain’s woodland area. The majority of plantings have taken place since the 1920s, and are primarily fast-growing conifers for timber and pulp production. The most important forested areas are in the southern and eastern Highlands. Except in these wooded areas, vegetation in the upland regions consists largely of heather, ferns, mosses, and grasses. Saxifrage, mountain willow, and other types of alpine and arctic flora occur at elevations above 600 m (2,000 ft).

Scotland’s countryside contains a rich variety of wildlife, with some species found nowhere else in Britain. The only large surviving indigenous mammal in Scotland is the deer. Both the red and the roe deer are found, but the red deer, whose habitat is the Highlands, is by far the more abundant of the two species. Other indigenous mammals are the hare, rabbit, otter, ermine, pine marten, and wildcat; the last named is found only in Scotland. Game birds that breed on the moors include grouse, blackcock, ptarmigan, and waterfowl. The few predatory birds include the kite, osprey, and golden eagle. Scotland is the only place in the United Kingdom where ospreys nest. The country is famous for the salmon and trout that abound in its streams and lakes; salmon and trout farming are now important rural occupations. Many species of fish, including cod, haddock, and herring, and various types of shellfish, are found in the coastal waters and around the islands, and fishing remains an important activity.

III.

Population

The people of Scotland, like those of Britain in general, are descendants of various northern peoples, including the Picts, Celts, Scandinavians, and, to a lesser extent, Romans. Scotland is a mixed rural-industrial society. Scots divide themselves into Highlanders, who consider themselves of “purer” Celtic blood and retain a strong feeling for the clan, and Lowlanders. There are strong Scandinavian influences in the Orkney Islands and Shetland islands.

A.

Population Characteristics

Scotland has a population of about 5,078,000 (2004). The average population density is about 64 people per sq km (167 per sq mi). The highest density is in the Central Lowlands, where nearly three quarters of Scots live, and the lowest is in the Highlands, where densities are as low as 8 people per sq km (21 per sq km). About two thirds of the population are urban dwellers.

B.

Principal Cities

The most populous city in Scotland is Glasgow (2001 estimate, 578,700). The conurbation of Clydeside, which includes the cities of Glasgow and Clydebank, is the largest marine-engineering centre in Britain, although today work is linked mainly to the offshore industry rather than shipbuilding. In addition to Edinburgh (population 449,000, 2001 estimate), the capital, other important cities are Dundee (150,250, 1996 estimate), Aberdeen (211,300, 2001 estimate), Inverness (63,850, 1993 estimate) and Stirling (86,212 (2001)). Aberdeen has benefited considerably from the North Sea oil industry.

C.

Religion

The Church of Scotland, a Presbyterian (Protestant) denomination, is the official Church, with an adult communicant membership of around 600,000. The Roman Catholic Church is also important with some 650,000 adherents. Other leading denominations are the Episcopal Church of Scotland, a province of the Anglican Church, Congregationalist, Baptist, Methodist, and United Free, as well as a number of small Presbyterian Churches, which in the past formed as breakaway groups from the Church of Scotland. There are signficant numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews in the cities.

English is the official language, and according to the 2001 census 58,650 Scots (mainly inhabitants of the Highlands and the Hebrides) also speak the Scottish form of Gaelic. This represents a fall of 10 per cent in the ten-year period between censuses. Efforts to increase understanding of Gaelic language and culture include Gaelic-language television programmes. See Celtic Languages: Scottish Gaelic.

D.

Education

Education in Scotland is administered by the Education Department of the Scottish Executive and by local education authorities. Scotland’s education system is independent of that of England and Wales and different in structure. The Scots have traditionally assigned great importance to education, and the voluntary schools system grew vigorously during the 19th century. In 1872 the responsibility for education was transferred from Churches to elected school boards, which provided education for children aged 5 to 13. In 1901 the school leaving age was raised to 14, 17 years before this happened in England and Wales. In 1918 local education authorities, or LEAs, were established to replace school boards and the provision of secondary education was made mandatory. The Education Act (Scotland) 1945 applied the same provisions as the Education Act 1944 in England and Wales (see also United Kingdom: Education) but involved fewer changes as most of the innovations had already been made. The school-leaving age was raised to 15 in 1947, and to 16 in the 1972-1973 school year.

However, the Education Reform Act introduced by the Conservative government in 1988, initiated the most fundamental changes in the education system of Scotland, as in the rest of the United Kingdom, since 1945. Its provisions dramatically reduced the powers of the LEAs, giving individual schools control over their own budgets, and allowing schools to apply to opt out of LEA control and receive grant-maintained (GM) status.

Devolved management of schools was introduced in Scotland in 1996. All state-funded secondary schools in England, Wales, and Scotland can obtain GM status if parents support the idea in a ballot and the Secretary of State approves the school’s proposals. GM schools are completely self-governing and independent of LEAs, receiving their funds directly from central government.

Scotland does not have a statutory national curriculum, as introduced in the rest of the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, although moves have been made to standardize curriculum content via A Curriculum for Excellence, and testing of progress in English and mathematics has been introduced. Pupils begin their secondary schooling at around 12 years and spend four compulsory years in the secondary system (S1, S2, S3, S4). National Qualifications are administered by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA). Pupils take the Standard Grade at the end of their fourth year of secondary education (S4/age 16). There are three levels of study (foundation, general, and credit). In addition there are National Courses and National Units. The Higher Grades, known as “Highers”, and Advanced Highers are taken in the fifth and sixth years (S5 and S6) and are the stepping stone to university entrance. In 2007 there were 2,755 state schools in Scotland with a school roll of more than 700,000 pupils.

D.1.

Universities and Colleges

Scotland has about 70 institutions providing programmes of study beyond the secondary level for those students who do not go on to the universities. These include colleges of agriculture, art, commerce, and science. There are six teacher-training colleges, with approximately 5,700 students. Scotland has 14 universities. Of the universities in Scotland, the oldest (University of Aberdeen, University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and University of St Andrews) were founded in the 15th and 16th centuries. Four more received their charters between 1960 and 1990: Dundee University, Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh), Stirling University, and Strathclyde University (Glasgow). More recent additions include the University of Abertay Dundee, Glasgow Caledonian University, Napier University (Edinburgh), University of Paisley, Queen Margaret University (Edinburgh), and The Robert Gordon University (Aberdeen), as well as the Open University for Scotland. Total enrolment in higher education in Scotland stood at 276,705 in the academic year 2004-2005.

E.

Culture

Clans, the traditional keystone of Scottish society, are no longer politically powerful but maintain a symbolic importance. Originally, the clan, a grouping of an entire family with one head, or laird, was also important as a fighting unit. The solidarity associated with clan membership has been expanded into a strong national pride. The work ethic and puritanism of Scottish Presbyterianism, which is traceable to John Knox, the 16th-century religious reformer and statesman, also retains a strong influence in parts of the country.

Popular indigenous sports include football, curling, and golf. Bagpipes, usually associated with Scottish music, were probably introduced by the Romans, who acquired them in the Middle East. Scottish music is noted for the wide use of a five-tone, or pentatonic, scale. Folk tunes are not standardized, and a single song may have hundreds of variations in lyrics and music. The country also has a strong indigenous dance and storytelling tradition. The country hosts two of the United Kingdom’s, and the world’s, premier arts festivals, the Edinburgh International Festival (the world’s largest arts festival), and Glasgow’s Mayfest. In the contemporary arts, Scotland has noted museums, galleries, and orchestras, and national ballet and opera companies. See also Celtic Art; Celtic Mythology; National Galleries of Scotland; National Library of Scotland; Scottish Ballet, The; Scottish Colourists; Scottish Dancing; Scottish Literature; and Scottish Opera.

IV.

Economy

Many aspects of the economy of Scotland are covered in the article United Kingdom. The currency of the United Kingdom, the pound sterling, is the legal tender of Scotland but the country can also issue its own banknotes; Scotland has retained a £1 banknote. Both agriculture and industry are important in the economy of Scotland, but the main growth sector has been the services industries in recent years. The chief exports are oil and natural gas, chemicals, and manufactured goods, especially whisky, electronics equipment, clothing, machinery, and textiles. Scotland has experienced the same pressure on its traditional industries, particularly shipbuilding, as Wales and the north of England. However, since 1987 economic growth in Scotland has on average been greater than in the United Kingdom as a whole, and it was less affected by the recession in the early 1990s than other areas. In part this has been a consequence of the new jobs and industries created by North Sea oil, and in part a result of Scotland’s success in attracting high-technology industries to a region between Edinburgh and Glasgow that has been dubbed Silicon Glen. The centre of Scottish trade unionism is the Scottish Trades Union Congress, with an affiliated membership of around 630,000.

A.

Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing

More than 75 per cent of the land is used for agriculture; approximately equal areas are devoted to arable farming and grazing. The most important crops are barley (used in whisky and beer-making), wheat, oats, and potatoes. Other crops include turnips and fruit (Scotland is especially noted for its raspberries). Livestock and livestock products are also of major importance. Sheep are raised in the Highlands and on the islands and Southern Uplands. Scotland, however, is best known for its beef cattle, both in terms of the quality of their meat and as pedigree breeding stock, and was therefore adversely affected by the European Union’s ban on British beef in 1996. There is also some dairy-farming.

About 15 per cent of Scotland is forested, 43 per cent of which is publicly owned. The country’s commercial forests account for more than one third of British timber production.

In Scotland fishing is a very important activity; the country accounts for more than 70 per cent by weight, and more than 60 per cent by value, of fish landings by British vessels. Sea-fishing is particularly important in the north-east and the islands. Salmon-farming has also become a vital industry in the islands and in western Scotland. Farmed salmon production increased from less than 1,000 tonnes in the early 1970s to more than 140,000 tonnes in 2002, making Scotland Western Europe’s largest producer. The principal fishing ports are Aberdeen, Fraserburgh, Kinlochbervie, Lerwick, Peterhead, and Ullapool. The catch consists mainly of white fish (cod, haddock), herring, crabs, and lobsters. Although the vast majority of fish are sold fresh to wholesalers or food processors, Scotland is also known for the quality of its smoked fish, notably kippers and smoked haddock (also called “Finnan haddie” after the village near Aberdeen where haddock smoking was developed).

B.

Mining

The mining industry based on the rich coal reserves of the Central Lowlands played a key role in Scotland’s industrialization and was a major contributor to the economy during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. However, as with its counterparts in England and Wales, the Scottish coal industry is today a shadow of its former self, undermined by falling world prices, cheaper overseas producers, and changes in government policy during the 1980s. The few pits left were privatized at the beginning of 1995. The country’s iron-ore deposits, also important during the early stages of industrialization, were largely exhausted some years ago, but mining of limestone, clay, and silica continues, and gold has been found in small quantities in some parts of the Highlands.

C.

Petroleum

Most important, however, since the early 1970s, have been the oilfields discovered off the north-east coast of the Scottish mainland, and to the north-east of the Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands in the waters of the United Kingdom’s continental shelf. Large deposits of natural gas have also been discovered in this region. Although the financial returns from the industry have been utilized as a British rather than a Scottish asset (to the anger of Scottish nationalists), the oil reserves have brought considerable benefits to Scotland. It is estimated that, overall, around 100,000 jobs have been created directly or indirectly in the country as a result of North Sea activities; the economies of Aberdeen, and of the Shetland Islands and Orkney Islands, in particular, have been revitalized.

D.

Energy

Scotland’s many fast-flowing rivers and its lochs are also an important energy resource and a considerable amount of the country’s electricity is generated by hydroelectric power facilities. Nuclear power is an even more important contributor to Scotland’s generating capacity, supplying a higher proportion of energy than in any other part of the United Kingdom. There are three nuclear power stations at Chapelcross, Hunterston, and Torness. The Dounreay nuclear reprocessing plant is in the far north-west, in the unitary authority of Highland. The Conservative government’s proposals to privatize Britain’s nuclear power industry, announced in early 1995, met with a particularly hostile reaction in Scotland. There is increasing use being made of wind farms, with a number being opened in 2000-2001.

E.

Manufacturing

The other traditional heavy industries of Scotland’s industrialization, shipbuilding and steel-making, have also largely been consigned to history—although the building of rigs for the North Sea oilfields and gasfields has enabled a number of the former Clydeside shipyards to stay in business. The decline of these traditional industries, however, has been paralleled by a growth of new industries such as chemicals, light mechanical and instrument engineering, and, especially, electronics. Many of the world’s leading companies in the electronics field, such as IBM and Motorola, located to Scotland, notably around Glasgow and West Lothian. By the mid-2000s, more than 1,000 electronics companies were operating in Scotland, making the country one of the main focuses of the industry in Western Europe. In particular, Scotland is a major source of computers and peripheral equipment. The electronics industry as a whole accounts for around 12 per cent of manufacturing jobs and more than half of Scotland’s exports.

A number of traditional industries, including the manufacture of food and drink products and of textiles (especially high-quality tweed and knitwear) and hosiery, remain important. Prime among the first group is the whisky industry. Scotland has some 110 distillers, located mainly in the north-east. About 80 per cent of their output is exported to more than 200 countries. Earnings from whisky sales amounted to some £3 billion a year in the mid-2000s, making it one of Britain’s top foreign-exchange earners.

F.

Services and Tourism

A marked expansion has occurred in the services sector since the 1950s, and it now employs 70 per cent of the workforce. Financial and business services are one of the fastest-growing service sectors. About one third of investment funds in Britain are managed from Scotland, which is also a base for a large number of insurance companies. Tourism is another major growth area, employing more than 200,000 people in the mid-2000s. In 2005 there were 24 million visitor stays in Scotland, with tourists spending about £4 billion.

G.

Transport and Communications

Scotland had a network of 54,776 km (34,036 mi) of roads, including about 383 km (238 mi) of motorways in 2005. About 4,376 km (2,720 mi) of railways serve Scotland. Under the Conservative government’s programme for privatization of the railways, initiated in 1993, the East Coast Main Line linking London and Edinburgh was one of the first six passenger lines to be franchised to private operators, in late 1995. The West Coast Main Line was privatized in March 1997. Public buses provide transport throughout most of the country, although services are less extensive than in the past; in more remote rural areas the “post bus” is an important lifeline. Glasgow has its own underground railway system. Many transatlantic flights use Prestwick Airport near Glasgow. Glasgow International Airport, Britain’s sixth-busiest airport, handles more than 1 million passengers a month. Edinburgh and Aberdeen airports are also among the ten busiest airports in Britain. Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd (HIAL) operates ten airports for inter-island journeys. Ferry services also link the islands with mainland Scotland.

Scotland has its own BBC television stations and there are also independent television broadcasters. The country also has access to Gaelic language television and radio services. A number of daily newspapers, including The Scotsman, Daily Record, and The Herald, are published in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

V.

Government

Scotland is governed as an integral part of the United Kingdom (see United Kingdom: Government). It is represented by 59 Members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons (prior to the 2005 general election the number was 72). With the parliamentary elections of May 6, 1999, Scotland gained its own Scottish Parliament for the first time in nearly 300 years. There are 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).

A.

Executive and Legislature

As of May 1999, Scotland achieved its own parliament. The new Scottish Parliament has powers over agriculture; fisheries and forestry; economic development; education; environment; food standards; health; home affairs; law; police; fire service; local government; sport and the arts; transport; training; tourism; research and statistics; and social work. Westminster retains power over abortion; broadcasting policy; civil service; common markets for the United Kingdom; goods and services; constitution; electricity; coal; oil; gas; nuclear energy; defence and national security; drug policy; employment; foreign policy and relations with Europe; most aspects of transport safety and regulation; national lottery; protection of borders; social security; and the stability of the United Kingdom's fiscal, economic, and monetary system.

The Scottish Parliament has an annual budget and has the ability to increase or decrease its overall budget by varying the rate of income tax for Scottish residents by up to 3 pence. The parliament, which sits for a four-year term, consists of 129 members, elected by a mixture of the first-past-the-post electoral system and a form of proportional representation known as the additional member system. Of the 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), 73 are elected from constituencies under the traditional first-past-the-post system and 56 are selected from party lists in the country's 8 electoral regions. These regions are the same as the current European parliamentary boundaries, and seven MSPs are selected for each region. The first sitting was a week after the May 6, 1999 election, when the first minister, the executive, and presiding officer were appointed. The official opening was on July 1, 1999, and was performed by Queen Elizabeth II. The Scottish Parliament replaces the system whereby Scottish affairs were administered by a British Cabinet ministry, the Scottish Office, headed by a Secretary of State for Scotland. As of June 2003 the Scottish Office became part of the new Department of Constitutional Affairs, though the Secretary of State for Scotland continues to represent Scotland in the British Cabinet.

Before the union of Scotland and England in 1707, Scotland had developed its own system of law, which continued after the union. The Scottish law system is based on civil law, which is derived from ancient Roman law, whereas the other parts of the United Kingdom follow the common law, which originated in England with the evolution of case law and precedents. Because of the different systems of law, separate statutes or statutory provisions are often enacted by Parliament for application only in Scotland. Any statute must state expressly or imply that it is applicable to Scotland in order to become enforceable. See also England: English Law.

B.

Judiciary

The Scottish judiciary is organized separately from that of the rest of the United Kingdom. The two highest courts of Scotland are the High Court of Justiciary (criminal) and the Court of Session (civil). A panel of about 30 judges—the number varies from time to time—is provided for both courts together. Major criminal trials are held before one or two judges of the High Court of Justiciary and a 15-member jury; criminal appeals may be heard by a bench of at least three judges. The Court of Session is divided into an Outer House, which holds all divorce trials and the more important civil trials, and an Inner House, which functions chiefly as an appellate court in civil cases. Appeals to the British House of Lords may be made from the Court of Session; appellate judgments of the High Court of Justiciary are final.

Each of the six sheriffdoms, into which Scotland is divided (Glasgow and Strathkelvin; Grampian, Highland and Islands; Lothian and Borders; North Strathclyde; South Strathclyde, Dumfries and Galloway; and Tayside, Central, and Fife), has a sheriff court for less important civil and criminal cases. Petty cases are tried by police courts and justices of the peace. One well-known difference between the Scottish legal system and that of England and Wales is that in Scotland, a jury can give a verdict of “not proven” when, as with a “not guilty” verdict, the accused is acquitted.

C.

Local Government

The Scottish Development Department is responsible for general policy in regard to local government. A reorganization of local government in Scotland was made effective in 1975, when the counties and burghs were abolished and replaced by nine regions and three island areas. The regions (but not the island areas) were divided into districts. Each of the regions was administered on a two-tier basis by regional and, lesser, district councils, whose members were elected to four-year terms. The island areas were administered by single-tier authorities.

Under the provisions of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Bill 1994, the two-tier system in the regions was abolished on April 1, 1996. The 62 existing regional and district councils on the mainland were replaced by 29 new single-tier authorities whose borders have in some cases affinity with many of the old authorities. The administrative systems of the island areas (the Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands, and Western Isles regional councils) remain unchanged.

Four of the new unitary authorities—Scottish Borders (formerly Borders), Dumfries and Galloway, Fife, and Highland—have retained the names and administrative boundaries of the preceding regions, combining their regional and district councils into a single authority. The other five regions—Central, Lothian, Grampian, Strathclyde, and Tayside—have vanished from the map. They have been replaced by unitary authorities that for the most part are coterminous with the former district councils, including those for the main cities and towns: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Falkirk, and Stirling. The former Central, Grampian, and Tayside regions are now each administered by three unitary authorities, and the former Lothian region by four. The former Strathclyde region, which encompassed the most populous part of Scotland, has been divided into 12 unitary authorities.

D.

Political Parties

Two leading British parties, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, shared the majority of Scottish seats in Parliament from the 1920s until the late 1970s. Since then, however, the Conservative Party, although the party of government for the United Kingdom as a whole from 1979 to 1997, increasingly became a minority party in Scotland. By the 1990s it had become less popular than the Scottish National Party (SNP), which was founded in 1934 in order to press for complete self-government. Although the SNP played a minor role in the politics of the country for a long time, since the 1970s it has become an increasingly significant force. In the 21st century the Liberal Democratic Party became the main opponent to the Labour Party in many areas. At the 1997 general election the Conservative Party lost its last remaining parliamentary seats in Scotland but won a single seat at the 2005 general election after boundary changes to the constituencies. The general election saw the Labour Party win 41 seats, the Liberal Democrats 11, the SNP 6, and the Conservative Party 1.

The Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2007 resulted in a parliament comprising the following breakdown of members: SNP (47 seats), Labour Party (46), Conservatives (17), Liberal Democrats (16), Scottish Green Party (2), and Independent (1).

VI.

History

There are many Scotlands. Different images of Scotland and of “Scottishness” have been created and recreated over the course of most of the 20 centuries of written historical records.

The conventional map of Scotland is a picture in disguise of successive attempts to invade it from the south. The natural features of topography, with passes running south to north through the Borders, have drawn invaders—from the Romans in the 1st century ad to the Angles in the 7th century and the armies of Henry VIII of England in the 1540s—to the shores of the Firth of Forth. Relatively few of them have penetrated beyond the Forth for very long. The Romans briefly pursued the barbarians as far north as Strathspey but then retreated behind the walls they built. The Angles were decisively beaten off at the battle of Nechtansmere in Angus in 685. The efforts of Edward I of England, the “hammer of the Scots”, were concentrated on the area around Stirling, which is the first bridge over the dangerous, tidal waters of the Forth; for that reason so many of the battles in Scottish history during the Wars of Independence—Stirling Bridge (1297), Falkirk (1298), and Bannockburn (1314)—were concentrated in that area.

The same formidable barrier of the Forth also helps explain why, until the 10th century, Scotland was naturally divided into separate kingdoms on either side. The territorial kingdom of the kings of Scots, bridging the Forth, came into being only slowly, as a makeshift coalition of disparate peoples.

If that map is turned on its side, looking westwards, a different history of the Scots comes into view. Separated from the rest of mainland Scotland by the Highland massif known as Druimalban (the “spine of Scotland”), the western Highlands and Isles look towards Ireland. Only a few miles of water separate Kintyre from Antrim, from whence the Scoti came to settle in southern Argyll in the 5th century. They were followed by the Christian bishop and missionary, Columba, in 563. For the next ten centuries, the histories of western Scotland and Ireland were closely intertwined. In the 16th century, the gallowglasses, mercenaries from the western Highlands, crossed the North Channel every year to fight in the Irish clan wars and, later, to resist the English conquest of Ireland. The union of the crowns of England and Scotland in 1603, ironically, brought attempts by both governments, in London and Edinburgh, to keep the two Gaelic-speaking races apart. And the 17th century would see the first mass migration of Scots, from Scotland to the Ulster plantation. The results of this exodus are with us still, in the sectarian make-up of Northern Ireland.

If the map of Scotland is turned on its head, it gives a view of Scotland seen by a succession of Viking raiders and settlers. The Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland were swamped by Scandinavian settlement, and all traces of their previous occupation by the Picts wiped out. Viking invaders penetrated only a short distance into the mainland, occupying Caithness and some of Ross and Cromarty and stopping short of modern-day Inverness, but their influence can be seen throughout almost the entire length of the western coast, marking the way to the Viking bases in Dublin and the Isle of Man.

If the map is turned again on its side, to look eastwards across the North Sea, it shows that much of Scotland’s economic development before 1700 took place on the east coast, with ports strung along it from Wick in the north to Berwick-on-Tweed in the south. Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and Berwick were all at the mouth of tidal estuaries, where the produce of the land was gathered for export. Scotland’s main trading routes, from the 12th century until almost the close of the 17th, lay across the North Sea, in the eastern Baltic, the Low Countries, and northern France. Many of the cultural characteristics of Scotland through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as a result, can be explained from the point of view of its natural links with northern Europe. The monasteries founded in Scotland in the 12th and 13th centuries had their mother houses mostly in France: the Tironensians at Tiron, for example, and the Cistercians at Citeaux. By the 15th century, Scots went to the Low Countries and the Rhineland for trade, first at Bruges and then Middleburg and Veere, and for higher education, to the universities of Louvain and Cologne. By the 17th century, budding lawyers and medical students were going especially to Leiden, whose famous medical school would be replicated in Edinburgh during the century of the Enlightenment. “Scotland in Europe” is a phrase often used by 20th-century politicians, but it has a long history.

A.

The Land

The country that comprises present-day Scotland came into existence only gradually. Until the 10th century Scotia or Alba meant the territory to the north of what one chronicler called the “sea of Scotland”, the wide stretch of tidal water known as the Firth of Forth. South of this inland sea was Lothian. By 1100 Scotland embraced both Scotia and Lothian; Celtic law and custom reached almost every part of mainland Scotland. But a borderline with England resembling the modern frontier was not established until 1239. Before that, the Scots periodically controlled large tracts of land in northern England, including present-day Cumbria and Northumberland. Even after 1239 the Borders still included tracts of “debatable land”, belonging to neither country, until the issue was finally settled in 1551, with the drawing of the first straight-line frontier in Europe, the so-called Scots Dyke.

The winning of the west came slowly and with difficulty: the control exercised by kings of Scots over the Western Isles was not ultimately settled until the Battle of Largs in 1263, when King Håkon IV of Norway was forced to accept a boundary fixed between the Northern Isles, which remained in Norwegian hands, and the Western Isles (or Sudreys), which passed to the Scots, along with the Isle of Man. Man itself was lost to England during the Wars of Independence (1296-1328), as was Scotland’s premier port of Berwick, which still remains within England to this day although, oddly, its football team plays in the Scottish League. The Northern Isles, which belonged to Denmark, were annexed by the Scottish Crown as late as 1470. It was only then, in the reign of James III, that the making of the kingdom of Scotland was fully completed.

B.

The Early Peoples of Scotland

With such a long history, it is not surprising that Scotland was a conglomerate of different peoples, languages, and cultures. As late as 1138, when David I invaded northern England, he led an army made up of an assembly of “Normans, Germans, English, Northumbrians and Cumbrians, men of Teviotdale and Lothian, Galwegians and Scots”. Yet they all fought under the war cry Albanaich! Albanaich! (Men of Alba). “New” Scots fought alongside the descendants of the Scots of Dál Riata, who had given their name to the kingdom. The making of Scotland, in part, was the process of the consolidation of a territorial kingdom. It was also the interweaving of a series of different peoples, sometimes violent but probably more often a natural process. Historically, Scotland is a collection of immigrants and migrants.

The earliest peoples who appear in some form of record were the inhabitants whom the Romans encountered during their three main periods of conquest and occupation between ad 78 and ad 215. The first map of Scotland, drawn by Ptolemy in the 2nd century ad, depicted 5 groups in the area of Roman occupation and a further 12 to the north of the Forth. Among the northern peoples, the most prominent was the Caledonii, whose influence was shown as extending from the Forth to the “northern sea” of the Moray Firth. The story of the next six centuries or so was one of the gradual amalgamation of these peoples into a unitary kingdom. The first mention of the “Picts” was made by a Roman observer in ad 297. The name in itself, literally meaning “painted people”, was probably a nom de guerre, given by the Romans to the various barbarian peoples who resisted their repeated attempts to extend their influence beyond the Forth-Clyde line.

The first attempt to subdue the Picts came with the three expeditions made by Gnaeus Julius Agricola between ad 79 and 83. Attempts to build forts deep in hostile territory, to act as firebreaks, were abandoned in favour of an ambitious, defensive barrier, built of stone and turf between ad 118 and 122. Hadrian’s Wall extended for 117 km (73 mi), from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the River Tyne. Two decades later, another rampart, called the Antonine Wall, was built across the 58 km (37 mi) from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde. By ad 161, however, after repeated breaches of it, the Antonine Wall, together with the policy of trying to create a pale across southern Scotland, was finally abandoned in favour of a fortress Britain, with its northern frontier fixed at Hadrian’s Wall. By ad 400, this wall, too, had become obsolete and was abandoned. The legacy of the Roman occupation is debatable, not least because of the huge gap in evidence between the 2nd and 6th centuries ad. The most obvious traces of Roman occupation are still to be seen, including the remains of the two walls, which marked the northern limits of the Roman Empire. Significant sections of Hadrian's Wall still exist and have been designated a World Heritage site under the title Frontiers of the Roman Empire. But also beyond the Antonine Wall have remained clusters of Roman marching camps, such as Ardoch and Bertha, and in the occupied zone between the two walls are forts and supply bases, such as Newstead and Inchtuthill.

One effect of the Roman period of invasion and occupation was to encourage and consolidate a closer confederation of their enemies. Already by about ad 350 the Picts were divided into two main peoples, each with an overking: the Maeatae, who lived immediately north of the Antonine Wall, and the Caledonii, who lived beyond them, deeper in hostile territory. The boundary between the two was probably the Mounth, the great natural obstacle stretching east-west, along the southern boundary of modern-day Aberdeenshire. By 685, when King Bridei mac Bile defeated Northumbrian invaders at the battle of Nechtansmere, or Dunnichen Moss, in Angus, there was one high king of the Picts, whose centre of power lay at Fortriu in Strathearn but whose authority stretched over a group of peoples from the Forth to beyond the Moray Firth.

C.

Britons, Scots, and Scandinavians

After the Roman withdrawal from Britain in 409, the Picts systematically raided the territories of their southern Celtic neighbours, the Brigantes. The latter, however, soon put an end to these raids, probably with the assistance of the Saxons, one of the Germanic groups that subsequently subjugated the Britons. In the course of the Germanic conquest many of the northern Brigantes withdrew into part of the region formerly occupied by the Romans between the Firth of Clyde and the Solway Firth, and there laid the foundations of what became the kingdom of Strathclyde. The seat of their kingdom was the formidable volcanic rock of Dumbarton, on the northern bank of the Firth of Clyde. The extent of that kingdom’s influence is largely a matter of guesswork but it brought forth two of the key saints in the conversion of the peoples of the isles of Britain. St Patrick was a Briton who went, as a bishop, to Ireland in c. 460. Ninian, another bishop, operating from his base of Casa Candida (the white house) at Whithorn in the south-west of Galloway, can lay claim to being the first missionary to work within present-day Scotland. By c. 600, the mission had spread far enough north for Kentigern to be instituted as the first bishop of the whole kingdom of Strathclyde, with his seat probably at Govan, near Glasgow.

The adjacent region (the southern part of present-day Argyll and Bute) to the north was occupied towards the beginning of the 6th century by the Scoti—Celtic invaders from northern Ireland—who established the kingdom known as Dál Riata. In 563, Columba, an Irish missionary who came to Dál Riata from northern Ireland, established a base on the island of Iona. Within 100 years of his death in 597, a vast family chain of churches and monasteries extended from the shores of the Moray Firth to Holy Island, or Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland, and from there to the north of Ireland and as far south as Kells, founded in 807.

The story of the spread of Christianity across Scotland is parallel to that of the making of a single kingdom. The real “apostle of the Picts” was not Columba but his successor and hagiographer, Adomnan, who established a network of contacts with kings and the aristocracy, not only in Ireland and Dál Riata, but in Pictland and Northumberland as well. The merging of different peoples under a high king of the Picts in the 8th and 9th centuries was accompanied by the cultivation of different saints and the compilation of the genealogy of kings. Both were the work of the class of officials and administrators—the clergy. It became the fashion for Pictish high kings to be named Constantine, after the Roman Christian emperor of that name. In the course of the 8th century, the Pictish Church adopted an exotic cult of the biblical St Andrew, firmly established in the royal centre of that name, in the east “neuk” (corner) of Fife.

In 807 Iona was abandoned because of Viking raids. In the 840s the Ionan Church was literally split in two. Most monks probably returned to Ireland. Along with them went the celebrated Book of Kells, produced on Iona. The relics of the saint were divided. Some, along with the Brecbennach (a portable house shrine which can be seen in the Museum of Scotland) went east, to a new religious centre established at Dunkeld by Kenneth mac Alpin or mac Allpín (MacAlpin). By then the church, kings, and peoples were amalgamated. A long process of intermarriage and assimilation had been going on for centuries.

The first Viking raids on Northumbria, including the church at Lindisfarne, had taken place in the 790s. Shortly after, Iona and Skye suffered a series of raids, culminating in the slaughter of 68 monks of Iona in 806. In 839 a great defeat “in which the flower of the Pictish nobility was destroyed” was reported. Viking pressure can account for the shift of the Ionan Church eastwards and indirectly explain the emergence of the kingdom of the Scots in a new guise in the early 840s under Kenneth mac Alpin. The Scandinavian threat increased as the 9th century went on. In 870, Vikings took Dumbarton Rock and the kingdoms within Scotland were threatened by a pincer, of the Danish capital of York and the Viking capital of Dublin. Scandinavian pressure was felt, too, in the north: the earldom of Orkney extended as far south on the mainland as Ross and Cromarty. By the 930s, though, the classic Viking era was nearing its end. The evidence of placenames and of grave goods begins by then to suggest settlers rather than ferocious raiders.

D.

The Unification of Scotland

The period between 843 and 1057 was vital in the story of the unification of Scotland. It began and ended with two of Scotland’s most celebrated but also most obscure kings—Kenneth mac Alpin (c. 843-858) and Macbeth (1040-1057). The status of Kenneth may owe more to claims that he was the first “king of Scots”, which were made by his successors up to three centuries after his death, rather than to anything that he achieved himself. He was not the first king to rule both Dál Riata and Pictland; the process of unification had been going on for a century before his reign, though usually dominated by the Picts rather than the Scots. Yet his reign did mark some attempt to claim a higher status for the kings of what was now a joint kingdom. Kenneth certainly established royal and religious centres at Scone and Dunkeld, as a counterweight to the Pictish centres at Fortriu and St Andrews. He may even have taken to Scone the Stone of Destiny or, more likely, have had it manufactured, for it is made of Perthshire sandstone. The union of king, land, and people, symbolized by such an inauguration stone, would have been given a new, wider meaning as a result.

The line of kings established by Kenneth ruled in the male line virtually unbroken until 1034, the end of the reign of Malcolm II. But this was not yet conventional kingship, in which son followed father. Without exception, grandsons, brothers, or cousins succeeded. Stability did not come easily to the new kingdom. There were internal frictions, recurrent coups, and a dangerous new neighbour—Northumbria, after it was taken over by the Danes, based in York, in 866. The extent of rule of the mac Alpin dynasty south of the Forth ebbed and flowed during the 10th century and was not established until the Battle of Carham, immediately to the south of the Tweed, in 1018. The annexation of Lothian and the winning of control over much of Strathclyde, however, were offset by the recurrent problems that these kings faced in the north, and especially in Moray. Three 10th-century kings were killed putting down northern revolts. Duncan I was a fourth victim, to a rival claimant who held greater power, as mormaer (“great steward”), than he did in Moray. The rival’s name was Macbeth. His reign lasted 17 years, longer than most in this period, which suggests some stability, as does his pilgrimage to Rome in 1050. It also seems unlikely that a simple usurper would have been buried, as he was, in the traditional graveyard of kings, on Iona.

E.

A New Scotland?

The reign of Malcolm III Canmore began in obscure circumstances and ended amid confusion, following his death during his fifth raid into northern England. Northumbria, unstable both before and after the Norman invasion of 1066, was the new factor in Scottish politics. It was both the making and the breaking of Malcolm Canmore, who harboured ambitions to extend his authority to the Tyne and perhaps as far south as the Humber.

His reign is conventionally seen as a marking of a new era, characterized by fundamental transformations of the ancient Celtic culture and institutions. Long an exile among the English, Malcolm had acquired a profound interest in their customs and affairs. His first wife had been the widow of the Earl of Orkney, Ingiborg, who had borne two sons. His second wife was Margaret, sister of Edgar the Aetheling and a refugee from Norman England. She is credited by her biographer, her confessor Turgot, as being the mainspring for the wholesale abolition of Celtic practices within the Church. Yet what happened is better seen as a religious revival, experienced elsewhere in Europe, than as the end of the Celtic Church or its Romanization.

The respective roles of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret are controversial. Her personal devoutness is not in doubt, nor is the piety that she instilled into her six sons. But the impact of a queen who knew no Gaelic must have largely been confined to the royal court. Like Columba before her, she was probably more important in death than in life. She became a cult figure, especially after she was canonized as a saint—Scotland’s only royal saint—in 1251, more than 150 years after her death. The changes that came about in this reign and in every reign that followed during the Canmore dynasty down to Alexander III mirrored the interaction between two dynamic cultures, Celtic and Anglo-Norman. Each reign represented a different attempt to strike a balance between old and new.

The reigns of two of Margaret’s sons, Alexander I and David I, saw significant new foreign influences. Latin made its first appearance in the written record of government under Alexander. His clerks addressed his subjects in his charters as “Scots and English”. His invitation to the Augustinian order to found a house at Scone in 1115 marked the beginning of the expansion of the religious orders of western Christendom in Scotland. But this was cautious change, which operated differently in Scotland north and south of the Forth. So did the more dramatic developments in the reign of his brother, David.

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the reign of David I. It saw the introduction of a coinage and the spread of the motte and bailey castle, both symbols of a more centralized royal authority. The reign was marked by the extensive grants of land made to new families, such as the Bruces and Stuarts (to give their names a more familiar spelling), who were of Anglo-Norman origin and often the tenants or services of David’s own estate of Huntingdon in England. These grants marked a new form of land tenure—feudal knight service, common in much of western Europe. And David gave generous grants of land to various new religious orders, including the Tironensians, Cistercians, and Premonstratensians, each of which had its mother house in France. Yet the revolution introduced by David I can be overstated. Many of the grants made to the incomers were in marginal land. No religious houses, as yet, were founded north of the Forth. The spread of both territorial dioceses of the Church and of sheriffdoms, both emblems of the new royal order, was patchy and not completed until the end of the 12th century. There were new bishops and abbots with Norman names in this century but they were largely replaced with native-born Scots in the next. The new arrangements brought novel terminology—sheriff, chamberlain, feu, earls, barons—but they often only substituted a new name for an old office or duty. One such example was the new feudal host, comprised of armoured knights, the symbol of a revolution in military tactics. But the “common army” of Scotland had been in existence for centuries and still featured, alongside the host, at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314).

The most dramatic change came with the foundation of royal burghs. Some 15 burghs were founded during David’s reign, including Dunfermline, Edinburgh, Perth, and Stirling. Their earliest inhabitants were a mixture of native Scots and immigrants, especially from Flanders and England, encouraged to settle and bring their skills. The new economy was based on the export trade in wool and cloth, although the Scots also shipped skins, hides, and fish across the North Sea. There are many streets called Schottendyk in the present-day Netherlands and the early word for cod there was aberdaan. Even with these new towns, though, there is likely to have been continuity as well as change. Recent archaeological discoveries have demonstrated settlement in Aberdeen and Dundee in the 11th century and in Perth as early as in about 980. The real upsurge in overseas trade, it is likely, came in the early 13th century rather than the 12th. And, as late as the 16th century, less than one Scot in ten was a town dweller.

F.

Relations With England

Malcolm Canmore’s death had triggered a family struggle for the succession. He was followed, not by Duncan, his eldest surviving son by Ingiborg, but by his brother, Donald Ban III. But the new king, a Celt by upbringing and temperament, was aided by Margaret’s third son, Edmund, a symbol of the alien culture at the royal court since the 1170s. Donald Ban was displaced by another of her sons, Edgar, who gained control through the help of a Norman army. It is difficult to make sense of the crises that followed the deaths of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret in 1093. The “Anglicization” of Scotland will explain only part of what was going on. More important was the dangerous game of whether Scotland should settle for becoming a client state of the new Norman England or should try to take advantage of the situation by extending its control into the English north. There were good reasons why the possession of Northumbria was so tempting for Scottish kings. Much of the dynamic economy that Scotland enjoyed during David I’s reign may have been due to his control of the extensive silver mines around Carlisle. His grandson, William the Lion, was also tempted by the lure of the lost territory in Northumbria. An abortive expedition in 1174 resulted in his capture and in the Treaty of Falaise, which renewed the obligation of fealty owed by Scottish kings to their English counterparts. That issue of the borderline was not finally settled until the Treaty of York (1237), in the reign of Alexander II. The question of English suzerainty, however, supposedly settled by the quitclaim of Richard I of England in 1189, would return to haunt Scotland.

When the last of the Canmore kings, Alexander III, died in 1286, he left the throne to Margaret, known as the Maid of Norway, daughter of Erik, King of Norway, his young granddaughter and only living descendant. Her death in Orkney in 1290, on the way to Scotland, plunged Scotland into a political crisis, with no fewer than 13 claimants, known as the Competitors. A civil war between the two most formidable of the rivals, the Bruce and Balliol families, threatened. To pre-empt the crisis, Edward I of England was invited to adjudicate in the “Great Cause” (1291-1292). Edward’s eventual choice of John de Balliol, a grandson of David I, was probably the correct one but he exploited the situation by reviving the old English claims of suzerainty over Scotland in a new, explicit form. Balliol, as a result, was caught between the demands of an aggressive English overlord and a growing sense of Scottish identity, in the form of the “community of the realm”.

G.

The Wars of Independence

Many Scottish nobles and, it is likely, the overwhelming majority of the Scottish people bitterly resented English interference in their national affairs. Balliol in 1295 resorted to an alliance with France, which was then at war with England. The first phase of the Scottish Wars of Independence ended within 17 days, after the sack of Berwick and a crushing defeat of a Scottish army at Dunbar in April 1296. Balliol was deposed and exiled, his kingdom annexed and placed under military occupation.

G.1.

William Wallace

In 1297 a major rising against English rule took place, under the leadership of the Scottish patriot, William Wallace, who acted in the name of the exiled king. An English army was badly beaten at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in September. The following year, Edward led a huge army into Scotland and won a decisive victory at Falkirk. The English occupation resumed, but so did Scottish resistance, which mostly took the form of guerrilla warfare. In 1304, Stirling Castle fell to another large-scale English invasion force. The year after, Wallace was betrayed to the English, convicted of treason, and executed.

G.2.

Robert Bruce

After Wallace's death, Robert Bruce, grandson of the Competitor of 1291, David I, assumed the leadership of the resistance movement by a desperate gamble, killing his rival, the Earl of Comyn, in a church at Dumfries. He was crowned Robert I in March 1306. During the first year of his reign Bruce suffered several reverses at the hands of the English. In 1307 he took advantage of the death of Edward I with a ruthless campaign against both the pro-English section of the Scottish nobility and the remnants of the Balliol faction. By 1310 he began a series of devastating raids into northern England.

Edward II finally led a punitive expedition into Scotland in 1314. At Bannockburn, near Stirling, on June 23 and 24, the Scottish army inflicted a shattering defeat on this much superior force. Bannockburn, however, did not bring about the end of the war. Bruce renewed his attacks on the English north, made worse by a series of disastrous crop failures. In 1315 his brother, Edward, invaded the English colony in Ireland and threatened Wales. The war ended in May 1328, when the regents of the young Edward III of England approved the Treaty of Northampton-Edinburgh. By the terms of this document, Scotland obtained recognition as an independent kingdom, although the threat from England was renewed shortly after Bruce’s death, probably from leprosy, in 1329.

G.3.

David II

Much of the minority of the young David II, who had been only four years old when he succeeded his father, was taken up with a third phase of the Wars of Independence. The “disinherited”, pro-English or pro-Balliol supporters who had been deprived of office and lands by Robert I, staged an invasion in 1332 and came close to overturning the fledgling Bruce dynasty. A puppet regime, under Edward de Balliol, was set up in 1333, with the help of Edward III. A guerrilla war, with much of central and southern Scotland made a wasteland, ensued. By 1341, when David II, aged 17, returned to claim his throne, England was heavily involved in the Hundred Years’ War with France and had abandoned all but a handful of strongpoints within Scotland. An uneasy period of “cold war” followed. David staged a series of raids into England, and was captured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross, near Durham, in 1346. He remained a prisoner until 1357, when the Scots agreed to an enormous ransom. The second part of his reign has been the subject of much debate. The old picture of a worthless, incompetent ruler, fostered by later pro-Stuart chroniclers, has given way to a more balanced view. There is a good deal to indicate that a rigorous royal government was in place, as royal income increased considerably. Yet David’s reign ended with the house of Bruce in dangerous political isolation and without a direct heir.

H.

Stuart Kings

The central feature of the Bruce dynasty since the death of Edward Bruce in 1318 had been its weakness in the male line. When David II died in 1371, it was his nephew, the son of Robert I’s daughter, Marjorie, who became the first Stuart (Stewart) king of Scotland as Robert II. He was by then 56, an old man by the standards of the time. His reign is no longer seen as a disaster, although it is difficult to find much that is positive to say about the reign of his son Robert III.

In March 1406 two events took place that changed the face of Stuart politics. Robert II died, and his young son James, who had been sent to France to escape political intrigues, was captured by the English and held prisoner in London until 1424. James I is considered to have been the first in a line of tough-minded Stuart kings. His personal reign began with a calculated involvement of his relations and others who had governed the country in his absence and a flurry of legislation from a series of parliaments. The re-establishment of royal authority was accompanied by a personal cult of honour, seen most strikingly in the reconstruction of Linlithgow Castle as a royal palace. But the 1430s brought increasing tension between the king and his nobles. Strikingly, James’s assassins in 1437 were members of his own household and included some of his relations.

Each of the next six Stuart monarchs succeeded as a minor. Almost exactly half of the period between 1437 and 1603 was taken up with royal minorities. Yet it is a mistake to see this as a period dominated by civil strife, an over-ambitious nobility, and weak kingship. Each of these monarchs took charge of their kingdom in their teenage years. Each benefited from a growing sense of the corporate identity of the Stuart dynasty. All tried to rule through the force of their own personality and invested heavily in a royal court, which was designed to impress. There was an ambitious and hugely expensive building programme. The reign of James II brought a Burgundian princess to Scotland as his bride and with her a rich court culture. James III, although derided by later chroniclers as an ineffectual king, brought about extensive improvements at Stirling Castle, formed a new chivalric Order of St Andrew, and established his capital in Edinburgh.

The reign of James IV, which began ignominiously with his involvement in the coup that brought about the death of his father, saw a more aggressive brand of kingship, including a naval race with England that produced the enormous warship, the Great Michael, more than twice the size of Henry VIII’s more celebrated Mary Rose. The Great Hall at Stirling Castle, recently restored to its original splendour, is the finest and most enduring monument to his reign, which ended in tragedy, defeat, and death at the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513. His son, James V, after a long minority, raised the status of the monarchy by a variety of means, including expropriation of the Church, enforced taxes, and two successive French marriages. His first bride, Madeleine, the daughter of Francis I of France, survived the Scottish climate for barely two months. A year later, in 1538, James married Mary of Guise-Lorraine. The east side of Linlithgow Palace and the palace block at Stirling Castle are monuments to the spending extravagances by which James tried to impress his French queen and his subjects. His premature death in 1542, more likely caused by water poisoning than the fit of depression graphically described by chroniclers after the minor defeat at the hands of the English at Solway Moss in November 1542, brought a new kind of crisis. For the Stuart infant successor this time was a girl. She was Mary, Queen of Scots.

H.1.

Mary Queen of Scots

The crisis facing Scotland in the 1540s, with a girl child as monarch, was made worse by two other factors: the slow but steady growth of Protestantism and the invasions and military occupation of southern Scotland by Henry VIII and Edward VI of England, which Sir Walter Scott later dubbed the “Rough Wooing”. In 1548, Mary, barely six years old, was sent to France for safe-keeping. There, she was brought up in a happy family atmosphere with the children of Henry II. She was betrothed to his eldest son, the Dauphin François, and they married in Paris in 1558.

War with England came to an end, with massive French military aid, in 1551. Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, assumed the regency in 1554, replacing the unpopular Earl of Arran. But within five years her government was thrown into turmoil by the revolt of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, whose appeal owed as much to resentment of French rule and fears of the example of Brittany, annexed to France after a similar dynastic marriage alliance, as to religion. The return to Scotland, in May 1559, of John Knox, an uncompromising Protestant preacher who had spent much of the mid-1550s in John Calvin’s Geneva, gave the movement new impetus. A week after his return, a Perth mob, inflamed by Knox’s sermon, ransacked the parish church and Catholic religious houses in the town. However, victory for the Protestants, who were often in a minority, was by no means assured. It took open support from Elizabeth I, an English army, domestic crisis in France, and the unexpected death of Mary of Guise from cancer to produce victory for the Congregation. In August 1560, two months after the regent’s death, the Congregation held, called the so-called Reformation Parliament, which abolished the Catholic mass, proscribed the pope’s authority, and adopted a Protestant Confession of Faith.

But the Reformation was not yet secure. In August 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots, returned to Scotland, following the death of her husband, Francis II. During her personal reign Mary’s Catholicism, her claim to the English throne, and her need to marry again to produce an heir all complicated both her authority and the allegiance of her subjects, caught between their loyalty to the Crown and Protestant convictions. The future of both Protestantism and the old Church were uncertain. 1565 saw the Queen’s marriage to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, a kinsman from a mixed faith family, and an abortive Protestant coup, the so-called Chaseabout affair. The following year brought another Protestant conspiracy, with the murder of Mary’s Italian servant David Riccio, and the birth of a son and heir, the future James VI. The mysterious murder of Darnley in February 1567, at the Kirk of Field in Edinburgh, brought suspicion upon the Queen and the Earl of Bothwell, whom she quickly married. A revolt by a coalition of Protestant and Catholic nobles aimed to separate her from Bothwell but ended up with the radicals in control and Mary imprisoned and deposed in favour of her infant son. She escaped from her island prison of Lochleven in May 1568 but, despite superior numbers, her army lost the Battle of Langside and she fled to England. This was an unprecedented situation but Elizabeth I, fearful of both aiding the rebels against their lawful sovereign and of Catholic conspiracies at home with Mary as their figurehead, kept her cousin imprisoned for 19 years. In 1587, Mary, implicated in another Catholic plot, this time engineered by Anthony Babington, was tried and executed. See Babington, Anthony; Walsingham, Sir Francis.

H.2.

James VI

Until 1578 Scotland was ruled by successive regents, all staunchly Protestant and pro-English. James, a precocious, talented, and foul-mouthed adolescent, was, by the standards of other Stuart kings, a late developer. He did not take control of his government until he was 19 and married only at 24. His bride was Anna of Denmark. His reign was marked by the decisive growth of state power: the privy council by the 1590s transacted 30 times as much business as in 1550. Radical Presbyterian ministers, errant nobles, Highland chiefs, and Border reivers all experienced the full weight of government that was more authoritarian, interventionist, and costly than ever before. The royal court became again a fulcrum for the arts but also for political intrigue. Royal propaganda hailed James as Apollo, patron of the arts, the biblical kings David and Solomon, and a new Christian emperor, Constantine. On the death of Elizabeth, on March 24, 1603, James VI, as her nearest heir, inherited the Crown of England as James I. Although James wanted what he called a “perfect union” and always referred to his kingdoms as “Great Britain”, this did not materialize beyond a mere union of the Crowns. James had promised to visit his northern kingdom one year in every three but returned only once before his death in 1625. And for more than 100 years after 1603, England and Scotland remained separate political entities, with their own parliaments. The main issue during that century increasingly became the nature of the union itself.

I.

Seventeenth-Century Scotland

James VI and I’s idea of a new Britain did not survive his death. His son, Charles I, tried to rule his three kingdoms separately but what historians now prefer to call the War of the Three Kingdoms (rather than the English Civil War or English Revolution) had its roots in the entanglement of separate crises, first in Scotland in 1638-1639, which resulted in the so-called Bishops’ Wars, then in Ireland with the outbreak of a Catholic rising in 1641, and with constitutional crisis leading to civil war in England in 1642. The main cause of the difficulties in Scotland was the attempt to impose Anglican worship on the Church, although high taxation and absentee government were contributory factors. The Scottish Covenanters (following their subscription of a National Covenant in 1638) faced war on three fronts in the 1640s: in England, where they joined Parliament’s forces after 1643; in Ireland; and in a civil war at home, in which the Marquis of Montrose, helped by a Catholic Irish army, inflicted a series of stunning defeats on them in 1644-1645. The victory of the radicals under Oliver Cromwell and Charles's execution in 1649 broke up the fragile alliance between Covenanters and Parliamentarians. England declared a republic but the Scots crowned Charles II as their king in 1651. The result was another English invasion and military occupation. The Cromwellian regime brought union in an unexpected and unwelcome form. The attempts to import English-style law and government did not create a desirable template for the future.

When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, separate settlements followed in each of his three kingdoms. The religious settlement in Scotland, which saw the reintroduction of bishops into the Church, was unpopular and Charles’s government, riven by internal feuds, was both inconsistent and heavy-handed in dealing with Presbyterian dissent. Several abortive risings occurred during his reign; the most serious, in 1679, was triggered by the assassination of Archbishop Sharp, primate of the Scottish Church.

Scotland played no part in the downfall of Charles's brother and successor, James VII (James II of England), in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Scottish Parliament did not immediately recognize the new monarchs, William III and his wife Mary, but chose instead to adjudicate between their claim and that of James VII, whose inept handling of his own cause compromised his supporters. Only after that did the Convention Parliament in 1689 choose William as king. The events of 1688-1689 showed that Scotland and England were moving further apart rather than closer together.

William’s government was little more popular than that of James VII. A rising of James’s supporters (or Jacobites) under Viscount Dundee in April 1689, which lasted for 13 months, alarmed both William and the Scottish Parliament. The settlement of 1690, which abolished bishops and produced a Presbyterian “kirk by the law established” was a product of this crisis. It did not bring religious peace: the largest purge in the history of the Scottish Church, far greater than that at either the Reformation of 1560 or the Restoration of 1660, took place in the years after 1690. William’s government lost control of the Highlands through a mixture of ineptitude and brutality, which produced the Glencoe massacre in February 1692, when 38 members of the MacIan clan (a MacDonald sept) were butchered by its troops. The authorities’ inept handling of the Darién venture, an abortive attempt in 1695-1700 to establish a colony in the isthmus of Panama, brought a serious political crisis and ruin for much of the Scottish economy, already in difficulties through a combination of trade wars, harvest failures, and severe weather caused by the death throes of the Little Ice Age. One in twenty Scots died of starvation in what were called the “seven ill years”.

The road to a fuller union was not inevitable. Politically, the two countries had drifted apart, especially after 1688. When the Union of the Crowns was effected, it was only natural to think that dynastic union, as with other examples in contemporary Europe, would lead to unification, including law and religion. The course of the 17th century, including the events of the 1640s which were, in a real sense, religious wars, made such a union less rather than more likely. The decline of Scotland’s old markets, in the Baltic and France, was serious but historians now prefer to think of the 1690s as a temporary breakdown in what was otherwise a slowly expanding economy rather than as a sole determinant of Scotland’s union with England, with free trade and access to the English empire overseas. But the situation did mean that, when negotiations for a union were forced on Scotland by the English government of Queen Anne (1702-1714), nervous of an independent Scotland in a period marked by European-wide wars, economic issues came to the fore. No fewer than 15 of the 25 Articles of Union prepared in 1706 concerned the economy.

J.

Scotland in the United Kingdom

In May 1707 the Scottish Parliament voted itself out of existence, and Scotland became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, with a single parliament at Westminster. A closer relationship between England and Scotland was probably inevitable but a full incorporating union was not. The Treaty of Union was greeted by cheering crowds in London and by riots and protests in Scotland, despite the guarantees it afforded to the Scottish Church and legal system. The union produced the largest free trade zone in Europe. By 1714, with the accession of the House of Hanover, its sphere of interest stretched from the River Elbe to the American colonies. Yet economic benefits from the union did not come to Scotland much before the 1740s. What was supposed to be a new, British parliament operated much as Westminster did before, with 45 Scottish members added to it. Scottish business hardly ever came before it: only nine acts relating to Scotland were passed between 1727 and 1745. The union—a uniquely British compromise of a unitary state without full unification—was an experiment. It remained on probation until almost 1750. Much of urban and Lowland Scotland was prone to popular riots and unrest, especially on issues such as taxation and customs duties. And Jacobitism stubbornly refused to fade away.

K.

Jacobitism

In 1714 the first real test of the union came about. It took the form of a major Jacobite rising. The extent of support for it, especially in Scotland north of the Tay, was an accurate reflection of discontent with the union. It was not a rising of the Highlands, where support was slow to materialize, but a concerted protest by the Scottish ruling classes led by a disillusioned Westminster politician, the Earl of Mar. But “Bobbing John”, as he was known, proved to be no general and the rising lost its way, well before the Old Pretender, the son of James VII, managed to arrive from France.

After that the London government remained nervous, although active support for Jacobitism had gradually waned. General Wade built a series of roads and fortresses in the Highlands in the 1730s but they did little to prevent the 1745 rebellion, the last and most spectacular of the Jacobite plots and risings. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, son of the Old Pretender, landed at Eriskay in the Outer Isles in July 1745. In the next six months he raised an army, this time mostly from the Highlands, marched first to Edinburgh, where a surprise defeat was inflicted on a government force at Prestonpans, and invaded England, getting as far south as Derby, only 204 km (127 mi) north of London. But the planned French invasion of the south of England never happened. Charles settled for Scotland and retreated northwards. He chose to take a stand at Culloden, near Inverness, on April 16, 1746. It was his last folly. Outnumbered and forced to advance uphill across boggy ground into a biting north-easterly wind, his clansmen were cut down by the superior firepower of the army of the Duke of Cumberland. The battlefield, which has been restored by the National Trust for Scotland to the way it looked in 1746, tells its own, chilling story. But Culloden was not entirely about the brutal defeat of a Scottish army by Hanoverian troops, although there were undoubtedly atrocities during and after the battle. Cumberland had as many Scots as English in his ranks, for the 1745 rebellion was also a Scottish civil war. Its aftermath was a savage backlash which dismantled part of the structure of Highland society and even proscribed tartan and bagpipes. By 1750 the Highlands were demilitarized. By 1790 they were part of a tourist trail, which took in Loch Lomond, Ben Nevis, and Fingal’s Cave. Robert Burns and William and Dorothy Wordsworth were among the first tourists to the new Highlands, where a romantic wilderness replaced the image of a war-like society.

L.

The Scottish Enlightenment

In the course of the 18th century, Edinburgh, having lost its status as a capital city of Scotland, became the focus of the new “North Britain” and the cultural home of the Scottish Enlightenment. A new “Age of Improvement” had dawned in the 1720s, although many of its roots lay in the 17th century. The scheme to build a New Town in Edinburgh had first been hatched in the 1680s, well before the union. The world-famous Edinburgh medical school, founded in 1726, which would become the leading school in the English-speaking world, was first planned in 1617. The wide streets of the New Town, with spacious, formal gardens, testified to the growth of a new middle class, a novel concern for privacy, and the consignment of middle-class women to the domestic household. Yet, ironically, the Enlightenment actually took place not in the New Town, most of which was built only in the 1780s and 1790s, but in the clubs and societies based in the narrow streets and closes of the overcrowded Old Town. An English visitor famously remarked that, by standing at the market cross in Edinburgh’s High Street, he could within a few minutes “take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand”. They included the philosopher David Hume, the atheist enfant terrible of the “hotbed of genius”; the economist Adam Smith, who offered a practical morality to a new, commercial society, which has been much misquoted and misunderstood in the 20th century; and the historian William Robertson, author of a two-volume History of America (1777).

Literary figures included Tobias Smollett, James Boswell, and Robert Burns, who operated in two languages—the English of North British society and in Scots. The Enlightenment was avowedly concerned with the future rather than the Scottish past, which the new, refined society had only recently escaped. But there was also by the 1770s an explicit sense of historical awareness that an older society was passing and relics of it needed to be preserved. This was why Burns began collecting songs and ballads in native Scots, including 200 songs in the six-volume Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803). James Macpherson published Ossian, translations of ancient Gaelic poems, which were exposed as a literary fraud after his death. And, in 1781, the Earl of Buchan founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which started the collections now housed in the Royal Scottish Museum. The Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, written between 1814 and 1832, were the epitaph of an older Scotland, now safely consigned to history.

M.

Scots and Britons

It was Sir Walter Scott who organized the visit to Edinburgh in 1822 of George IV, the descendant of a Hanoverian dynasty that had crushed the Jacobite risings. He came dressed in a kilt, symbol of his former enemies. Tartan, banned for a time after the 1745 rebellion, became a symbol of Scottishness, especially after Queen Victoria acquired a Highland estate at Balmoral, on Deeside, in 1848. A cult of tartan, bagpipes, and clans was created, which, as one of the sceptics in 1822 complained, “made us [Scots] appear a nation of Highlanders”. Highland games, which can be traced to the 1780s, were given a new popularity through royal patronage. Clans had existed for centuries but a rash of clan societies sprang up in the late 19th century, each with its own (alleged) tartan, which were, in truth, largely the inventions of entrepreneurial cloth manufacturers.

There was a serious point behind “tartanry”, a word invented in the 19th century. It helped give the Scottish people a new, different sense of national identity, which the North Britain of the 18th century had failed to do. People felt themselves to be both Scots and Britons or, to be more specific, citizens of a greater Britain, which, in the form of the British Empire, encompassed much of the globe. Scots felt that they had contributed out of all proportion to the second British Empire, which opened up in India from the 1770s on. Glasgow gloried in the claim that it was, after London, the second city of the Empire.

In the 19th century Scottish nationalism was contained within a new kind of Britishness. Both the monarchy and army were important agents of this. George IV had been the first monarch for 171 years to visit Scotland. Victoria came every year. While Scottish administrators helped govern the British Empire, Scottish soldiers helped defend it. Much of the officer corps of the British army was made up of Scots. And Scottish regiments, even those recruited from the Lowlands (such as the Cameronians), were forced into tartan.

The irony was that this confident sense of a dual nationality came at a point when the three main institutions that had previously protected Scotland’s identity—the Church, education, and the law—were each under attack from the growing tentacles of the British state. The real change came in the 1840s and 1850s. The discovery of the electric telegraph and the construction of the first railways links, which reduced the journey time from Edinburgh to London from 43 hours to 12, gave a new dimension to government intervention in Scottish affairs. Yet Scottish politics remained stubbornly Scots, and local control of local affairs continued. It was a reasonably happy balancing act until the second half of the 20th century. The union and unionism worked because of its own internal contradictions. It remained a union that allowed a distinctive Scottish political culture to operate.

N.

The Highland Clearances

Few issues in Scottish history are more emotive than the Clearances. Even among professional historians the debate is fierce and unresolved. For those who see the increasing population growth and pressure on poor land as the main problem, there was a logical and near-inevitable momentum about the Clearances. In 1755 the population of the Highlands was 115,000. By 1831 it had grown to 201,000. In another view, though, the Highland problem was the outcome of the landlords’ policies, which created a new, unstable economy between 1780 and 1810, known as the crofting community, based on the unstable profits to be made from kelp and sheep. The truth, even with an issue as controversial as this, is often elusive. Few landlords were as calculating as the notorious Countess of Sutherland and her infamous factor, Patrick Sellar, who evicted 700 families between 1819 and 1821. Many landowners made mistakes. There was in the 1810s and 1820s a clearance of Highland landlords who chose the wrong options. The flood of clearances in the later 1840s had a different underlying source than the previous ones. They were primarily caused by the failure of the potato crop and a famine that was beyond the control of both landlords and the government. The Highland Clearances grabbed the headlines, both at the time and since, because they were concentrated and dramatic. A less well-known but probably more substantial exodus from the land took place in Lowland Scotland in the later 18th century, with the reorganization of much agricultural land into larger, single-tenant farms and the displacement of large numbers of peasants who worked small holdings. It was a much quieter revolution, which has not attracted enough attention.

O.

Industrialization and Urbanization

In 1750, Scotland was still overwhelmingly a rural society. By 1800, nearly one Scot in five lived in towns of more than 10,000. By 1850, it was one in three, and by 1900, one in two. Scotland experienced the fastest rate of urbanization anywhere in 19th-century Europe. The pressures that accompanied such a rapid rate of change were enormous. The Scottish experience centred on big city life. Glasgow’s population had been 43,000 in 1780. By 1820 it was 147,000 and by 1900 it was 762,000. Until the 1840s, much of the population increase had come from immigrants, with Irish Catholics and Highlanders leading the way. Most of them were unskilled workers who lived in an inner-city ghetto and were vulnerable to typhus and cholera, especially in the damp conditions of the cotton factory. The second half of the 19th century saw a new kind of industrial complex and the emergence of a very different workforce.

The first stage of Scotland’s industrial revolution, between the 1770s and the 1830s, was largely dominated by textiles. Its symbols were the cotton factory and the weaving shed. A different kind of industrialization emerged with the rise of the iron industry in the 1830s. This was closely followed by the development of heavy industries—shipbuilding, marine engineering, and steel manufacture. By 1880, Clydeside produced over a third of all British ships. As a direct result, Glasgow became a skilled worker’s city. Irish immigration continued but from the 1870s onwards it was now largely of Protestant, skilled labourers, often recruited from Belfast shipyards and engineering works. They lived in newly built industrial colonies, such as at Govan and Partick, close to the shipyards. The new cities produced a distinctive new culture, especially after the spread of the half-day Saturday to the skilled working classes in the 1870s and the unskilled in the 1890s. Glasgow Rangers Football Club was founded in 1873 and Glasgow Celtic in 1888. Football became a new focus for the loyalties of the working man: it gave a sense of place to towns like Dundee and Aberdeen; it could provide a home for sectarianism; and it was both Scottish and British.

P.

Scotland in the 20th Century

It was only in the very late 19th century that the contradictions of a nation living within a larger nation-state began to demand a remedy. Home Rule, the demand that the Scots needed a parliament of their own, first surfaced in the 1880s. There were more than 30 unsuccessful Home Rule bills before the eventual successful act passed by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998. Yet Scottish nationalism, unlike its sister movements in Ireland and Wales, was late to emerge and remained at the fringe of mainstream politics until the 1960s. The creation of an Irish Free State in 1922 seemed to have removed the urgency of finding a solution to the Scottish problem and signalled the death of the remedy called “Home Rule all round”—giving federal parliaments to Ireland, Scotland, and the dominions within the Empire.

There is a conundrum to explain here. There can be no doubt that Scottish identity was sharpening or that the political cultures of Scotland and England remained distinct. Scotland had its own press and banks as well as its own church, education, and legal system. The advent of explicitly British institutions such as the BBC (ironically the creation of John Reith, a Scot) may have helped preserve in a new form the 19th-century instinct of being both Scots and British. So, too, did the experience of two world wars. About 110,000 Scots fell in the war of 1914-1918, far more than the 12 per cent or so of the 573,000 death toll for the British Isles that might have been expected. In retrospect, it seems to have been a defining moment. The sacrifice was marked by the building of a National War Memorial within Edinburgh Castle. The war to end all wars brought massive unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s in Scotland’s traditional heavy industries and new words, such as “slump”, were coined to describe the new phenomenon of structural unemployment.

Another word invented, this time by a civil servant working in the Scottish Office in the mid-1930s, was “devolution”. In 1936 government administration was centralized in a new home, St Andrew’s House on Edinburgh’s Carlton Hill, built in Scottish baronial style and with Scottish lions at its entrance. Although the move did not increase the number of civil servants involved in governing Scotland or offer any new powers to anyone other than the Secretary of State for Scotland, these changes were typical of the concessions offered to Scotland by both Conservative and Labour governments between the 1920s and the 1970s. For the optimists among historians, the process is sometimes described as informal Home Rule, as Scotland was mostly governed, in one way or another, by Scots. The most successful practitioner of this strategy was the Labour politician, Tom Johnston, who ran Scotland during the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill. Scotland, he claimed, had “its wishes and opinions” more respected during his period in power than at any time since 1707.

This balancing act became more difficult to perform as Scotland began to diverge from England in its political loyalties. In 1955 the Conservative Party claimed more than half of Scotland’s 72 seats in parliament and polled almost 50 per cent of the vote; in 1974 it had only 16 seats. It was by then losing votes more to the Scottish National Party (SNP) than to Labour. A new politics was dawning.

One of the most important of several new factors operating in Scotland in the 1970s was oil. Scotland’s industrial success in the 19th century had been based on cheap, plentiful supplies of raw materials, especially coal and blackband ironstone. The opening of the first major oilfield in the North Sea, in 1970, seemed to offer the return to a prosperity lost in the slump between the wars. Although the SNP was initially slow to realize its electoral possibilities, by 1972, amid a worldwide rise in oil prices, it launched its emotive campaign with the slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil”.

At the 1974 election, the SNP claimed 11 seats. By 1977 opinion polls claimed that it had 36 per cent of the vote. With a wafer-thin majority, dependent on its Scottish seats, the Labour government was increasingly vulnerable to both nationalist and devolutionist pressures. The answer eventually produced by the Labour administration, now led by James Callaghan, was a devolution bill, which offered a Scottish parliament with limited powers. A referendum in 1979 produced a narrow majority of Scots in favour of the proposal—51 per cent to 49—but the measure was lost amid Labour Party internal divisions and the fall of Callaghan’s government. The headlines in the newspapers on the day after the referendum—“A Nation Divided”—were probably correct.

The long reign of Margaret Thatcher, elected prime minister in 1979, sharpened the divisions between a largely Conservative England and an anti-Conservative Scotland. A no-surrender stance on the issue of devolution resulted in a sharp drop in the Conservative vote in Scotland. The 1992 general election, which had widely been forecast to produce a “Tory-free zone” in Scotland, saw a minor recovery for the Conservatives under John Major, a series of cosmetic adjustments to the workings of the Scottish Office, and the unlikely concession to Scottish opinion of the return of the Stone of Destiny after its 700 years’ residence in Westminster Abbey.

Meantime, an alternative constitution, based on A Claim of Right for Scotland (1988), was being worked out by the Scottish Constitutional Convention, a cross-party body that aimed to devise detailed proposals for a Scottish assembly. It was boycotted by both the Conservatives and the SNP, the latter being fearful of exposing a gap within itself between devolutionists and fundamentalists. The 1990s brought political frustration but also, closely allied to it, the flowering of Scottish culture and the arts to such an extent that the period has been dubbed a second Scottish Enlightenment.

The reality of a devolved Scottish Parliament came closer after the general election in May 1997, which resulted in an overwhelming victory for the Labour Party. The Conservatives’ humiliation was even greater north of the border, where they failed to gain a single seat. The Queen's Speech during the State Opening of Parliament that followed pledged legislation to enable a referendum on the establishment of a Scottish Parliament.

P.1.

New Parliament—New Politics?

In a referendum on September 12, 1997, Scottish voters backed the proposal for a Scottish Parliament by nearly three to one—a significant change in opinion since the referendum of 1979. Perhaps more surprising to commentators was the support for the second question on the ballot paper: Scots voted by almost two to one to allow the new parliament to have the power to vary taxes by up to 3 per cent. What John Smith, leader of the Labour Party until his untimely death in 1994, had called the “settled will” of the Scottish people had been decisively expressed. It showed that, in a sense, the bulk of the Scottish people were nationalists by inclination, but that nationalism might embrace a federal, unionist solution as well as outright independence.

On May 6, 1999, elections for the Scottish Parliament were held. Of the 129 seats, Labour won 56, the SNP 35, Conservatives 18, Liberal Democrats 17, Greens 1, and others 2. The parliament, based in Edinburgh, was formally opened by Elizabeth II on July 2, 1999. The Scottish issue of Home Rule has been settled, and it is thought that any prospect of an independent Scotland has probably been postponed for at least a generation.

In September 2000 the SNP leader Alex Salmond stepped down as party leader after ten years. He was replaced in elections to succeed him by his deputy, John Swinney. The following month saw the death of Scotland First Minister Donald Dewar. One of the leading architects of Scottish devolution, Dewar died not long after major heart surgery. The election to succeed him was won by Labour Party MSP Henry McLeish.

The trial of two Libyans, suspected of having planted the terrorist bomb that blew up Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 that killed 270 people, started in May 2000. This largest murder prosecution in British legal history was held under the rules of the Scottish legal system at a former US airbase, Camp Zeist, near Utrecht in the Netherlands, which for the duration of the trial was named Scottish territory. In January 2001 one of the suspects, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was found guilty of putting the bomb in a suitcase that travelled from Malta to Frankfurt, Germany, and was then transferred to Heathrow Airport in London and finally on to the Pan-Am flight 103. His co-defendant, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was found not guilty.

McLeish resigned as First Minister in November 2001 over breaches of rules concerning his office expenses. He was replaced by the former Scottish education minister Jack McConnell, a Labour Party member. McConnell was re-elected as First Minister following the elections of May 2003. A coalition agreement was signed between Labour and the Liberal Democrats to push forward legislation on a number of agreed issues in the new parliament. The 2007 election was won by the SNP, which secured a narrow victory over Labour by 47 seats to 46.