The Scots and the Highlands in the 18th century

Résumé du document

Do you discern a major change in the attitudes of eighteenth-century Scots towards Highland culture and society ? Bagpipes, tartan, kilts : How did Scotland as a nation come to adopt these symbolic elements of its cultural identity in the first half of the XIXth century ? Before trying to answer such a tricky question one needs to examine and analyse the tremendous changes that Scotland experienced within its own people from the end of the seventeenth century onwards

Extraits

[...] Withers, The historical creation of the Scottish Highlands, in I.L Donnachie and C.A Whatley, eds, The manufacture of Scottish History, Edinburgh H.Trevor-Roper, invention of Tradition: The Highland tradition of Scotland”, in E.J Hobsbawm and T.O Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, Oxford T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, Penguin, 1999. [...]

[...] Most Scots changed the way they considered the Highlands: it was not an alien territory, remote and uncivilized any longer but Scottish past on the doorstep Whatever may be said about MacPherson's forgery or invention of the Highland tradition what we must keep in mind is that the Scottish Nation was searching for an identity in a context of “unprecedented economic and social change in the course of the XVIIIth century. References T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, Penguin T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830, Fontana T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830, Fontana T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, Penguin T.M. [...]

[...] As a result, by the end of the XVIIth century, both on the elite and on the popular levels the contacts were all but friendly between Lowlanders and Highlanders as the long tradition of anti-Highland satire (the writings of W.Dunbar and Sir R.Holland among others) shows. The Highlands, seen as “inhospitable and threatening for the Lowland mind had to adopt the social and cultural standards of the rest of the country. At the start of the XVIIIth century, the Highlanders were therefore still considered, to the people of the Lowlands, as hostile and alien savages, speaking an archaic language and living in remote areas that civilization had not reached yet. II. [...]

[...] As a result they were to be harshly punished and condemned. Hence the battery of measures taken by the British Parliament in London to transform Highland culture and society and tame its people. But what Westminster did not realise at that time is that by banning such specific items as Highland clothes and bagpipes (after the Disarming Act and the Disclothing Act of 1746), it would give birth to what T.M. Devine called a certain form of “Highlandism”, that is to say, absorption by Lowland elites of the mostly imagined and false Highland tradition” that would lead to formation of the symbolic basis of a new Scottish identity In this particular context, the fact that Jacobitism was no longer a dreadful threat, and was even starting to be “sentimentalized” from the 1750s onwards, played a significant part in the change in the Scots attitudes towards the Highlands. [...]

[...] However it would be wrong and historically erroneous to say that all Scots rediscovered the Highlands in a positive way in the course of the XVIIIth century. This new state of mind was not the only one to prevail in Lowland Scotland: as Leah Leneman points it out, “there were the improvers, there were collectors of Gaelic poetry, there were the genuinely interested and there were also plenty who still despised the Highlanders as much as their ancestors had done Nevertheless the change in attitudes, generally speaking, is quite obvious and once again the question of the identity of Scotland as a nation emerges in all its complexity: from the XVIIIth century onwards Lowlanders started to idealize Highland virtues and appropriate Highland clothes and this very change helped to create a new Scottish identity. [...]