Groundwater Connecting Scotland's History

A Scottish History Timeline Linked into 2,000 Years of World History
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80425-250-5
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten

What was happening elsewhere in the world when Robert the Bruce was outlawed and Mary Queen of Scots lost her head? When Genghis Khan was on the warpath and Ivan the Terrible was the Russian czar, what was happening in Scotland? Find the answers to these questions in 2,000 years of Scottish history presented alongside what was happening in the rest of the world. By placing events in Scotland in relation to those elsewhere, we can see what is different or distinctive about Scotland's experience. Simultaneously we can also see where movements in Scottish history were part of wider cultural or political change in Europe and beyond. John Knox's fiery sermons of the 1560s were connected into a wider Protestant Reformation, but they also represented a singularly Scottish version of a European phenomenon. Connecting Scotland's History also gives us a history of 'many Scotlands'. We see the hybrid nature of a country where multiple peoples have come together in a distinctively Scottish mixture. From the Gaels, Picts and Norse people to more recent influxes from England, Ireland, continental Europe and beyond, Scotland's history tells us of internal connections as well as connections between Scotland and the wider world.

DR ANNA GROUNDWATER is currently the Principal Curator for Renaissance and Early Modern History at the National Museum of Scotland. She previously lectured in early modern Scottish and British History at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of several publications on Scottish history including History Scotland, and acts as a consultant to TV history programmes including the BBC's Scotland's Clans. She is currently a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and on the editorial boards of the Antiquaries of Scotland, and of the Scottish Archives, the journal of the Scottish Records Association. She is a reviewer for multiple publications including the English Historical Review, the Innes Review, and the Journal of British Studies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Groundwater, Anna

Leseproben

Introduction

Connecting Scotland’s History provides a comparative timeline for Scottish history alongside significant dates in the histories of the rest of the British Isles and the rest of the world. It helps you map the history of Scotland onto the history you already know. In this introduction – find out

• how to use this timeline
• why it was written
• the stories, contexts and symbioses it reveals
• why it’s called Connecting Scotland’s History

Why Connecting Scotland’s History?

Scotland has never existed in isolation. It has always been connected into wider geographical spaces and historical movements, through migration, religion, trade and familial connections, and political and diplomatic agreements. To understand Scotland’s history we need to see it in those wider contexts, as much as understanding the internal connections between different Scottish regions and peoples.

From the pan-Gaeldom of Dál Riata in the linking of the Scottish west and Ireland, and the early Britonnic connections with northern England, to the Scandinavian-facing northern lands and islands; then looking out from the eastern seaboard, across the Channel to the ‘auld alliance’ with France, and the North Sea to emigration and trade-links with the Baltic states; and from the 1560s, a new Protestant-driven alliance with the ‘auld enemy’, England, that severed the ties with Catholic Rome. This enabled a very Scottish king, James VI, to take his seat on the very English ex-Elizabethan throne in the first Anglo-Scottish union, the Union of the Crowns; a refocusing of Scottish horizons within the British Isles.

Moving into the modern era, for good or bad, the imperial and economic hopes that underpinned the Union of 1707 were realised both in internal trade and expanding western horizons, a pan-Atlantic web of connections that expanded south and east in the holds of Scottish ships reaching India, and beyond. Millions of Scottish men and women found new homes in the Americas, Africa, south-east Asia and Australasia, often maintaining their links with home, and each other abroad. Scotsmen staffed the empire, and built huge international companies whose trade spanned the world. The fruits of the labour of this Scottish diaspora came back to Scotland, and we should acknowledge the difficult origins of a significant amount of this wealth. Then as empire changed to Commonwealth, Scotland refocused its sights again on Europe, as a member of the European Union, and on our Scandinavian and Baltic commerce. Conversely, Scotland experienced waves of immigration, from Ireland, Europe and elsewhere, establishing further connections with rest of the world.

And throughout all these changes, Scotland, the country itself, was emerging, with its own history, its national stories, its own laws and customs. For at the same time as looking outwards, across the lands and seas to our neighbours, we also look inwards to the hybrid experiences of the peoples of the highlands, lowlands and islands. A centralising state drew these peoples increasingly together. But what was perhaps once a government-led process became driven by our own curiosity, and interdependence, a social fluidity oiled by the expanding network of train tracks, tarred roads and the internet connecting people hundreds of miles apart.

This book is a timeline of Scottish history, set alongside that of the British Isles and the rest of the world.

• By reading down the page, we trace the development of the internal connections that created the independent kingdom that is now Scotland.
• By reading across the page, from Scotland to Britain and beyond, our external connections emerge.

So this book is about connections, internally as Scotland grew from the disparate peoples of Dál Riata, Pictland, and the Norselands, to Alba, from the lands of the Scots, to Scotland itself; and externally, within Europe, and globally. I am a product of those internal and colonial connections, a Scottish father with Orcadian ancestry, and an Australian mother, with English and Irish forebears. I write this as my train crosses the Tweed at Berwick on a dreich morning as the Anglo-Scottish border disappears into the mist. The blurred line between Scotland and England sharpens then disintegrates as the cloud moves on.

How to use the timeline

Each page has three columns that take the dates forward from 0 to 2025 CE, each line and date spaced so that events of similar years are placed alongside each other:

• the left hand column contains the dates for Scotland
• the middle column for elsewhere in the British Isles
• the right hand column for the rest of the world
• reading down the page takes you forward in time
• reading across the page takes you to events happening around the same time
• entries are necessarily brief – they are intended to trigger your curiosity and to encourage you to look elsewhere for the details.

In this way, you can see the historical and geographical contexts within which particular events happen, both in terms of what came before, and what after; and in other places at the same time. From this, you can tell whether what’s happening in Scotland, or elsewhere at any one time is an isolated event, particular to that country in that era – or part of something wider, such as religious reformation, or political rebellion, or international conflict, or scientific and industrial development.

Interspersed are

• passages taken from seminal Scottish documents, histories, acts of parliament, literature and travel writings that relate to the dates surrounding them
• word clouds constructed from their texts
• poems illustrative of the rich language of the Scots
• and the Pictish king list, an early medieval version of a timeline.

At the end are

• a list of suggested further reading, necessarily selective, but accessible
• web-based resources for primary sources from Scottish history
• the sources from which the quotations were taken

I wouldn’t sit down and read this book from end to end. Dip in and dip out. It might be better to come to it in the spirit of enquiry, or exploration. To do this just turn to the dates you know, and look leftwards across the page to the left hand column for Scotland (or vice versa).

Why a Scottish history timeline, in its global contexts?

Scottish History in its current form is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although Scotsmen wrote prolific histories of their kingdom in medieval times, and in the 16th and 17th centuries, much of that was swamped by the emergence of an Anglocentric ‘British’ history as the dominant narrative for the last 300 years. But from the 1960s, a new school of Scottish history emerged to challenge that dominance. Fueled by extensive archival work amongst the manuscripts of family, kirk and state, a new breed of Scottish historians has charted the gradual coalescence of the kingdom of the Scots, now Scotland. They have found a history that is as different from English history as it is similar. Not richer or poorer, just different.

These new histories illustrate the distinctive nature of that Scottish history – not solely as in independent from England as it was until early modern times, but independent as in its own history – a history that helps us to understand how Scotland came together, territorially and in terms of identity (or identities), the hybridity at our core, and the kings, and parliaments, religion and laws that have helped to shape it. A history too that places Scotland within the British Isles, yes, but also within Europe, and beyond.

Scottish History, as a subject distinct from History, began to feature on university course lists, and, finally, astonishingly recently, on the core curriculum at school. Today, if you are at school in Scotland, you now can’t get a qualification in History without exploring that of the country in which you live – and that’s as it should always have been.

At Scottish universities, including the University of Edinburgh where I taught over 15 years, Scottish History courses were eagerly taken up by Scottish students starved of their own history. Increasingly the courses’ popularity enticed foreign visiting students, particularly Americans and Canadians. Where they are sometimes drawn in by the romanticism accorded to the Wars of Independence, Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie, they can seem surprised to find a rich history that often has nothing to do with England or Britain – a somewhat hidden history, with a wealth of stories.

The novelty of this however brings its own problems. Such has been the dominance of the British (at best, or English at worst) historical narrative, that students, tourists and interested Scottish men and women alike, have found it difficult to map this emerging history of Scotland onto their own national histories, or the history they have been taught. How do the travels of St Columba, the battles of the Pictish and Gaelic kings, the emergence of the Canmore and Stewart royal dynasties, the religious upheavals, the experience of the Scottish colonial diasporas, and Anglo-Scottish relations fit into the history they already know? This book is intended to help answer those questions.

It will not satisfy everyone. Necessarily it is selective in the histories and events I have chosen to include. I am as much influenced my own background and education, although I hope that decades...