It is sad to hear that this is the last book the Saltire Society will publish.
For decades it has published valuable books on many aspects of Scottish affairs, beginning at a time when no other publisher was doing so, strange in a country which has contributed so much to the world in ideas, inventions and literature. Now there are several other active Scottish publishers, and the society evidently feels it can make a greater contribution to Scotland by concentrating on its many other activities.
Scottish history is now taught in most Scottish universities and the Scottish Government is encouraging our schools to do the same. The editor of this new volume is Edward Cowan, professor of Scottish history at Glasgow University, who has a team of three professors and two readers, all of whom contribute chapters. As Cowan writes in his introduction: "Scottish History has always mattered. Without it Scotland would not exist." It is a fascinating story.
In the first chapter, medieval historian Dauvit Brown writes: "By 1034 all the main pieces of the jigsaw which is now Scotland had been assembled" and "sometime between about 1260 and about 1290" the people began to regard themselves in a domestic context as 'Scots'".
In the next essay, Richard Oram says that, even after the Union, Scotland has been able "to develop its own distinctiveness". Julian Goodare, in Reformation, Revolution And Union, tells of our evolution from the medieval to the modern age and ends his chapter with the words: "Welcome to the modern world: ordinary Scots helped to create it."
The next chapter, by Richard Finlay, is the only one with which I find myself in serious disagreement. He has a long discussion on the Union of 1707 which seems designed to conceal the facts. The chapter by Edward Cowan is a brilliant account of the achievements of the many Scots who emigrated to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the book ends with Dr Catriona Macdonald bringing Scotland up to the modern age.
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