CITING historic parallels is not always the most reliable measure when it comes to analysing current events, but Dr Jonathan Sher makes some interesting points in placing the "spirit of the Fourth of July" in the context of the referendum debate, whilst recognising the obvious differences ("Why the spirit of the Fourth of July must prevail in September's vote", Agenda, The Herald, July 4).
The underlying dynamic in each case was that there was a weakening of shared imperial sentiment as London and its provinces drifted apart. Despite the best Better Together efforts of such Enlightenment luminaries as Sir Adam Ferguson and Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, the London government's chronic mishandling of the "unpleasantness" in His Majesty's American Colonies throughout the 1760s drove devolutionists like Benjamin Franklin into the independence camp as Westminster hardliners urged the Government to bring the feckless "squirrel hunters' of rural America and incendiary agitators like the Sons of Liberty Samuel Adams and (Islay-born) Alexander MacDougal into line.
The cataclysmic event which brought the hesitant middle classes into the fray was Lord North's closure of the port of Boston under the 1774 Coercive Acts. This was rightly viewed as an attack on the economic interests of the American colonies as a whole, and the predictable outcome was that independence became the preferred option of the majority.
George Osborne's own version of the Coercive Acts was unveiled in a whistle-stop visit to Edinburgh on February 13 this year, when he announced that the pound sterling, like the port of Boston in 1774, would be a no-go area for Scots in the event of independence. Apart from the little detail about the pound not being an exclusively English asset, this invited comparison with the currency-sharing arrangements which had been entered into with the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland, where independence had been won after an armed uprising.
For many moderate Scots this appears to have been something of a cataclysmic event. Doing business with people who bully, cajole, and issue dark threats is not an attractive option for most of us. Even if independence is rejected on September 18, the Chancellor's unwise intervention can only have harmed the relationship between Scots and the Westminster establishment. Future historians may indeed come to view this as George Osborne's "Lord North moment".
David J Black,
6 St Giles Street,
Edinburgh.
ONE has to admire Richard Mowbray's persistence in attacking independence with such a paucity of weaponry (Letters, July 3) But he is clearly wrong in his claim that Enlightenment "giants" define Scotland as British.
Though Burns, Smith and Hume were living in a United Kingdom, their work was informed by European thought, and influenced by the Scottish education system and the self-improving ethic of Presbyterianism. While Burns was well acquainted with English 18th-century poetry, his best work is rooted in the Scots literary tradition. He is no more an English or British poet than Yeats or Heaney.
Dominant cultures tend to subsume and redefine other cultures, and this is all too evident when applied to Scottish literature and history: the categorisation of the Makars Dunbar and Henryson as "Scots Chaucerians", and the teaching of pre-Union English rather than Scottish history in Scottish schools are but two examples. However, historians such as Smout and Devine, and writers such as Gray, Robertson, McGrath and Barrow have enabled many of us to view a different Scotland from that seen through the prism of Union. It is enlightening, though I don't suppose Mr Mowbray would see it that way.
Graeme Forbes,
12 Longformacus Road,
Edinburgh.
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