Free A People's History of Scotland by Chris Bambery Page B

population to grow by 50 percent between 1770 and 1820.
    Between 1740 and 1790 there was a spectacular growth in the cattle trade with England, driven, in part, by the demand fromBritain’s armies and navy, with prices increasing by 300 percent in those years. Wool exports also increased and prices rose too. To meet demand, sheep farming spread across the Southern Uplands and from there north into the Highlands. Farming rather than rents became the best source of revenue, and landowners competed as to who was the best ‘improver’, introducing the latest techniques. 2 One French observer noted in 1800: ‘If Scotland were not prospering, Glasgow would not be growing as fast as it is, the size of Edinburgh would not have doubled in thirty years, and they would not now be building a New Town whose construction is employing close on ten thousand immigrant workers.’ 3 Walter Scott, a conservative, was disturbed by all this:
The state of society now leads so much to great accumulations of humanity that we cannot wonder if it ferment and reek like a compost dunghill. Nature intended that population should be diffused over the soil in proportion to its extent. We have accumulated in huge cities and smothering manufacturies the numbers which should be spread over the face of a country and what wonder that they should be corrupted? We have turned healthful and pleasant brooks into morasses and pestiferous lakes. 4
    This rapid transformation of Scottish society was driven by the creation of an all-British economy, a growing empire and the demands of constant war. Capitalist farming reduced the numbers living off the land, first in the Lowlands and later in the Highlands. Some emigrated, and many found employment in the growing industries of the central belt. In the subsequent centuries we have seen how such rapid industrialisation and creation of a working class creates an explosive mix.
    Scotland After the Union
    In the immediate aftermath of the Union of 1707 few Scots identified themselves as British. Yet within a century that was to change. The Scottish upper classes had to rely on the British state to defeatthe Jacobite threat (always backed up with the threat of foreign invasion). The destruction of feudalism in the wake of Culloden in 1746 opened the way to the development of full-scale capitalism dependent on the British market. In addition, the creation of the Empire was a common enterprise in which eager Scots played no small part. By 1772 one in nine of the East India Company’s civil servants was a Scot, as well as one in eleven of its common soldiers and one in three officers. By 1803 the most important six agencies that controlled Calcutta’s trade were controlled by Scots, and in Bombay, they ran three out of five. 5
    Because the Union was not the simple incorporation of Scotland into the English state, but the eventual construction of a new British state, Scots could share their sense of nationhood within that common British identity. The historian Linda Colley points out that the Empire was always the British Empire, never the English one. 6 This, together with eight decades of war against the French, created a British nationalism that Scots shared, in large part because Scots, Highlanders and Lowlanders made up a significant percentage of the British army.
    Industrialisation meant that Scotland (Central Scotland at least) was not on the periphery of the British economy, and Scots were at the fore of the British ruling class. 7 The emerging Scottish capitalist class were not even junior partners, they were a major component of the British ruling class, and their nationality was no obstacle to their becoming prime minister, running the colonies or simply amassing a fortune.
    Yet the romanticism of the great novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott created a Scottish national identity that for the ruling and middle classes could sit easily with their role within this imperium. As a unionist and a