[OT] Waiting for Beta and Visiting Edinburgh

[Peter Alcibiades]

While we are waiting for Beta...

When you go to Edinburgh, you're visiting Scotland, but you are visiting 
Lowland Scotland.  Historically Scotland has been two cultures, the culture 
of the lowland cities, commercial, financial, manufacturing and oriented to 
England.  This was the Whiggish part of Scotland, as Richmond puts it, the 
part that accepted the Whig Revolution of 1688, that fought on the side of 
the English at Culloden, that helped defeat Charles I in the civil war, and 
that conducted the Highland Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 
part that bankrupted the country in the Darien Expedition.  Then you have 
the highland culture, which was the culture of the clans and subsistence 
agriculture and the 'King over the Water'.

The 18C Jacobite rebellions (or as Richmond might put it, the wars of 
national liberation!) were basically continuations of the English Civil 
war.  The Tories were High Church or Anglo Catholic, sympathetic to Royal 
Absolutism, and mainly of the rural interest.  The Whigs were the city and 
commercial interest, parliamentary, and mainly centrist Church of England 
in religion, who later became the Liberals. The Church of England was very 
broad, and the result was that the state could exile what were felt to be 
the extremes, in one direction the protestant sects which had furnished the 
wild men of the English Revolution, and in the other, the supporters of 
James II's hopeless attempt to roll back the Reformation in England.

The Jacobites (and the Tories in the 18C) could never really make up their 
minds if they wanted to have an absolute Catholic monarchy for the whole of 
the UK, or independence for at least most of Scotland, whether absolutist 
or not.  The historical memory of all this has also inextricably confused 
regional highland nationalism and class issues.  It was the regional 
aristocracy, often absentees in London, that conducted the clearances, and 
this is something that the regional nationalist memory has trouble with 
because its orientation is region rather than class.

If you've a long flight to get there, you could do worse than to read 
Prebble's book on the Highland Clearances.  The Highland Clearances from 
1800-1850 were the final stage in the process.  After that, and after the 
Reform Bill of 1832, the UK became recognizably modern Britain, and the 
Scots became full participants in the great Victorian imperial adventure.  
The exiles from the clearances became the Scottish diaspora, and that's 
where the substantial Scottish heritage in Canada (and perhaps now, 
Bulgaria?) derives from.  Be aware though that Prebble, though vivid, is 
limited, idiosyncratic, and has a definite ideological perspective.

Boswell's account of his journey with Dr Johnson to the Highlands and 
Western Isles in the late 18th century is also very interesting reading.  
Richmond will probably have other suggestions.

But whatever you do, don't think you are visiting all Scotland when you go 
to Edinburgh, and if you go north to the Highlands, well, take history with 
you.  It is invisible unless you look under the tins of shortbread and 
plaids, but its all around you.

Peter