The curious case of inventing Scottishness
In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper claimed that Scottishness had been invented. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction.
Hugh Trevor-Roper’s original essay ‘The invention of tradition: the highland tradition of Scotland’ appeared in The Invention of Tradition (1983) edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. The other essays in the book are also worth a read, though you need to keep your historical wits about you so that you don’t (like Trevor Roper) fall into methodological bear traps.
The best book for a more modern view on tartan and much Scottishness besides is Ian Brown ed., From Tartan to Tartanry. Scottish Culture, History and Myth (2010). The most useful chapters to compare with Trevor-Roper are Brown’s own ‘Myth, political caricature and monstering the tartan’, Hugh Cheape’s article ‘Gheibhte breacain charnaid (translated: ‘scarlet tartans would be got…’): the re-invention of tradition’ and Murray Pittock’s ‘Plaiding the invention of Scotland.’
Matthew Newsome has a website dedicated to highland dress where you’ll discover an enormous archive of material. As a kilt maker, former director of the Scottish Tartans Museum and past governor of the Scottish Tartans Authority, he knows vastly more about the subject we any of us will ever do.
Thomas Devine’s The Scottish Clearances: a history of the dispossessed 1500-1900 (2018) is the starting place for landscape change. It’s an enormous subject in itself.
The best – and most entertaining - introduction to the broader field of the chivalric revival is still Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot. Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981).
If you want to dig even deeper, see if you can get hold of Karalee Dawn’s 2014 PhD University of Maryland thesis, ‘Today we are all Scottish’ which has a bibliography. The history of genealogy seems to be an under-researched field. But you can access Hannah Little’s 2010 PhD on the subject here.
A correction - we call the English painter of The Monarch of the Glen Edward Landseer. Our mistake. Should have said Edwin.