In the latest episode of the Explaining History Podcast, cultural historian Murray Pittock takes us on a whirlwind tour of two millennia of Scottish history – and explains why understanding the past is essential to understanding the present

When Murray Pittock agreed to write The Shortest History of Scotland for a bestselling series, he had two practical reasons. First, many one‑volume histories of Scotland were either long, heavy, out of date, or written by non‑historians. Second, The Shortest History of England had sold a third of a million copies. There was a market.

But his ambitions for the book went deeper. He wanted to give readers a full insight into Scottish history that went beyond kings and battles – to capture people’s lived lives, culture, and the built environment. And he wanted to help people make sense of Scotland today: how we got to the modern era of devolution, nationalism, and the near‑miss of independence in 2014.

The Land of the Mountain and the Flood

Walter Scott’s famous phrase is not just poetry; it is a key to understanding Scottish history. Scotland’s geography – the Highlands, the glens, the islands, the rugged coastline – made it virtually impenetrable until modern roads and railways. As late as 1740, Lord Lovat took six weeks to travel from Inverness to London by coach. Bringing an army into Scotland and keeping it supplied was possible only by going up the east coast.

In the Middle Ages, the seas were the highways. Scotland’s east‑coast ports looked as much to the Baltic and the Low Countries as to England. That orientation – towards continental Europe, not just the southern neighbour – shaped Scottish politics, trade and culture for centuries. The union with England, when it came in 1707, was not an inevitable destiny.

The Birth of Modern Nationalism

Modern Scottish nationalism, Murray argues, begins with Winnie Ewing’s shock by‑election victory for the SNP in Hamilton in 1967. Her acceptance speech included the slogan “Stop the world – Scotland wants to get on”. That phrase captured a growing sense of marginalisation. The British Empire was dissolving; the old, inclusive Britishness that had allowed Scots to be both Scottish and British was shrinking.

The 1951 Festival of Britain marked the shift. Unlike the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow – which attracted 12.6 million visitors and proudly presented Scotland as a nation within the empire – the 1951 festival was overwhelmingly London‑centric. Its theme and closing song was “Jerusalem”. The Welsh section was entirely anglophone. Suddenly, Britishness looked like special pleading for England.

The memory of the Second World War has played a complex role. The “we stood alone in 1940” narrative has become an English, south‑east England story – the Battle of Britain, the Blitz in London. Scottish and Welsh cities were bombed too, but that is not front and centre. As the generation that fought the war has died away, the emotional glue of the union has weakened.

Why Nationalism Rose

Murray identifies three drivers of modern Scottish nationalism:

• Economic anxiety: a sense that Scotland’s resources – particularly North Sea oil – have been exploited for Westminster’s benefit.
• Democratic control: Scotland has long maintained separate institutions (law, education, church) that gave it functional self‑government. Devolution was supposed to satisfy that, but Labour never truly became a nationalist party.
• Internationalism: Scots have consistently looked to Europe as an alternative to London. The 2016 Brexit vote – where Scotland voted Remain while England voted Leave – was a powerful expression of that orientation.

The 2014 Referendum

The independence referendum was much closer than many people realise: 55% No, 45% Yes. But 52% of those born in Scotland voted Yes. The margin was small. Murray believes the deciding factors were anxiety about pensions and currency.

The SNP’s inability to settle on a clear currency policy – retain the pound? adopt the euro? create a new Scottish currency? – became a vulnerability. Yet the forces that drove the Yes vote have not disappeared. Devolution, which Labour’s Lord Robertson predicted would “kill nationalism stone dead”, has had the opposite effect. Because Scottish Labour remained a branch office of a British party, it failed to capture the patriotic middle ground.

The Union of 1707: A Forced Marriage

We ended by returning to the union’s origins. Murray is clear: the vote was forced. Scotland’s economy was struggling – hampered by religious conflicts, adverse climate, and England’s refusal to allow Scots access to overseas markets. The Darien scheme, a Scottish colony in Panama, collapsed in disaster, deliberately undermined by English policy.

There was little popular support for the union. Many boroughs and organisations petitioned against it. But the alternative – an armed rising in favour of the Stuarts – was scared off by the Royal Navy in 1708. Enough of the Scottish estates were persuaded, by a mixture of bribery, fear, and lack of alternatives, to vote it through.

The mercantile class would later benefit hugely from the British Empire, shifting Scotland’s economic centre of gravity from the European‑facing east coast to the Atlantic‑facing west. Glasgow became the great beneficiary of the American trade.

Where We Are Now

Today, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have nationalist parties in power. The union is not dead, but it is no longer unquestioned. Understanding how we got here – the long history of geography, economics, empire and memory – is essential to understanding where we might go.

Murray Pittock’s The Shortest History of Scotland is the perfect place to start that journey.

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Transcript

Welcome again to the Explaining History podcast and I’m very honoured today to be joined by cultural historian Murray Pittock. We’re here to talk about Scotland – we talk about Scotland comparatively kind of not very often on the podcast – and Murray’s new book The Shortest History of Scotland, which is part of a Shortest History series, manages to compress a couple of millennia of history into a neat 200‑page summary.

So let’s begin a little bit. Firstly, thanks for joining us, Murray. It’s nice to have you today. And firstly let’s just talk about the book and where it originated from and the background.

Well, I agreed to do this as part of the Shortest History series for a number of reasons. Two of them were that a lot of the one‑volume histories of Scotland are either rather long and heavy, or rather out of date, or written by non‑historians, or some combination of all three. So there was an opportunity in the market from the point of view of a book which will familiarise people with a history with which they might otherwise be unfamiliar. And I won’t deny that the other reason was that The Shortest History of England had sold a third of a million copies at the time that I signed the contract for this. So there were, as I say, a number of reasons.

The aim of the book was fundamentally to give people a full insight into Scottish history, to make sure that history wasn’t limited to kings and battles and pure narrative that gave a sense of people’s lived lives, culture, and built environment through the ages, and to shape it in a way which enabled people to make sense of Scotland in the post‑war and the contemporary era, and how we got to where we are. And also to give them some small parts of the book which show depths that they might want to read into further, for example round about the Declaration of Arbroath. So if people do get the bug for reading more Scottish history, there’s some signposts within the book itself as to areas they might want to explore further.

And for a relatively concise book, were there key themes that you focused on – key issues and processes?

Well, I wanted to focus primarily on how Scotland came to become a state in historical time. And in that sense I used – and it’s a quote from Walter Scott – “the land of the mountain and the flood” as the guiding metaphor, because I think it’s very easy in the way we live now to underestimate the extent to which the geographical terrain of Scotland made it virtually impenetrable until modern road and rail transport, even as late as 1740. Lord Lovat took six weeks to get from Inverness to London by coach – and that was a member of the elite. Bringing an army into Scotland was an extremely difficult task, and basically the only way you could do it and keep them supplied was to go up the East Coast.

I always remember – I did my undergraduate degree in Aberdeen many, many years ago – and the professor at the time argued that in the Middle Ages, the seas were the highways, the seas and rivers, and the land was extremely difficult to navigate. What we see as now being a difficult mode of transport actually was how you got around, and so Scotland’s coasts were alive with nautical travel.

That’s absolutely right. Aberdeen is about the same distance from the Elbe as it is from the Thames, but the Elbe was in most respects easier to get to in 1500.

Before we began recording today, we were just discussing the very interesting context that Wales, where I live, and Scotland, where Murray is speaking from today, find themselves in – and of course Northern Ireland as well. The three Celtic parts of the United Kingdom all now have nationalist majorities, political majorities. The story of Scottish nationalism really begins, am I right in thinking, in the late 60s, early 70s?

The story of modern Scottish nationalism, yes. I would say there’s quite a lot of Scottish nationalism evident in the 50 years after the union associated with the Jacobites, but modern Scottish nationalism starts from Winnie Ewing’s victory in the 1967 Hamilton by‑election. The interesting thing was that one of her slogans – and it was used in her acceptance speech – was “Stop the world – Scotland wants to get on”. So the perceived marginalisation of Scotland in the post‑imperial era was one of the key drivers of modern Scottish nationalism. Instead of being Scottish and British, Canadian and British, New Zealand and British, Australian and British, you suddenly almost overnight became British – and British identity was something which looked like special pleading, whereas previously it had been quite normative.

There’s a great book written in about 2014 by David Reynolds, The Long Shadow, about the historical memory of the First World War. In one of the later chapters he argues that the two world wars and the Cold War afterwards gave the union an unnatural longevity, because you had people from all parts of the union who fought under a British flag and swore an oath of loyalty to King George. As that generation begins to die away – from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s onwards – you get less of that emotional commitment to the union. Is there something in that do you think?

Certainly the two world wars were of solidarity, but I think there is more. That solidarity held back for quite a lot of processes, actually. Society in the late 30s was as liberal and dynamic as society was not to be again till the verge of the 60s, so it held back a lot of social changes in the UK as a whole, as well as any political ones. But I think it’s a deeper thing here. If you look at say the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow – the last empire exhibition – 12.6 million visitors, the nation presented as a Scottish national event, a national pavilion for Scotland, a whole range of material clearly identifying Scotland as one of the nations of the British Empire. Compare that with the Festival of Britain in 1951, where the theme and the closing song was “Jerusalem”, although there were a few regional events, almost everything took place in London, and the Welsh section was entirely anglophone. All of this – and where Britain was, suddenly there was no empire. You got for the first time – there was still a British empire, the festival presented itself as the first festival where the empire had come home, so there was some acknowledgement of the Windrush generation and the multiculturalism of Britain in 1951 – but there wasn’t any real acknowledgement compared to 1938 of the internationalism of Britain.

And the other thing is that the memory of the Second World War – “we won the war, we stood alone in 1940” – all that kind of memory was very much about an introspective national memory rather than an international one. That has had quite a significant impact. It means no wonder people want to remember the Battle of Britain more than the fall of Singapore, but from the point of view of rubbing out the British Empire as the competent actor in World War I and II – and not Great Britain alone – a whole load of serious mistakes are made. The number of British troops even in the Eighth Army was a minority in North Africa. And we get to a situation where the Commonwealth War Graves Commission about five years ago expressed strong concern that the sacrifice of the Indian war dead in World War I and II was insufficiently recognised, because there’s this habit of making everything as if it’s all about the island.

And I think in the imaginarium of 1940, the way in which the crisis year of 1940 is remembered is primarily as an English crisis. The Battle of Britain is the Battle of the South Downs. The Blitz – Scottish cities were bombed, Welsh cities were bombed, but for the most part that’s not completely edited from the narrative, but it’s not front and centre.

No, it’s a London home county story, you’re absolutely right.

In Wales, there are two forms of Welsh nationalism: a cultural nationalism around language, and an economic nationalism – a sense that we get a rubbish deal and that Welsh resources are used and abused by England. Are those the two drivers of Scottish nationalism, do you think, or are there other aspects?

It’s a slightly different pattern. I would say it’s a mixture of economic and democratic control, which reflects the fact that Scotland was functionally self‑governing throughout its institutions for a large part of the union era – having all the institutions of the state remaining even after the union, and professional organisations which had a role analogous to parliamentary ones, for example the Faculty of Advocates. And also there’s an international dimension: Scotland has always responded to an outlet. I think you could see that in the Brexit vote in 2016, the hugely different pattern of the vote in Scotland was a clear sign of the way in which Scots define themselves with an external organisation which is not primarily or necessarily or solely the United Kingdom.

And I think you have in the British Isles this emergent Celtic nationalism. To some extent, particularly following the first Scottish independence referendum, for many people in England that was the first time it really registered that there was a significant number of people in Scotland that did not want to be part of the union any longer. And I don’t know what effect that had on the Brexit referendum, but I think a very chauvinistic English nationalism and a Celtic nationalism interplay with one another. And David Cameron tried to introduce this idea of only English MPs can vote on English laws, which is a bit nonsense. It’s hard to predict how these nationalisms interplay, but certainly I think the current iteration of English nationalism is fuelling other Celtic nationalisms.

I’m not sure about the reverse being the case. What tends to happen – for example in Ireland in 1922 – is that suddenly it suits both parties: Ireland dropped out of British history like a stone, it was never there, and Britain dropped out of Irish history in much the same way. It’s come back a bit now, but for a long time there were these holes. So the power to forget what are sometimes called the Celtic fringes is very deeply embedded in the centre.

To what extent does the current generation of Scottish nationalist politicians owe their success to the effects of Margaret Thatcher on Scotland?

I think that’s exaggerated myself. Margaret Thatcher’s ascendancy did not coincide with the recrudescence of Scottish nationalism. It was a slight recrudescence linked to the poll tax, but it wasn’t a period of strong nationalism. What it was was a period of strong Labour nationalism with a small n, where the Labour Party in Scotland appeared to be a national patriotic party. Probably a significant part of the SNP success after 1997 is down to the fact that, unlike in Catalonia or Quebec, the Labour Party never instantly became – despite the efforts of people like Henry McLeish in the early years – a “branch office”, as it’s been repeatedly called, of a British party. Jordi Pujol in Catalonia probably delayed a Catalan independence referendum by a generation because he presented as a patriot Catalan politician not seeking independence. Scottish Labour leaders have found it extremely difficult to present in that way, and since 2007 they seem to have given up the effort altogether.

Was the intent of devolution to try to stave off nationalist tensions? States rarely decentralise for benign reasons.

I’m not sure that there was a grand strategy. I think what happened was that Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown guilted Tony Blair into honouring John Smith’s legacy, and so Blair agreed to legislation introduced by Dewar, which he didn’t really care about, frankly, and wasn’t very enthusiastic about and didn’t like the outcome very much but didn’t exactly oppose it. Then the devolution bill got watered down in the Commons anyway as to what was to be devolved. I don’t think the UK or either major party ever actually understood the constitutional changes created by it. It’s still the case that you can have the BBC having headlines saying “junior doctors strike” and they themselves are oblivious to the fact that a settlement’s been reached in Scotland. That basic element of public sector broadcasting is repeatedly breached by the BBC because they don’t offer geographical coverage which reflects devolution, even though they’ve got guidelines about it.

Lord Robertson, of course, said devolution would kill nationalism stone dead. But Labour failed to take the basic step of becoming a nationalist party themselves in order to try and achieve that goal, which was absolutely necessary for them to do.

In Wales, there’s a similar conversation – whether the Welsh Labour Party, which has been decimated, might cut its ties with UK Labour. It comes around every so often. But they’re never quite bold enough to give it a go.

No indeed. It was also within the purview of the UK Labour Party to take that leap itself. And what also became apparent quite early on was that MPs from Scotland looked down on MSPs. There wasn’t a commitment. A number of senior Labour figures went to the Scottish Parliament – Donald Dewar – but that quality was not maintained. MPs who could go to Westminster preferred that and were preferred by the Labour Party, which weakened the representation they had. It still does.

When there was a referendum in 2014, the Leave vote lost not by an enormous margin. What drew a majority of voters to the union?

The evidence is that it was anxiety primarily about pensions and currency, which was critical in making the difference between a small majority and a small loss. That said, 52% of those born in Scotland voted Yes. So in a number of ways it was very tight. And you got the same situation as in the Brexit vote, where people who were younger tended to be much more strongly in favour of Yes and people who were older tended not to be.

The SNP never quite made the case for what they would do with the currency – at some points they were talking about separating from the pound, at other points they backtracked.

Yes. Retain the pound in the short term was the position. But part of that weakness – and it’s still a weakness for the SNP – is that some significant number of senior figures think that the solution is to have the euro circulate within Scotland. But polling evidence suggests people don’t want the euro – about 30%, it’s not a vote winner. An independent Scottish currency is more of a vote winner than the euro, but that brings questions about the performance of such a currency in international securities markets and the willingness of people to deal in such a currency when other currencies are available to hold assets in.

My thought always was what a vengeful rump UK government would do to Scotland if it continued to control fiscal levers over it – so it’s a really difficult knot to unravel.

Finally, I wanted to hop back to the formation of the union in 1707. In Scotland, which social groups, which classes benefited from it? You have to have a significant body of people thinking they’re onto a winner in order to accept it.

Some of the nobility got something out of the union, but I think it would be fair to say that the union vote was forced. Scotland was not performing economically well, partly due to its habit of fighting each other over matters of church government, partly due to the adverse climate of the early modern period, and partly due to England’s refusal – even though the kingdoms were joined – to allow Scots to take part in English overseas markets and to fail to support any Scottish ventures in overseas markets, as with the Darien scheme. A lot of the reasons people voted for the union were that there didn’t seem to be an alternative, short of an armed rising in favour of the Stuarts – which did come and was going to come in 1708 but was scared off by the Royal Navy.

There was very little popular support for the union. A large number of boroughs and organisations protested and petitioned against it. But there was sufficient support in the Scottish estates to get it through, partly by the advantaging of some people and partly by the fact that there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go. Scotland couldn’t functionally have an independent foreign policy and couldn’t functionally carry out overseas trade in the way it had been doing since the medieval period, let alone take advantage of the markets that were now opening up.

There were wonderful opportunities for a Scottish mercantile class to become involved with the development of the British Empire. That did come – it wasn’t absolutely apparent in 1707, though the potential was there. And it also meant a change of balance in Scotland from east to west, because the eastward‑facing ports with European trade tended to do worse over time, and the western ports – Glasgow in particular – with a focus on the American trade did better.

Fantastic. Well, Murray, it’s been really lovely to talk to you today. We’ll finish there. The book is available currently in all good bookshops?

The Shortest History of Scotland is available in all good bookshops, yes indeed. It’s going very well – it’s the fourth best‑selling title in Scotland currently. So a lot of people are lapping it up, and people can easily get it for £12 or £13.

And as we always say, if you can please buy it from a local independent book retailer, or if you can’t get it there, buy it directly from the publisher. Please don’t buy it from a gigantic – for legal reasons unnamed – online mega retailer, because they’ve got enough money already. Buy it from your local guys because they need you.

Murray, it was a real pleasure today. Thank you so much, and all the very best.

Thanks very much, Nick. If you could let myself and Fiona know when this goes live, that’d be really helpful for us.

Probably, yeah, okay, I will do.