1 - The Ideology of Early Scottish Nationalism

Summary

Scottish nationalism understood as support for an independent Scottish state is notable by its absence from most of Scotland’s history after 1707. Although the initial organised advocacy for greater Scottish democratic autonomy within the United Kingdom emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the goal of Scottish independence only received its first sustained modern articulation after the First World War. This chapter examines the ideology of these early Scottish nationalists as they tried to construct a persuasive case for independence before the rise in support for the SNP in the 1960s. The aim of the chapter is not to offer an exhaustive account of the nationalism of this period but to set the scene for the rest of the book by clarifying the ideological resources that were already available for advocates of independence in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter looks in turn at the political economy and constitutionalist arguments that were framed by nationalists in the decades around the Second World War.