Ulster and Scotland 1600-2000: History, Language and Identity (review)

Two tales. Archibald Hamilton, the son of Claud Hamilton of Cochno, Dumbartonshire, rose within the Irish Anglican church in the first half of the seventeenth century. Successively bishop of Killala and archbishop of Cashel, he was driven from the country by the turmoil of the 1641 rising. Initially associated with the exiled Stuart court, he soon affiliated himself with the Prince of Orange, serving as a professor of theology, before moving, finally, to Sweden. In contrast, Robert Blair, who fled Scotland into Ulster to avoid the Five Articles of Perth, planned, but failed to execute, a removal to America in 1634-5, before returning to Scotland when again faced with religious persecution, this time in Ulster.

Despite their obvious differences—both in terms of their religious affiliation and the trajectories of their travels—Hamilton and Blair exemplify the travelling spirit that makes the links between Ulster and Scotland so vital a topic of historical research. In this collection of essays, scholars from a wide range of disciplines and temporal periods congregate to confer over the significance of the emotional, familial, cultural, political and linguistic connections between Scotland and its first colony—Ulster. Divided into three substantive sections, as indicated by the subtitle, the book attempts to convey something of the historical and cultural homogeneity of this migrant community.

In some cases, the essays are illuminating and successful, notably in the section devoted to migration. The contribution of Steve Murdoch, in whose essay Hamilton appears, illustrates adeptly how the Scots looked east to the Baltic, as well as west to Ulster, when they dreamed of leaving their homeland. The cultural consequences of their migration in such far-flung parts as New England and New Zealand are equally well handled by Kerby Miller and Jock Phillips, while Patrick Fitzgerald offers a useful corrective to the scholarly emphasis upon the Ulster Plantation by highlighting the impact of the years of dearth in 1690s Scotland in buttressing that initial migration with economic refugees fleeing into the more hospitable climes of Ulster.

So too is the issue of language reasonably well handled, although Gaelic gets short shrift from many contributors, with Alan Titley's colourful essay on autobiography an honourable exception. Instead many of the authors have chosen to enter the lists in the increasingly polemical debate surrounding Scots and its derivative, Ulster-Scots. David Horsbury, for example, endeavours to tie the use of Scots to a broad national identity in the early modern period, writing of how 'such men ... were regarded as ethnic Scots and not as separate Ulster Scots.' (p. 151). This is contradicted by John Young's evaluation of the evidence of group depictions in the period, wherein he asserts 'it is clear that a variety of linguistic descriptions was in operation throughout the period; distressed Irish, Irish, Scots-Irish, Scottish nation, Irish Protestants, British Protestants.' (p. 32). However, that contributors feel comfortable to argue within the pages of the book may merely illustrate the catholicity of the volume, as well as the spirited nature of the debate.

More problematic, however, is the broken-backed nature of the story that is being told. This is clearest in the section on language, but it is apparent elsewhere also, notably in Graham Walker's reflections on the utility of the Scottish connection in asserting Ulster's British identity. As Michael Montgomery makes plain in an illuminating contribution, the Scots tongue has had an unhappy and irregular relationship with print culture. Although in the sixteenth century it was a language of state, it declined in the face of standard English, at least as a written language, and has only occasionally surfaced since, notably in the late eighteenth century when Burns took pen in hand.

That Burns provides a problematic legacy for the language is the central contention of Richard Finlay's contribution. Finlay notes how Burns was at once contaminated by his own skill as a versifier...