Modern Scotland, 1914-2000 (review)

Richard Finlay's book has one immediate advantage. It lacks a quote from Irvine Welsh on the front cover. Endorsement by Scotland's worst writer has disfigured Arthur Herman's rather plodding How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001) and disfigured in a much worse way James Buchan's excellent Capital of the Mind (2003): presumably a peril that any writer who has made it to a London publisher now stands in danger of. On the back cover, however, comes Tom Devine's 'The best single-volume history of twentieth-century Scotland I know'. Is your man, with a good conceit of himself, the right one to be doing the review? In fact, Devine is to a great extent right. While I can claim with some pride 'turning the accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass', of No Gods and Precious Few Heroes at precisely 55,000 words, Finlay has about 180,000 words to play with, and he makes good use of them.

There is also a difference of approach: No Gods was broadly concerned to map out differences in employment, economy, social life and culture between Scotland and England, and the structures of its chapters tended to start with a statistical survey to establish Scots derivations from a British norm. It assumed that there was a central phase in twentieth-century Scotland, between 1920 and 1964, where most of these factors were constants, followed by a more activist, less predictable phase which was still continuing when the first edition was published in 1981. By and large this worked, but, on re-reading, I find that it is sometimes rather deterrent in its factuality, and laconic about what it was like to experience such situations.

Richard Finlay's approach is quite different: basically chronological, but with inserts in each chapter which cover institutions which underwent particular change in the period covered. Hence there is a concentration on education when covering the 1920s—the aftermath of the 1918 Education Act—on poor relief in the 1930s, and on the health service in the 1940s. Finlay has a sharp eye both for statistics and for telling statements from experts, policy-makers, reporters and victims. The longish quotes with which he peppers his narrative are very well chosen and will be a great boon to teachers and lecturers preparing seminar discussions.

Finlay's book isn't perfect. Although oil is adequately treated, those other huge swan songs of the heavy industries, the Polaris and Trident projects, 1961 to the present, don't get in at all. Mind you, they don't get into my or Tom Devine's narratives either. It could do with three or four maps to locate the main changes of economy and society when expressed in spatial terms. There's also a need for a few key graphs, showing for instance the mounting production of energy, which has underwritten the expansion of the service sector, and the growth of physical mobility through motorisation. There are also more of what the Germans call Schönheitsfehler than there should be: 'Ian Hay' was the pseudonym of Ian Hay Beith not Ian Campbell Hay; the medieval Makar was William Dunbar, not Henry. But Richard Finlay can tackle these, I hope, in time for the paperback.

One bugbear continues. Finlay, like Tom Devine, is impressionistic rather than scientific about industr y—not admittedly a happy stor y in twenti-eth-century Scotland. The problem is, I think, that economic history only reached us about 1930, neck and neck with the Slump. The post-Samuel Smiles generation who could have, for instance, mapped out the impact of capital export on domestic industrial investment just wasn't there. As a result, Finlay may lay too much stress on the left-wing argument of Tom Burns in The Real Rulers of Scotland (1938) that Scottish capitalism was distorted by a tightly-controlled oligarchy. The problem was in fact that most cross-directorships tended to be pretty low-powered accountancy posts, supervising companies...