Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 by Richard A. Marsden (review)

Scotland commanded the world’s attention during the country’s independence referendum in September 2014. Despite the 55 percent to 45 percent rejection of independence, it has retained that attention with the Scottish National Party’s sweep of 56 out of 59 Westminster parliamentary seats in the May 2015 UK general election.

Yet political nationalism of the separatist variety is a recent phenomenon in Scottish history, with no concerted and sustained challenge to the Anglocentric Union until the 1930s and no significant political breakthrough until the late 1960s. There has been a major scholarly effort to explain the relative historical lateness of Scottish nationalism’s emergence. Much of that effort has been concentrated on the historiography of Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when political nationalisms were ascendant elsewhere in Europe, as manifested in the revolutions of 1848. The established view within this scholarship is that Scotland failed to continue Sir Walter Scott’s project of countering the anglicizing forces of the Enlightenment by asserting Scottish distinctiveness within the context of the Union. This is held to be particularly evident in absence of a robust and distinctively Scottish national history, as is argued in Marinell Ash’s seminal text The Strange Death of Scottish History (1980).

Dr. Richard A. Marsden, who teaches in the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion at Cardiff University, has entered this historiographical dispute with a meticulous study of Scottish antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798–1874). An advocate and judge by profession, Innes was a prolific editor of Scottish historical documents, with an emphasis on the medieval period, whose work earned considerable respect in both Scotland and England. Marsden’s study places Innes “at the forefront of a small group of antiquaries and historians who sought to make their fellow Scots more aware of and thus more appreciative of their own history” (297).

The ideological framework provided by the Enlightenment produced a Scottish historical scholarship in which Scotland’s history was presented as a story of progress from the inferior and more primitive conditions of the past to the celebrated achievements of the present. The past, in other words, was something from which to escape. In particular, the pre-Reformation period was denigrated for a backwardness that was explained in terms of the constraints of Catholicism. Marsden demonstrates that Innes, whose political sympathies lay with the Whigs in politics, worked within this Enlightenment framework. At the same time, he was influenced by the early nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in Scottish distinctiveness and by a resistance to assimilation into English culture. By mid-century, these trends were manifesting themselves in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, which in turn prefigured the campaign for a Secretary of State for Scotland in the 1870s and, ultimately, the movement for Home Rule within the United Kingdom in the 1880s.

While accepting the essential Englishness of the British Constitution, Innes set about establishing the Scots as something more than North Britons. His philosophy of history acknowledged historical specificity: the recognition that different peoples had different needs at different points in the past. Consequently, past institutions and practices were to be presented not as historical blind alleys but as crucial and indispensible steps towards Scotland’s modernity. In this way, Innes attempted to reconcile progressivist and romanticist historical scholarship.

This text is a valuable addition to the study of nineteenth-century Scottish historiography and adds to our understanding of the character of Scottish national awareness and political nationalism. Marsden supplies chapters which examine in detail Innes’s work on Acts of the Scottish Parliament, burgh sources, ecclesiastical cartularies, university records, family papers, manuscript facsimiles, illustrations, and photography. The appendix of “Innes’s Periodical Contributions” will be of particular interest to readers of VPR. Innes was a frequent contributor to periodicals during the 1850s and 1860s. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals attributes to...