The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence by Cairns Craig (review)

Cairns Craig's The Wealth of the Nation explores the maintenance of Scotland's cultural distinctiveness under the Union, both during the British Empire and after its collapse. Craig begins his account with a chapter titled 'Cultural Capital and the Xeniteian Empire', which surveys the legacy of 'the Scottish Empire within the British Empire' (p. 72). Here, Craig discusses Xeniteian migration in the following terms: 'Xeniteian migrants do not arrive in their new territories as victims of forced expulsion dreaming of a return to the homeland but as masons or architects who carry with them the plan by which they will rebuild the familiar structures of their homeland in a foreign place' (p. 64). Perhaps further work in this area will explore what the indigenous populations of those places thought of these imposed and alien structures.

For Craig, Scottish Xeniteian activity is also a type of cultural nationalism which can explain the belated appearance in Scotland of 'resistant' forms of nationalism:

Scotland had no need of a 'resistant nationalism' precisely because it was an imperial nation engaged in projecting its national culture to the world. The historical problem of Scotland's 'absent nationalism' in the nineteenth century is a non-problem because far from lacking a nationalism, Scottish nationalism was vigorously engaged in imposing itself wherever Scots had achieved a determining or a significant role within the territory of the British Empire.

(p. 73).

Was there no need for a resistant nationalism opposing English colonisation in Scotland? According to Craig, sociologists and historians such as Michael Hechter and Colin Kidd have 'misread the dynamics of Scottish culture from the 1750s to the early twentieth century' (p. 74) by presenting Scotland as having been colonised by England.

After a detailed and comprehensive account of the achievements of Scotland's 'Xeniteian Empire' in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, Craig moves on to the shameful aspects of Scottish history and culture. The chapter 'In the Race of History' considers the connections between Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and white supremacist ideas, noting 'how easily the stadial theory of human progress . . . could be inverted to become a theory of the progress of some and the impossibility of progress for others' (p. 106). Craig discusses the racism of Scottish thinkers such as David Hume and Thomas Carlyle, before detailing Scottish involvement in the slave trade: 'Scots were not only significantly involved in the business of slave ships running out of Liverpool, London and Bristol, but [. . .] they represented a substantial proportion of those managing plantations in certain parts of the West Indies' (p. 107). It is to be commended that Craig addresses the deplorable deeds and words of Scottish businessmen and thinkers alongside celebrations of Scotland's considerable cultural capital.

In a chapter titled 'Living Memory: Nostalgia, Necromancy and Nostophobia', Craig notes that the 'revivalism by which Scotland maintained a sense of its own distinctive culture after 1707 made the understanding of memory crucial to its eighteenth-century philosophies' (p. 146). Linking the 'nostalgic' work of James Macpherson to Enlightenment philosophy, Craig suggests that the Ossian poems embraced the 'modern conception of the ''science of man'', with its stadial account of historical progress' and 'used the new psychology that underpinned Hume's analysis of the mind to elaborate an aesthetics of memory that would make the past of his people valuable again' (p. 155). The chapter also explores examples of necromancy, where 'the dead are raised from their graves to speak in modern voices' (p. 172) in the work of writers such as Hogg and Scott. Craig then addresses the 'nostophobia' of the Scottish Renaissance, that 'gravedigger of the Scottish past' (p. 181), claiming that, 'If . . . nineteenth-century Scotland was the country of nostalgia, then for most of the twentieth century Scotland has been the country of nostophobia' (p. 188). Craig uses the term ''nostophobia'', or fear of homecoming, to address MacDiarmid's hatred of a Scottish cultural tradition the poet saw as blighted...