Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott (review)

almost a century ago, in his 1923 inaugural lecture at the Congress of Historical Sciences in Brussels, Belgian historian Henri Pirenne stated that the belligerents of the recent world war had "put two sciences in particular under requisition: chemistry and history. The former provided them with explosives and gases; the latter with pretexts justifications or excuses" ("De la méthode comparative en histoire," Fourth International Congress of Historical Sciences, 9 April 1923, Wikisource, fr.wikisource.org/wiki/De_la_méthode_comparative_en_histoire). History had been enlisted to justify nationalist claims on both sides. To avoid the repetition of such manipulations of the discipline, Pirenne advocated the adoption of the comparative method—the only way to prevent such a harmful appropriation of history from happening again.

Although he does not mention this important historiographical tradition, John H. Elliott adopts and revives it. He describes events, reflects on political processes, and makes comparisons to foreground similarities and dissimilarities. This method, which he already used in his previous books Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge UP, 1984) and Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (Yale UP, 2006), is again employed in Scots and Catalans. This latest comparative study is highly topical in light of the rise of the Catalan and Scottish autonomist movements since the 1970s and the two recent referendums on self-determination that took place in September 2014 in Scotland and in October 2017 in Catalonia. This is therefore a history book that responds to current events. Its subtitle, Union and Disunion, sets out the common thread that Elliott follows amid the political dynamics confronting the British and Hispanic empires and between the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of the two monarchies.

The author devotes most attention to providing a comparative assessment of the state of knowledge on the forms of national expression in Catalan and Scottish spaces. A specialist on the Hispanic world, author half a century ago of The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598–1640 (Cambridge UP, 1963), he uses the Scottish case as a mirror of the Catalan situation to present his analyses of the crisis facing the Spanish monarchy since the beginning of the current century. This dual examination ponders the Catalan and Scottish histories with great detail and precision. To do so, Elliott travels through about ten centuries to describe and understand how the Scottish kingdom and the Catalan principality each fit into a larger whole: respectively, the United Kingdom, ruled from London, more than four hundred miles from Scotland, and the Hispanic monarchy, ruled from Madrid since the sixteenth century, more than three hundred miles from Catalonia. At each historical stage, tensions occurred between the sovereign authorities (English and Spanish) as well as within these two spaces, not only among the social groups that compose them (aristocracy, bourgeoisie, proletariat, clan structures, and so forth) but even according to the geographical areas that divide them—between the Highlands and the Lowlands of Scotland, and between Barcelona and the Catalonian rural heartland. Scotland and Catalonia therefore belong to two larger political areas. However, as Elliott wonders in the introduction, are they "stateless nations" (5)? Or, are they simply "imagined communities" (4) born of the reconstruction of the past by politics in order to elaborate a "national narrative" (163–78) capable of making claims of independence?

The six chapters of the book, of about equal length, form an astonishing journey. Its scope goes beyond the six hundred years announced in the titles of the chapters to propose a history of this "union/disunion" movement. In addition, a rich critical apparatus, a detailed index, notes, and an impressive bibliography on this vast subject are most welcome.

Elliott begins his history of the relationships within these empires at the end of the fifteenth century with Spain's dynastic union. The complexity of the formation of the Crown of Aragon is reflected in the notion of "composite monarchies" that the author had proposed in an earlier publication ("A Europe of Composite Monarchies," Past...