Is Murdo about to

become another

great Scottish inventor?

Dennis Smith

The Scots are famously inventive (especially in their own eyes). Anaesthesia, antisepsis, the bicycle, the inflatable tyre, the telephone, television, radar, penicillin, Dolly the sheep – the list rolls on. Some of the claims are controversial. Fleming's role in discovering penicillin has been disputed; Baird may have produced the wrong kind of television. But the myth prevails.
     The Scots have also been credited, by Robert Crawford and others, with inventing English literature as an academic discipline which then took on a life of its own and shaped perceptions of the world for generations.
This line of argument can be pushed further. The Scots also invented Great Britain and with it the concept of Britishness. This started off as an essentially defensive measure. After the union of 1707 the English were disposed to see the new UK state as Greater England continuing, with Scotland incorporated as Wales had been centuries before. This was resisted by Scots who insisted on developing a new British identity that could co-exist with a residual Scottishness.
     This idea of Britishness never made much progress in England but proved immensely successful as the basis of an expanding overseas empire. It provided a heaven-sent opportunity for Scots to strut the global stage as soldiers, administrators, merchants, engineers, doctors and (not least) missionaries. Tom Devine's 'To the ends of the earth: Scotland's global diaspora' illustrates a glorious 1796 cartoon of 'A flight of Scotchmen' parachuting into London in search of pickings.
     There is another wider sense in which the Scots can claim to have invented the British empire. Much of the ideological justification for empire, insofar as it went beyond economic and military self-interest, rested on the idea that some societies were more advanced than others, and that advanced societies had the right, if not the duty, to guide their backward brothers ('the white man's burden').

 

     Much of the theoretical argument here derived from ideas about stadial history developed in the Scottish Enlightenment. (More generally, it could be argued that most 19th-century English Whig thought comes straight from Scottish sources, but that's a topic for another day.)
     From a largely post-Christian perspective in the 21st century it is easy to underestimate the religious impetus that also underwrote the empire. Many evangelicals, in particular, felt a Christian duty to save the souls of the heathen. This imperial mission sat easily with a lingering Covenanter vision of the Scots as God's chosen people. Some people took the idea of divine providence very seriously indeed.
     There is a good deal of evidence, from culture as well as politics, that many Scots are now giving up on their invention, Britishness. It has served its purpose and it is time to move on. The burden of Britishness is thus passed to the English, who don't seem to know what to do with it. (The issue of Northern Ireland may have been parked for the moment but its ultimate destination is still uncertain.)
     All of which brings us, by a round-about route, to Murdo Fraser MSP and his suggestion that, if elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives, he would disband the existing party and replace it with a new, distinctively Scottish, centre-right party. This is an inventive approach to a deep-seated problem. Whether it can hope to succeed is anyone’s guess. If it does, Murdo Fraser and his redefinition of Britishness may take their place in the pantheon of Scottish inventiveness.

 

Dennis Smith was formerly curator of modern Scottish collections at the National Library of Scotland