T.M. Devine > Quotes

“The great French historian Ernest Renan in the late 1880s denied that a nation was based on ethnicity and language or blood-and-soil nationality. His argument was that a nation consists of people who have a collective shared sentiment and that sentiment is based on myth and history and a series of symbols and markers of identity. There is a constant referendum going as to whether that sentiment still exists in the union. Renan’s concept of a nation is that it can be ephemeral; it’s not there forever, it is not a permanency as it varies according to circumstances. This is a very intriguing parallel with what’s going on in the UK today.”
― T.M. Devine

“It was noted of Smailholm in Roxburghshire, for instance, that many young men from the parish had joined the army and navy during the American War of Independence and never came back home.”
― T.M. Devine, The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600 - 1900

“The new political integration might well have doomed Scotland to the status of an English economic satellite: a supplier of foods, raw materials and cheap labour for the more sophisticated southern economy but with little possibility of achieving manufacturing growth and diversification in her own right...Union could well have been the political prelude to 'the development of underdevelopment' rather than the catalyst for a new age or progress and prosperity.”
― T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700 - 2000