ABSTRACT
Knowing who you are has long seemed something which has distinguished the Scots, certainly from their neighbours south of the border. A sense of identity, of distinctiveness, seems at times to have been held against all the odds, and, critics might say, much of the evidence. After all, the distinctive markers of national identity, such as language and religion, have been largely absent, certainly in comparison to other inhabitants of these islands, notably the Irish and the Welsh. The Scots have long spoken a variant of English, and from the middle of the sixteenth century marked themselves out as Protestant, to such an extent that they took to being British without much trouble, and, indeed, considerable success, in the eighteenth century. Assertions of difference might appear to amplify minor differences in a world growing increasingly homogeneous.
