ABSTRACT
The Scots, it is said, love their history but do not study it-perhaps love it the more easily because they do not permit study to interfere with preconceptions. There is less truth in this opinion than once there was, but it has to be confessed that the number of writings to be recorded is disappointingly small: it is only in the last few years, perhaps in the last decade, that the sort of professional work commonplace in English and Welsh history has become at all prominent in the northern kingdom. An older tradition of lively narrative, little analysis, and doubtful accuracy survives still in Mackie’s brief introduction,1246 while signs of improvement appear in the more generously planned two-volume general history produced by Dickinson and Pryde.1247 These works all follow tradition by concentrating on the history of politics and the Church. In view of the dearth of really detailed investigation, it is surprising to find that a multi-volume general history is also in the making; indeed, its modern section is complete in two volumes of which Donaldson’s on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is the more impressive.1248 Campbell’s attempt to add the dimension of economic history is particularly welcome, though the treatment is impressionistic, there is a striking dearth of statistical material, and we still do not move quite in the later twentieth century.1249 These strictures cannot be at all applied to Smout’s very fine social history of early-modern Scotland, a well-planned, sensible and fascinating work with excellent bibliographies.1250 At the same time, it must strike one as significant that what in any country would have been regarded as good and most welcome, was in this case received with extremes of rejoicing or disapprobation, provoked by the destruction of comfortable legends, thus underlining the relative backwardness of this historiography. His American nationality did not save Notestein’s readable survey of Scotland’s historical role from the characteristic sentimentality which Smout so entirely avoids.1251 Burleigh’s
1246 J.D.Mackie, History of Scotland, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books: 1964. Pp. 406. Rev: Scottish History Review, 45, 203f.
