ABSTRACT
Brewing in Scotland in the nineteenth century became concentrated mainly in Edinburgh, Alloa and Glasgow and, in common with the English industry, expanded rapidly. This chapter looks at one aspect of this growth, the development of the Scottish export market for beer. It provides an overview of the volume and changing structure of the trade between 1850 and 1939, some case studies of the firms that participated, the marketing strategies they adopted, and the products involved. It looks inter alia at questions I either previously ignored or addressed briefly in an earlier study of the Scottish brewing industry, such as how the trade originated and was sustained, why certain firms entered the market, whether or not imperial markets and troop supplies were its mainstay, which products were most successful, and why, in the face of apparently declining markets, the Scots seem to have persisted for so long in a notoriously difficult trade (Donnachie 1979:137-42, 221-9).
