The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class

By James D. Young

"The most controversial book on modern Scottish history written by a professional historian in the twentieth century."

In 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher's election, historian James D. Young published this seminal study of Scottish working class history. Now updated to cover the period from 1774 to 2008, this is the first time The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class has been available in an electronic format.
An essential text for those interested in Scottish history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James D. Young
• Release date: Jul 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393385721

Book preview

Preface

When Brian Quail gave me his rare copy of The Pioneers: A Tale of the Radical Rising at Strathaven in 1820 (1843), I was completely astonished to read that John Stevenson told a crowd of radicals that they were going to raise ‘the Red Flag of Defiance’ To the very best of my knowledge this 1820 reference to ‘the Red Flag’ was the first ever used anywhere in the Western world:The Red Flag was moreover, at the dynamic centre of the process of the rousing of the Scottish plebeian and later working class between 1773 and 2008.

For just over three centuries after the Anglo-Scots sold out the majority of real Scots, national identity, languages and cultures, many Scots men and women were radical and internationalist. This was seen quite dramatically when the Scottish plebeians supported the Americans struggle for national independence from the 1770s, over two decades before the Friends of the People supported the great French revolution of 1789. Needless to say, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland came out against the American War of Independence.

As the reader will see, Helen Crawfurd and a few other outstanding women radicals were just as heroic as Sir William Wallace and John Maclean, the Clydeside socialist, had been. Besides, for my many sins, I was brought up on the good book, so I am familiar with the proverb `Unhappy the land that has no heroes’; and, though Scotland has not had a good share of heroes or heroines, perhaps the reader will think of the comment by Bertolt Brecht ‘Unhappy the land that needs heroes’ And Scotland in 2009 is an unhappy land.

However, if Scotland did not produce many heroes or heroines, she did produce a heroic and a very ‘advanced’ working class. Indeed, in his A Short History of Labour under Capitalism (1942), Jurgen Kuczynski argued that the strike of Scottish cotton weavers in 1812 was perhaps the largest strike in Europe in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Scottish working-class women were unusually independent and sometimes voted against their own husbands and men folk in contrast to Peterloo, England, where for the first time, women were allowed to vote on the side of their men folk in 1819. This was a reflection of the different cultural sediments of the past in Scotland than in England. In the light of two very important books published in 2007 and 2008 Live Working or Die Fighting: How The Working Class Went Global (2007) by Paul Mason and Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008) by Tony Judt — the central fact of international working-class history is less positive or somewhat less celebratory than the reader might at first expect. In The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), Peter Linebaugh and Marcuas Rediker, they focused on:

The proletariat was not a monster, it was not a unified cultural class, and it was not a race.

By 1819, however, the Western working class had become racist a la Basil Davidson, the English historian of Africa. As the reader will see near the end of the final chapter of this revised The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class, the Western labour movement in the symbolic year of 1989 ended with the fall of what Paul Mason called the international labour movement in Russia, Eastern Europe and China.

In the year 2009 global capitalism stank with pollution and corruption from top to bottom. Far from this being portrayed in the newspaper and television media, the attention of men, women and children are diverted from their dull, monotonous, mind-numbing lives by ‘celebrity’ culture. The constantly televised world of glamorous beautiful and sexy women presenters — and sometimes men — is aimed at allowing people to participate in an escapist television which tries to lull us to sleep. In the Scottish cities, gentrification is being speeded up as people are edged out of their homes and social space by the huge building companies. As the common good is privatised, many working folk cope with debt, rent, ill-health and other problems.

Since this is a new and expanded version of The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class, I am chiefly concerned with resurrecting Scottish history from 1688 to 2008. The present is inseparable from the past and vice-versa; and one way to strengthen and toughen up resistance to our inhuman world of global capitalism is to produce more critical books on history. A greater knowledge of our radical past will assist everyone struggling against injustice and vast inequality today.

From my point of view, the times are out of kilter. We live in a world dominated by images and imaging in which systematic attempts are made by the television and news media to distort social reality and replace it by ‘virtual reality’ While words are comparable to bread as the staff of life, they are devalued, debased and distorted in day-to-day discourse and conversation. But the biggest obstacles facing radicals, socialists, anarchists, dissenters and those who are resisting the social consequences of world capitalism reside in the heroes and heroines of the celebrity culture of the giant corporations. If the new global labour movement as Paul Mason names it is victorious in our century, this pre-history of the Scottish national labour movement will reveal that the Scots will have produced their share of the building bricks for international socialism.

As a passionate Scottish international socialist of working-class origin, I have spent the whole of my adult life researching into and publishing essays, newspaper articles and books on Scottish and international history. Although I began my working life in 1945 as a sawmill labourer and railway worker before I eventually became a full-time historian, I feel more estranged than ever before from my own country and what passes for its ‘culture’ However, I am not estranged from the class I was born into; and like other writers, feel that I am an ‘internal exile’ in Scotland.

In the new post-modern world of so-called virtual reality existing outside of the real world of unemployment, poverty, the scarcity of housing, worry about paying rents or mortgages, stealing food, mindless violence, crime, ill-health and inadequate health care, the colourful, glamorous, glittering television shows divert our attention from our world. In a world of fraud, downright lies and falsehood, the brave new post-modern world of the Mickey Mouse socialism of New Labour is `past history’ in the pejorative sense of the words and anyone, whether man, woman or child, can become a ‘celebrity’ for at least five minutes at the supposed ‘end of history’, where nothing matters except a self-centred, individualist orientation towards the world.

The assumption of the culture of celebrity resides in the belief that everyone can ‘make it’ into the hallway of fame here-and-now rather than tomorrow; and that the gift of beauty, garrulous put-on confidence, acquiring big money by hook or by crook, the cultivation of looking sexy and insensitive to the other unfortunates around you are the qualities needed for the new twenty-first century world of make-believe wrapped in designer clothes made in the sweatshops of India and China.

The celebrities themselves, as well as ordinary men and women, are the victims of the ‘culture’ of the money obsessed media. Although created by a very commercial multi-dimensional media which usually brings them down — not down to earth but to mental break up or psychological collapse through hard drugs and heavy booze. At the back, behind and round about the ‘celebrity’ is television, including television comedies. One such recent comedy responsible for glamorising rehabilitation clinics and the treatment of drug addiction is called ‘The Abbey’ As long as profit can be made out of such television this anti-humanist programming will go unchallenged by those in ‘authority’

The capitalists’ shallow ‘culture’ of fleeting celebrity is based on the ultimate triumph of the bourgeois INDIVIDUAL I heard so much about in my youth. But that fictitious individual of yesteryear remains classless, nameless and ageless. At the core of the celebrity culture is the belief in self-centred individualism, respect for traditional subservience to the ruling elites of the middle class. The working classes allegedly no longer exist at the ‘end of history’. In this world of make-up and make-believe, twenty first century propaganda from on high fosters ‘the conviction’ that everyone has to make his or her own fate. Collectivism and solidarity are rubbished as never before, though as working people resist vast inequalities of wealth and social injustice, reality persists in intruding into the comfortable world of our rich exploiters.

For the benefit of those who tried to pigeon-hole and categorise me in 1979, when the first version of The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class was published, I am not and was not a Scottish nationalist in the sense of sympathising with a nationalist political party, although I was a member of the ‘79 socialist group. I was in 1979 as I am in 2008 an enemy of the Union of 1707 and an advocate and supporter of the agitation for Scottish national independence. I am in fact a militant socialist, an anti-militarist and anti-war internationalist, who demonstrated against nuclear weapons, Apartheid and other abuses of human rights.

I remain unhappy with the backward mentality among some prominent members of the SNP; and I cannot forget that in the 1950s they were propagating the idea that Scots should keep ‘our ain fish guts for our own sea maws!’ I am not that sort of Scot, though I am glad Alex Salmon has come out against the illegal war in Iraq as well as opposing nuclear weapons on the Clyde. Although I no longer trust Parliamentary politicians, I am in complete harmony with the extra-Parliamentary agitators throughout a very Scottish radical history. As in 1979 I remain intensely interested in the questions of national, class and cultural identity, including the attempts of the cultural imperialists to crush them.

In thanking those who have encouraged me to continue with my work on Scottish history, I am focusing on my wife, Lorna, son, David and his wife, Marta and their daughter Caitlin and my daughter, Alison, her husband Keith and children Loui and Faith. I owe enormous debts to Tommy Kayes of Clydeside Press, a real gem of a friend and radical publisher. Friends who have encouraged me include Liz Breem, Dr. Raymond and Mabel Challinor, Farquhar McLay, Ray Burnett, Kent Worcester, Paul Buhle, Brian Quail, Anne and Jimmy Thomas, Rachel Williams, Donald Anderson, Dr. Duncan Wilson. Dr. Alastair Hargreaves, Felicity Greenfields, Margaret Paterson, Gerry Cairns, Kay and Jim Millar, Lynn and Jeff Ball and Malcolm Dickson for correcting the proofs.

An Introduction: The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class Revisited, 1707-1852

In introducing this reissue of The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class (1979) to a new generation of readers in Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales and North America, especially in Canada, I require to say it was the first of the twelve books I have had published since 1979. It was widely reviewed, mostly denounced in Scotland, upset Unionist historians, questioned by a few prominent members of the Scottish National Party, and made a big and sympathetic impact on what was still a strong Scottish labour movement. It was not a book for ambitious scholars interested in promotion at the cost of the truth to identify with or praise; and, when first published David Daiches, the Scottish literary authority, praised, and then bowed to pressure in later years by ignoring it. It was published by Croom Helm, London, Fontana Books, London, and McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, Canada; and it was later published by two American publishers. It was in 1994 that Professor Willy Maley wrote an article ‘Cultural Devolution? Representing Scotland in the 1970s’ for the book The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure? (1994), where he responded to the silly attack on The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class by Christopher A. Whatley. Maley wrote with penetrating, analytical skill.

The 1970s saw the crystallisation of an idea that had been forming in Scotland for some time, namely that socialism could profitably be harnessed to a developing Scottish political identity. The Scottish socialist historian James D. Young produced a number of challenging essays on Red Clydesider John Maclean, and his The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class ably illustrated the links between Scottish radicalism and the struggle for independence’.

Tom Nairn sent me an unsolicited reply to an article I had published in The Scotsman ‘The Making of the Inarticulate Scot’ in 1978; and he freely admitted suffering from inarticulacy.

In the 1980s and 1990s The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class was still being discussed by historians and literary critics. Christopher A. Whatley used his essay ‘An uninflammable People?’ in The Manufacture of Scottish History (1992) to demonize my first book on Scottish history.’ As an outcome of the Scottish national question becoming critical after 1979, MacDonald Daly and Colin Troop, two Scottish historians researching Scottish history at the University of Oxford, published an article in The Times Higher Educational Supplement in which they highlighted the reasons why The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class was important in 1989. In a part of their article, they wrote:

In material terms, the cultural surrender to England undoubtedly improved the daily lot of the Scottish people, as James D. Young acknowledges in the opening chapter of his The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class. But, as Young also demonstrates, there was a profound continuity between the authoritarianism of the Scottish philosophers’ coup and social ills of women’s oppression, cultural dependency, inarticulacy and our internationally high levels of crime, ill-health and alcoholism — which would bedevil the lives of Scottish working people in subsequent centuries.³

 The questions I first raised in 1979 have refused to go away.

Despite or because it was the most controversial book on modern Scottish history written by a professional historian in the twentieth century, The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class was coloured by chock-a-block hitherto hidden historical facts questioning the constant and uncritical support for the Union of Parliaments of 1707 Notwithstanding the vicious criticism of The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class, it was by the standards of the time used to measure the commercial success of a book on history a best-seller. It sold nine thousand copies; and it is still discussed, though more favourable now than it was thirty years ago. In 1995 a long piece entitled ‘Scottish Radicalism: How So? In the 1790s and 1819-20’ appeared on the internet."

An American historian, who put this essay on the internet, summarised the dispute and quoted T. C. Smout’s assertions that the Scottish people were uninflammable, tame and docile. In discussing the whole range of views provoked by The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class, the anonymous American said: ‘Countering the older arguments are those of historians like James D. Young and Christopher Whatley, the former taking a more revisionist, nationalist stance and the later taking a more moderate approach’ "* The American wrote:

The opinions of historians on the importance of the 1790s and 1819-20 varies widely, from those who scoff at them, such as T. C. Smout and Bruce Lenman, to the revisionists that find them of the utmost importance, such as James D. Young.

The function of the historian, argued E. H. Carr in What Is History? (1961), is to understand the past as ‘the key to understanding the present’ And history, for him, was neither simply the biography of ‘great men’, nor exclusively the impersonal account of ideas and movements: ‘people do not cease to be people, or individuals individuals because we do not know their names’. Since Carr wrote in the early 1960s there has been a great deal of work on modern Scottish history, notably on the period since the 1603 Union of Crowns and the 1707 Union of Parliaments.⁴ My own approach to history has always been a holistic one; and Scotland needs honest history more than doctrine or dogma.

After 1979 I discovered two very important documents — the pamphlet by James Thomson Callender, ‘The Political Progress of Britain’ and The Autobiography of a Glasgow Unfortunate’ by George Donald —highlighting the hard historical fact that many of the Scottish plebeian or ‘working-class’ radicals in the 1790s and early nineteenth century repudiated the Union of 1707 and the inequalities created by rapid and forced industrialisation from the top down. The importance of those documents cannot be exaggerated, and they will compel Unionist historians to look at Scottish history in a new way. But I have always been an ‘internal exile’ as I explained to Kevin Williamson when he interviewed me in late 2007 for the new radical newspaper Bella Caledonia.

Moreover, in 1995 I was made a Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Science; and the Royal Literary Fund awarded me an annual pension for life in recognition of my distinguished contribution to literature. But I remain a very critical and self-critical historian: an outsider in the Scottish world of professional Unionist historians, particularly Professor Tom Devine, who has denied that the Clearances actually happened and displayed contempt for the popular movements portrayed in The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class has been appointed by the Scottish National Party government to draw up plans for introducing Scottish history into the secondary schools.

* http://www.hfienberg.com/scots/scotradical, html, p.z

** Ibid., p.3.

I

After 1707 there was no specific (as distinct from a British Unionist) national history taught or written in the nominally Scottish universities. But in seeking to fill in the huge gaps in Scotland’s lost history, historians like Tom Devine have not faced the accumulated muck of the ages and are so parochial that they remain ignorant of the centuries-old theoretical problems created by the Union of 1707 In his The Search for Africa: a history in the making (1994), Basil Davidson, the fine English historian, touched on the critical differences between Scottish and English history in relation to anti-black racism:

When in 1603, King James VI of Scotland and I of England followed Elizabeth to the throne of what was not yet Britain (insofar, that is, as Britain has ever become a cultural reality), it could not be said that the English were a racist people. As it happened, they were going to become a racist people in the sense that superstition feeds racism. They were going to become a racist people in the fullest cash meaning of the term, but that was going to take some time to happen.⁵

Because I dared to argue in a hard-hitting way in 1979 that Scots were not a part of British cultural reality until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, I was dismissed by Tony Dickson as a romantic bourgeois Scottish nationalist.

These events helped to create ‘the paradox of Scottish history’ — a paradox arising from the way in which Scotland’s semi-autonomous cultural status controlled by the Anglo-Scottish elite coexisted with its subordinate political position in the larger British entity. Yet much Scottish history survives as parody rather than paradox and, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the need for critical work is more urgent than ever. The achievements in academic history-writing during the past two generations created real insights into what I called ‘The Condition of Scotland question’ This has important implications. The Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei, put the matter more relevantly even than Carr when he wrote in The Healers: ‘The present is where we get lost — if we forget our past and have no visions of the future’.⁶

Long before I became a professional historian and University teacher in 1968, I did a vast amount of reading to prepare myself thoroughly for the first course on modern Scottish history put on at the new and Scottish University in the town of Stirling. After completing the research and presenting a doctoral thesis on Scottish labour history during the second half of the nineteenth century at the University of Stirling in 1974, I fervently desired to write a book on modern Scottish history. By 1977 the pressure was then on from my head of department to produce a book on Scottish history. The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class was not meant to be provocative, but it upset a number of people in Scottish historical circles. I am now willing to admit that in 1979 I was not aware of how many sacred cows I had questioned at the same time. My friend, the late Royden Harrison, wrote me a private letter in 1979 suggesting I had made the big tactical mistake of ‘kicking all the shite [shit] out of the wee men with bunnets (caps) and nae teeth’ If the Scottish conservative historians did not like my first book at all, the more generous Americans did.

It was Richard Price, the distinguished English historian, exiled in America, who explained and defended my new interpretation of Scottish history. In an extended review article in the American Journal International Labour and Working-Class History in 1980, Price opened his long piece by endorsing my identification of the central paradox of Scottish history — the question of how a nation with a ‘well-defined identity and culture’ was subordinated to England by the Act of the Union of 1707. In the best discussion of my first book, he wrote:

James D. Young’s book The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class, is an intelligent and extremely interesting enquiry into the consequences of this paradox for the working class. As he so convincingly demonstrates, Scottish working-class history cannot be understood apart from the subordination of that country to English dominance. This domination was handled through a peculiarly English mechanism of suzerainty, whereby Scottish institutions (such as the distinctive educational and legal systems) were retained intact for obeisance to anglicised culture and most crucially, a participation in the fruits of English economic and cultural progress. This bargain, struck between the metropolitan and provincial elites was made before industrialisation, and the nature of Scottish nationalism has struggled ever since under that historic compromise.⁷

What I particularly like about Price’s books and essays is that unlike most British historians, he is not inhibited about using the personal pronoun and employing personal experiences to highlight important points about what happened in history.

Price devoted great attention to the cultural differences between the early Scottish plebeian radicals and their English counterparts. Arguing that ‘the failure of the junction between intellectual nationalism and working-class politics is a constant theme of Young’s account of Scottish history, he highlights the fact that the First World War gave John MacLean a substantial following. It was that war which shattered the myth of ‘the canny Scot’ Summing up, Price wrote:

The message of his book is that the rousing of the Scottish working class must wait until the rousing of Scotland itself. It may be that this is now beginning to happen. Unlike the early 1920s, when British capitalism could stumble through the depression on the back of its huge colonial Empire, the contemporary crisis is no longer [with the discovery of the oil in the North sea] a paying proposition for Scotland.

Price was far more perceptive than any other reviewer; and most certainly more perceptive than the genuinely genial Stephen Maxwell, the leading radical Scottish National Party intellectual, who reviewed it, too, in the Scots Independent. It was left to Price to underline the importance of Anglicisation. As he put it: ‘So total was the commitment to Anglicisation that (as William Cobbett found to his dismay), sympathy for the rights and feelings of the poor was non-existent amongst the intellectual classes. Scotland could not produce, therefore, its own group of intellectual dissidents who played such a key role in the English labour movement’ Then he said: ‘Furthermore, in spite of the best efforts of the respectable classes to deny and sanitise the Gaelic past, it continued to lurk in the background, occasionally resurfacing to play a radical role’

I was already in 1979 introducing the wider international context of workers radical and later socialist history. Even in 2009 parts of Scotland are still parochial and inward-looking; but quite apart from the Scots distinctive roots in the origins of modern socialism, I was looking at the cultural differences between distinctive national working classes from the perspective of a Scottish historian who was also a radical and an internationalist. As he insisted that The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class was an important book, Price expressed his opinion that I ought to have carried the narrative beyond 1928, where it stopped. I am going to add two new chapters at the end of the original version of what I wrote in 1979 by bringing the book up to date, now that Scotland has a new Parliament in Edinburgh and suffering the frustration of limited political power from London with indignation.⁸

II

Unfortunately, I did not discover Hobsbawm’s important 1978 article entitled Capitalism and Agriculture: The Scottish Reformers of the Eighteenth Century in the French journal Annales in time to make use of it in The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class. He provided me with further vindication. He wrote with great perception:

In fact, they [the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers] probably represent the first example, and one of the rare examples of a bourgeoisie which was able to envisage its aims and historical function in these precise terms. It would even appear that the terms `feudal system’ and ‘feudalism’, as a description of a whole socio-economic, legal and political order, were formulated by Scottish intellectuals in the course of their discussions.⁹

Again the reader will see the impact of those thinkers concepts of feudalism on Marx through to the early Utopian socialists.

Then in 1983 Norbert Waszek published his pioneering article on The Division of Labor: From the Scottish Enlightenment to Hegel. Just as he discussed how the Scottish Enlightenment contributed significantly to the genesis of classical Marxism, so without knowing my book The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class he gave me justification for offering a stronger critique of ‘the wee men with bunnets and nae teeth’ He realised that the Scottish Enlightenment did not, as I suggested in 1979, contribute anything to Marx’s idea of revolutionary socialism. Earlier on a number of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) published articles arguing that the Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals had made an inordinate contribution to the genesis of classical Marxism.

In the 1930s and 1950s Roy Pascal and Ron Meek were members of the CPGB, self-styled Marxist-Leninists, Britons and Unionists who were even against Home Rule for Scotland. Pascel wrote about Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the 18th Century and Meek produced an article on The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology; and this was the orthodoxy I challenged in 1979 alongside the conservative school of ‘Scottish’ Unionist historians in the universities. When the Israeli historian Waszek published his essay on The Division of Labor: From the Scottish Enlightenment to Hegel, he was unaware of Pascel and Meek. So summing up, Waszek wrote:

 Social inequality, as Smith and Ferguson insist, is fostered by the division of labour. The wealth that results from the division of labour is unevenly distributed... Although this may sound like an anticipation of Marx’s theory of exploitation, the Scots were no revolutionaries but considered the problems as resolvable within the existing social structure.¹⁰

When I began to teach modern Scottish history at the University of Stirling in 1968, George Rude, who taught history at the University of Aberdeen during the Second World War, was the founder of the Department of History at Stirling. He laid it down that no history before the Industrial Revolution would be taught, and going through a Marxist but anti-Leninist phase I agreed with him that the Scots had been taught far too much about medieval Kings and Queens. Before very long my students convinced me that I had to go back to before the Industrial Revolution. Many of my students were like me of working-class origin, and they were very critical, well read, intellectually curious, and particularly critical of the Henry Cockburn and the Scottish Whigs. My critical students convinced me that the Scottish Whigs were not Scottish at all. In common with many of my students from Easterhouse, Castlemilk and Wester Hailes, I found late eighteenth century Scotland to be absolutely fascinating.

Before I did considerable historical research into the Scottish working-class movement, I was influenced to some extent by some of the ideas George Rude expressed in his important book Ideology and Popular Politics (1980).¹¹ Nowhere in his book, however, did he deal with the role of black slavery or the Africans, West Indians or African-Americans creation of the accumulation of capital for the British Industrial Revolution. To be fair to Rude, the beginnings of the break-up of Stalinism in the 1960s was just beginning to assist a few historians to develop a new understanding of the history of radicalism and socialism and its multi-cultural dimensions.

In time I began to question historians authoritarian and sectarian traits acquired by them in the Communist Party and in the Trotskyist sects in earlier years. As I did research on the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, too, I discovered the previously hidden racism behind the Clearances in the Scottish Highlands. Although no professional Scottish historian has yet written about the nineteenth century Highlanders’ expulsion during the so-called Highland improvements and the similarly linked improvements in Stalin’s Russia, Peter Linbaugh connected the seventeenth-century English Revolution to what happened in Russia between the two world wars:

It [the London Hanged] noted that with the defeat of the English revolution the English entered the slave trade on a massive scale, the expropriation of land in Scotland, Ireland and England went ahead rapidly, and urbanisation created a propertied proletariat. Might we not identify three such similar themes under Stalin: the expropriation of millions from the land, the appropriation through wage labour of the social wealth created by an urban proletariat, and the development, if not of plantations, then of prison and labour camps which organised slavery.¹²

All of this was an unknown country to Rude, the English Marxist historian; and David Craig, Terry Brotherstone and other historians on the Scottish ‘Left’.

Unlike English radicalism which was always focused on the struggles in Parliament and for Parliamentary reform, Scottish radicalism was expressed through extra-Parliamentary agitation. English radicalism began in the 1760s, and Henry Jephson emphasised the point that ‘the Platform’ — narrowly defined ‘as every political speech at a public meeting excluding those from the pulpit and those in the Courts of Justice’ — was called ‘into requisition’ in Scotland for the first time in 1792 when the Friends of the People met in Edinburgh.¹³ This definition excluded the very real Scottish plebeian radical agitations in support of the Americans during their struggle for national independence.

A glance at what honest observers of Britain thought about Scotland before and after the Union of 1707 will offer a different social picture. Far from Scotland only becoming a nation after 1707 a la the Leninist sects, some Scots were members of the Friends of the People and offered a different social picture than that found in books on British history. The early Scottish workers were radical, internationalist and nationalist. Over a decade after the Americans struggles for national independence, the editor of the Caledonian Mercury commented on the support for America in the 1770s.

This feeling and consciousness of being Scots existed long before and long after 1707 Unlike Linda Colley in Britons: The Forging of the Nation, 1707-1836 (1993) in his fine book Radical Pioneers of the Eighteenth Century (1886), the Irish historian, J. Bowles Daly, did not have an axe to grind when he wrote: ‘The Scotch were considered foreigners and Jacobites, entirely wanting in sympathy with the principles [of the Glorious English] Revolution’.¹⁴ From a British or English viewpoint in the eighteenth century, he understood that the Scots estrangement from the English House of Commons explained why no popular radicals like John Wilkes were elected to the British Parliament.

Moreover, the distinguished American historian, Robert Palmer, wrote in volume two of his The Age of Democratic Revolution (1959) of the greater support for the American and French revolutions in Scotland as a result of the lingering feeling against England. There was considerable popular support in Scotland for the Americans struggle for national independence in the 1770s.¹⁵ The 20,000 to 30,000 Scottish emigrants, who went to America during the decades down to 1773, created a shortage of labour for merchants and manufacturers. At the end of 1773 Scottish manufacturers petitioned Parliament for a complete ban on emigration. The Highland emigrants went to America to escape rack-renting, poverty and landlord oppression. Besides, some Highlanders decided to face ‘an enemy in the wildest desert’ rather than become ‘beggars in their native land’ ¹⁶

In 1773 a great number of sailors in Greenock and Port Glasgow rioted under the influence of the Americans whom they supported. A most interesting incident was that weavers in Glasgow were refused an increase in their wages and threatened to emigrate to America en masse unless their demands were met. In a confidential letter to the Earl of Suffolk, Thomas Millar, Lord Justice Clerk of Glasgow, boasted that he had prevented the migration of the weavers by handing out light sentences to the known ringleaders.¹⁷

Moreover, another book neglected by radicals is the brilliant Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000) by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, and they make a most critical point about English revolutionaries abandonment of an internationalist perspective around 1819 when Scots were much more militant and disaffected from the Britons Empire than the English working class ever were. This most certainly did not mean that the Scots were superior or innately much more radical than the English. It did mean that they inherited different cultural and political traditions and a national question. Linebaugh and Rediker wrote about class, class consciousness, nationality, women and ‘cultural class’ in a way that is alien to narrow sectarian thought. As the two Americans put it:

When casualties began to mount after the British expeditions against Haiti in 1795-96, panic — and racism — spread through society... The globalising powers have a long reach and endless patience. Yet the planetary wanderers [of the Atlantic revolution] do not forget, and they are ever ready from Africa to the Caribbean to Seattle to resist slavery and restore the commons.¹⁸

When I published my essay ‘Scotland’s Lost Past: British history and the paradoxes of the Scottish nation’ in These Fissured Isles: Ireland, Scotland And British History, 1798-1848 (2005), edited by Terry Brotherstone, Anna Clark and Kevin Whelan. Brotherstone insisted that `James D. Young (who in this book makes an important critique of Tom Devine’s Scottish Nation) has written effectively over many years against a labour and radical history that fails to recognise the importance of a distinctly Scottish, operational working-class consciousness’ Being steeped in a centuries-old inherited English culture, Brotherstone’s words `these fissured Isles’ were borrowed from William Shakespeare, not the Scottish national bard, Robert Burns.¹⁹

However, as a devotee of Vladimir I. Lenin’s partisan approach to the history of working people, Brotherstone was never comfortable with The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class. In his introductory remarks to These Fissured Isles, he made a provocative remark about ‘Young’s oddly entitled The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class as ‘the most sustained attempt to follow upon, and develop, E. P. Thompson’s work from a Scottish perspective’.²⁰ Incidentally, too, I have never accepted the idea of ‘operational’ consciousness or ‘operational’ history — that is, history related to immediate class struggles in the here and now.²¹

After the Tory witch-hunt in the universities in 1791 and the use of the judiciary to crush the plebeian radicals, the Whig intellectuals, including the so-called extreme left-wing John Millar, did not deviate from their project of resolving social problems and class conflict within the established social order. As Michael Ignatieff explained: ‘Yet Millar could not be called a Jacobin. Medick does pay attention to his repeated disavowal of forcible levelling, but he misses his emphatic endorsement of our condemnation of Paine’s atheism’. Indeed, Millar conceived of the enfranchisement of artisans as a ‘solid refutation of popular doctrines then afloat’, as a strategy of conciliation to ‘rally the great body of the [British] nation around the constitution’.²² However, Callender was an extreme Jacobin leveller and Scottish nationalist. Unlike Callender, none of the Scottish Whig intellectuals (except Lord Gardenstone) were interested in Scotland’s distinctive history or national oppression.

Refuting all the accumulated and almost immovable Unionist history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Ignatieff has helped to remove the walls of the perceptional prison blinding us to the reality of a Scottish national plebeian radicalism before and after the first phase of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland. Summing up, Ignatieff wrote: ‘Millar’s was not a social vision of reform, an artisanal Republic, but a narrowly political reformism, aiming at maintaining the constitutional balance between the executive and legislative achievement of 1688’.²³ Yet there was no doubt that Millar and Callender associated with each other before the latter was forced to escape from Scotland.

III

The disputes that Callender’s had been involved in at the University of Edinburgh in 1778 and the High Court in 1792, when he was falsely accused of blaming Lord Gardenstone for the authorship of The Political Progress of Britain, were to plague him for the duration of his short exile in America between 1793 and 1803. When his disputes in Edinburgh were being used against him in America, he wrote in an undated letter of 1801: ‘Perhaps it was Mr. Wagner, who, had at an early period, made it himself’.

Though Callender was hypersensitive about his ‘plebeian’ background, he made and kept powerful connections in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Always a controversial figure within the militant and carnaptious Scottish nationalist and very radical tradition, Callender was already in 1782 a gifted pamphleteer. An intuitive leveller, he did not share James Boswell’s elitist and Unionist admiration for Dr. Samuel Johnson. It was the latter who told Boswell: ‘You are to consider that it is our duty to maintain the subordination of civil society; and where there is a gross or shameful deviation from rank, it should be punished so as to deter others from the same perversion’ Callender was not cowed or intimidated by the great English writer; and one of the most interesting features of Callender’s anonymous pamphlet The Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson was his admission that he did not belong to the polite middle-class culture of belles-letters.²⁴

Motivated by Scottish nationalism, an embryonic plebeian radicalism and Johnson’s ignorance of Gaelic poetry, Callender criticised the Englishman’s ‘dishonesty, pride, vulgarity [and] prejudice’ against the Scots. Then he attacked Johnson for being the patron of this poor scribbler and concluded that: ‘From this single circumstance, Dr. Johnson stands convicted of an illiberal intention to deceive’." An interesting aspect of the angry reaction in the Critical Review was the assertion that ‘the pamphlet... is apparently written by some angry Caledonian, who, warmed with the deepest resentment for some real or supposed injury, gives vent to his indignation, and treats every part of Dr. Johnson’s character with the utmost asperity’.²⁶

In the second anonymous pamphlet, A Critical Review of the Works of Dr. Samuel Johnson, published in 1783, Callender exhibited tremendous confidence when he wrote: ‘The author of the present trifle was last year induced to publish a few remarks on the writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Like the former essay, these pages will endeavour to ascertain the genuine importance of Dr. Johnson’s literary character’ For it was not the polite world of middle-class culture that caused offence and outrage in 1782 and 1783, but the intervention of a Scottish nationalist plebeian writer who challenged aspects of English cultural imperialism. And the genuine outrage felt by Callender’s contemporaries led writers like Ford and C. J. Kolb and J. E. Congleton to depict him as ‘a Scots master of scurrility and a vicious scandalmonger on both sides of the Atlantic’.27To see Callender in a wider historical perspective, however, it should not be forgotten that (1) Jefferson described him as ‘a man of genius’, and (2) English plebeian radicals like Thomas Paine were similiarly attacked by the polite literary journals and magazines.

Callender began to work as a sub-clerk in the Sasine Office, Edinburgh, in 1782, the year when he published his first (anonymous) pamphlet on The Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson. When he was appointed a messenger-at-arms on 29 March 1789, he was already a well-established clerk with a reputation in Edinburgh as a writer and poet. Outspoken, carnaptious and disaffected from the established social order, he was friendly with Gardenstone, Lord Kames, Lady Henderson and other members of the ‘higher ranks’.²⁸

In most of the surviving private letters to his ‘superiors’, including Andrew Stuart, the Keeper of the Sasine Register and later on the American ‘Jacobin’ President Thomas Jefferson, Callender displayed the contradictory qualities of obsequiousness and outspokenness. He was a most unusual man, and he would display the typical characteristics of successive Scottish radicals.

As a clerk in the Sasine Office in 1789, Callender witnessed the corrupt practices of some of his fellow clerks and sub-clerks. The letters designed to expose corruption were just as interesting for what they revealed about his complex character. When he wrote to Stuart on 5 December 1789, he said: ‘I venture to plead for some indulgence as having literally, though unintentionally, risked my life to serve you’ After detailing the extensive corruption in preparing and keeping the Register of Sasine, he informed Stuart that: ‘It was originally intended to print this letter and sell it for a shilling a copy in the Parliament House. The obvious consequence of this measure must be the annihilation of the General Register. The conduct would at once have been unjust and unfair’ Although Stuart’s replies to Callender have not survived, he did not suffer for his outspokenness.

On 19 December 1789, in the year of the French revolution, he again wrote to Stuart to complain about an official in the Sasine Office:

There is not an assistant clerk about the Sasine office who has not heard him [Steele] solimnly [sic!) vow my destruction. If I had followed the dictates of resentment I had easily got him secured. For his own clerk would attest to his bringing pistols in his pocket to the office. But I considered that you would soon be in town and that it was better to keep out of the way. And let the quarrel expire in silence. ²⁹

An interesting feature of those letters to Stuart was Callender’s occasional spelling mistakes and the odd ugly phrase.

Despite being noticed by A. and E. G. Porritt just after the