Speaking our Language: Past, Present and Future

In this essay Cass Ezeji, a singer and linguist from Glasgow, explores her experiences of Gaelic Medium Education (GME) as a child with no direct roots to a’ Ghàidhealtachd. She challenges the limitations of Scottish history taught in schools as well as perspectives on the Gaelic language. She considers the historical context of Afro-Scottish identities as a means of broadening the way we think about Gaelic and its speakers, whilst shedding light on a neglected diaspora.

Natural Children, Country Wives, and Country Girls in Nineteenth-Century India and Northeast Scotland

This article takes a history of emotions approach to Scottish illegitimacy in the context of imperial sojourning in the early nineteenth century. Using the archives of a lower-gentry family from Northeast Scotland, it examines the ways in which emotional regimes of the East India Company and Aberdeenshire gentry intersected with the sexual and domestic lives of native Indian women, Scottish farm servant women, and young Scottish bachelors in India. Children of these relationships, White and mixed-race, were the focus of these emotional regimes. The article shows that emotional regimes connected to illegitimacy are a way of looking at the Scottish history of empire.

The Earl of Buchan’s political landscape at Dryburgh, 1786–1829

David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan (1742–1829), is best known for founding the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780. In 1786 he reacquired the family’s Dryburgh estate, on which stood the ruins of Dryburgh’s medieval abbey, which he thereby protected from stone-robbing, enabling it to be enjoyed today. This paper focuses elsewhere, namely on Buchan’s architectural interventions in the abbey’s landscape, on what motivated him, what he sought to achieve and on what people both at the time and afterwards have made of him and these interventions. It is argued that while Scotland’s elites were striving to downplay the independent nation’s accomplishments, Buchan instead exploited Scottish history and accomplishment to create a political landscape at Dryburgh, centred on his statue of Sir William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland during the Wars of Independence and executed in 1305. It is argued, too, that the nature of Buchan’s politics, as one of the privileged elite who had broken rank from the ruling class, resulted in his reputation being maligned and his creation being generally undervalued by posterity, and in particular by the Scots themselves, the very people to whom he wanted to reach out, to inspire, and to highlight.

‘Beyond the Vallum’: English interpretations of Scottish history

Chapter four examines English attitudes towards Roman Scotland. It introduces the writings of William Stukeley, one of the most influential antiquarians working in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, looking in particular at the content of his 1720 essay An Account of a Roman Temple. While Stukeley was convinced, like Sir Robert Sibbald before him, that the Romans had conquered and civilised much of Scotland, fellow English antiquarian John Horsley took the view that they had in fact decided against colonising such a barren and inhospitable land. Horsley’s posthumously published 1732 work, Britannia Romana, sets out his pragmatic approach to Scotland’s ancient history and reveals an antiquarian who was far less influenced by patriotism and Romanism than many of his contemporaries.