Scotland, most northerly of the four parts of the United Kingdom, occupying about one-third of the island of Great Britain. The name Scotland derives from the Latin Scotia, land of the Scots, a Celtic people from Ireland who settled on the west coast of Great Britain about the 5th century CE. The name Caledonia has often been applied to Scotland, especially in poetry. It is derived from Caledonii, the Roman name of a tribe in the northern part of what is now Scotland.
An austere land, subject to extremes of weather, Scotland has proved a difficult home for countless generations of its people, who have nonetheless prized it for its beauty and unique culture. “I am a Scotsman,” the poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote in the 19th century; “therefore I had to fight my way into the world.” Historically one of Europe’s poorest countries, Scotland has contributed much to political and practical theories of progress: forged in the Scottish Enlightenment in the hands of such philosophers as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, who viewed humankind as a product of history and the “pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right, this progressive ideal contributed substantially to the development of modern democracy. Scots have also played a vital role in many of the world’s most important scientific and technological innovations, with inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs such as Alexander Graham Bell, James Watt, Andrew Carnegie, and John McAdam extending Scotland’s reach far beyond the small country’s borders. Few students of English-language literature are unacquainted with historian Thomas Carlyle, poet Robert Burns, and novelist Muriel Spark.
Scotland’s relations with England, with which it was merged in 1707 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain, have long been difficult. Although profoundly influenced by the English, Scotland has long refused to consider itself as anything other than a separate country, and it has bound itself to historical fact and legend alike in an effort to retain national identity, as well as to the distinct dialect of English called Scots; writing defiantly of his country’s status, the nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid proclaimed: “For we ha’e faith in Scotland’s hidden poo’ers, The present’s theirs, but a’ the past and future’s oors.” That independent spirit bore fruit in 1996, when the highly symbolic Stone of Scone was returned to Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, from London, and in 1999 a new Scottish Parliament—the first since 1707—was elected and given significant powers over Scottish affairs.
Edinburgh is a handsome city of great historical significance and one of Europe’s chief cultural centres. Other significant principal cities include Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, and Perth, all centres for industry, transportation, and commerce.
Hardworking, practical, and proud of their traditions, the Scots have a reputation for thrift that verges on miserliness. Travelers to the country, however, often remark on the generosity and friendliness of their hosts, as well as on the vibrancy of contemporary Scottish culture. An ancient Gaelic song, a blessing on cattle and the people who keep them, speaks to that hospitality in a sometimes inhospitable landscape:
Pastures smooth, long, and spreading,
Grassy meads aneath your feet,
The friendship of God the Son to bring you home
To the field of the fountains,
Field of the fountains.
Closed be every pit to you,
Smoothed be every knoll to you,
Cosy every exposure to you,
Beside the cold mountains,
Beside the cold mountains.
People of Scotland
Ethnic groups
For many centuries continual strife characterized relations between the Celtic Scots of the Highlands and the western islands and the Anglo-Saxons of the Lowlands. Only since the 20th century has the mixture been widely seen as a basis for a rich unified Scottish culture; the people of Shetland and Orkney have tended to remain apart from both of these elements and to look to Scandinavia as the mirror of their Norse heritage. Important immigrant groups have arrived, most notably Irish labourers; there have also been significant groups of Jews, Lithuanians, Italians, and, after World War II, Poles and others, as well as a more recent influx of Asians, especially from Pakistan. The enlargement of the European Union in 2004 led to a dramatic increase in immigration from the countries of eastern Europe.
Scotland’s linguistic heritage is complex. The vast majority of the population now speaks English, but both Scottish Gaelic and the Scots language have wide influence. Languages such as Urdu and Punjabi continue to be spoken by immigrant groups, and the Scottish Parliament provides information in different languages to meet these needs.
Gaelic, the Celtic language brought from Ireland by the Scots, is spoken by only a tiny proportion of the Scottish population, mainly concentrated in the Western Isles and the western Highlands, with pockets elsewhere, especially in Glasgow. Interest in Gaelic has increased sharply, especially following the establishment of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999, and its literature has flourished. Scots was originally a form of Old English that diverged from southern forms of the language in the Middle Ages, becoming a separate national tongue by the 15th century. Union with England and other factors caused English gradually to be adopted as the official and standard language; however, Scots survives in the Lowland areas, in a vigorous tradition of poetry and drama, and in aspects of the English spoken by most Scots. Both Gaelic and Scots are recorded and supported by major works of scholarship: the Linguistic Survey of Scotland (1975–86), The Scottish National Dictionary (1931–75), and A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (1931–2002). The Scottish government has allocated funds to support Gaelic, notably in broadcasting and education, and it also has provided grants to Scots-language organizations. Local education authorities are required to provide for the teaching of Gaelic in Gaelic-speaking areas, and they give guidance on ways to include Scots literature in school curricula.
Religion
Scotland is relatively free from ethnic and religious strife. The Church of Scotland, Presbyterian in structure and Evangelical in doctrine, is the established religion and largest communion, though membership has been steadily declining. It is controlled by a hierarchy of church courts, from the kirk session (governing the affairs of a congregation) through the presbytery (covering a group of parishes) to the General Assembly, at which clergy and lay representatives meet annually in Edinburgh to discuss key issues relating to Scottish society. The Roman Catholic Church is organized into two archdioceses and six dioceses. The Scottish Episcopal Church is also significant, and there are congregations of other denominations, such as the Free Church of Scotland, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Unitarians. Faiths other than Christianity are also practiced, especially by ethnic minority groups; for example, Glasgow has several synagogues and mosques and a Buddhist centre.
Settlement patterns
In earlier times mountains, rivers, and seas divided the Scottish people into self-sufficient communities that developed strong senses of local identity. This sense has been eroded by social mobility, modern transport, broadcasting, and other standardizing influences and by a general shift from rural to urban ways of life. Yet vestiges of regional consciousness linger. The Shetland islanders speak of Scotland with detachment. The Galloway area in the southwest, cut off by hills from the rest of the country, has a vigorous regional patriotism. The Gaelic-speaking people of the Hebrides and the western Highlands find their language a bond of community. The northeast has its own local traditions, embodied especially in a still vigorous Scots dialect, and Borderers celebrate their local festivals with fervour. The most thickly populated rural areas are those with the best farming land, such as in East Lothian and in the northeast.
The Highlands once nourished a large population, but “Highland Clearances” (a series of forcible evictions) and continuous emigration since the 18th century have caused it to dwindle. Now settlements in the Highlands are mostly remnants of crofting townships—that is, irregular groupings of subsistence farms of a few acres each. The old pattern of crofting was one of communities practicing a kind of cooperative farming, with strips of common land allotted annually to individuals. Examples of the old system survive, but now crofters have their own arable land fenced in, while they share the common grazing land. In East Lothian and other areas of high farming, the communal farm has long been replaced by single farms with steadings (farmsteads) and workers’ houses. Scotland noticeably lacks those old villages that evolved in England from medieval hamlets of joint tenants. Some planned villages were built by enterprising landowners in the 18th century.
Burghs, often little bigger than villages, were mostly set up as trading centres, ports, or river crossings or to command entrances to mountain passes. Many small towns survive around the east and northeast coast that were once obliged to be self-contained in consumer industries and burghal institutions because they lacked adequate transportation systems. The growth of industry and transport has helped produce urbanization. Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen are centres of administration, commerce, and industry for their areas, but only central Clydeside, including Glasgow with its satellite towns, is large enough to deserve the official title of conurbation (metropolitan area).
While Scotland makes up about one-third of the area of the United Kingdom, it has less than one-tenth of the population, of which the greatest concentration (nearly three-fourths) lives in the central belt. Historically, England has been the main beneficiary of Scottish emigration, especially during economic downturns. Large-scale emigration also placed Scots in such countries as Canada, the United States, and Australia until the late 20th century; despite this phenomenon, however, the size of the Scottish population has remained relatively stable since World War II. The pattern of migration began to reverse when the North Sea petroleum industry brought many people to the northeast and the north, not only from various parts of Scotland and the United Kingdom but also from other countries, notably the United States. Scotland is now increasingly seen as an attractive place to work and live.
During the 1970s and ’80s Scotland’s economy shared in acute form the problems besetting many European countries, brought about by rapid changes that included the widespread failure of heavy industries. Unemployment became a serious problem, especially in those areas where major industries had declined. Successive governments made efforts to improve these conditions by a variety of measures. Beginning in the 1980s, Scotland’s economy benefited from the exploitation of North Sea petroleum and natural gas and from the development of high-technology and other economic sectors.
Scotland remains a small but open economy and accounts for about 5 percent of the United Kingdom’s export revenue. Its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is higher than in all other areas of the United Kingdom outside London and England’s eastern regions, and its level of unemployment is fairly low. However, wealth in Scotland is not evenly distributed, and the average unemployment rate hides pockets of much higher unemployment in some regions and localities. Although the British government controls Scotland’s macroeconomic policy, including central government spending, interest rates, and monetary matters, the Scottish Parliament has power over local economic development, education, and training.
Wild animals, birds, and river fishes are of minor importance as an economic resource, but deer and grouse hunting, as well as fishing, provides employment in parts of the Highlands in which other activities are hardly possible. Venison, including meat from deer farms, is exported to the European mainland.
No economic sector made greater progress in the post-World War II period than agriculture in terms of productivity. Mechanization allowed the full-time labour force to fall from about 88,000 in 1951 to roughly one-fourth of that number by the end of the 20th century. But in the early 21st century the number of those employed in agriculture increased to some 65,000 people, and farming was a significant contributor to Scotland’s rural economy. Still, though there are thousands of crofts (subsistence farms) in the north, many of them are no longer cultivated. Crofting is a special branch of Scottish agriculture that has to be supplemented by other work, such as forestry, road work, and weaving, as well as in the tourist industry.
Most of Scotland consists of hilly or marginal land, with hill sheep farming predominating, particularly in the Southern Uplands and in the Highlands. In the southwest, dairy farming suits the wetter, milder climate and has a convenient market in the central Clydeside conurbation. The most-striking feature of livestock farming has been the rise in the number of cattle and, to a lesser extent, sheep; pig and poultry production has also expanded. However, during the 1990s, publicity surrounding an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (commonly known as mad cow disease) adversely affected cattle farming.
Forestry
Forestry is a significant activity and has helped to retain population in Scotland’s rural areas. Scotland is responsible for about half of the United Kingdom’s total timber production and more than two-thirds of its softwood production. The forests are managed by the Forestry Commission, a public body, and by private landowners, including forestry companies. Although the Forestry Commission plants trees throughout the country, it plays a particularly important role in Highland development. The main species used are conifers, including Sitka spruce, Norway spruce, Scotch pine, European larch, and Douglas fir.
Fishing
The seafood industry has long been vital to Scotland’s economy. About two-thirds of the total British fish and shellfish catch is now handled by Scottish ports. Peterhead ranks as Britain’s top whitefish port, and Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire are among the United Kingdom’s main centres of fish processing. Haddock, cod, herring, sole, and mackerel are the main species caught. Nephrops (langoustine) is the most important shellfish, though scallop, queen scallop, lobster, and several crab varieties are also important. Commercial salmon fishing is important on the west coast from Argyll to the Shetland Islands, and fish farming is also important, especially of salmon and shellfish along the coast and trout in the inland lochs.
Mining and power generation account for less than one-tenth of Scotland’s annual GDP. Until the last decade of the 20th century, Scotland’s chief mineral resource was coal. The industry reached a peak annual production of 43 million tons in 1913 but subsequently declined drastically. In particular, deep mining became largely uneconomical, and Scotland’s last remaining deep-pit coal mine was closed in 2002. Other minerals that have been worked intermittently include gold, silver, chromite, diatomite, and dolomite, but none has been successfully exploited. Although peat is available to a depth of 2 feet (0.6 metre) or more and is spread over some 2,650 square miles (6,880 square km), its economic value is limited. It is still burned for fuel in the Highlands, but its use has decreased because of the time and labour involved in cutting and drying it.
Britain’s North Sea petroleum and natural gas resources began to be developed in the 1970s. The oil fields lie mostly in Scottish waters, but the British government holds their ownership and receives the revenue yield. Large companies have located and extracted the resource, mostly with the aid of American technology. Aberdeen is the centre of the petroleum industry, and the economy of Shetland has also benefited from discoveries in adjacent waters. In addition, natural gas from North Sea wells has replaced manufactured gas in Scotland. Tens of thousands of jobs have been created in Scotland by onshore oil- and gas-related enterprises, such as oil-platform construction and the servicing of North Sea operators. Although the newfound prosperity has been subject to the vagaries of international markets—especially after fossil fuel revenues were severely reduced in the mid-1980s—the petroleum industry continues to provide, directly and indirectly, a great number of jobs in Scotland.