© Columbia University Press
Impaled Upon a Thistle: Scotland Since 1880
Paper, 448 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-1315-1
$32.50
April, 2010
Cloth, 448 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-1314-4
Edinburgh University Press
$95.00
Ewen Cameron explores the political debate between unionism, liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, and the changing political relationship between Scotland and the United Kingdom. He sets Scottish experience against that of the Irish, Welsh, and the Europeans, and considers British dimensions of historical change, such as involvement in two world wars and imperial growth and decline, from a Scottish perspective. He relates political events to economic, cultural, and social trends within the nation’s borders, lowlands, highlands, and islands, and follows the evolution and growth of national self-confidence and identity, which fundamentally affected Scotland’s destiny in the last century. Cameron concludes with a consideration of how such forces may transform Scotland in the twenty-first.