There’s really nothing unusual in idea of Scotland being seen as ‘North Britain’

It is always entertaining to read Kenny Macaskill’s column and his regular revelation of his lack of knowledge of Scottish history... though it is somewhat alarming for such admissions from a former SNP Justice Minister! A few weeks ago he admitted his lack of knowledge of Scottish connections to the slave trade and confessed to a schoolboy understanding of the Empire. Now (Perspective, 20 August) he discovers “patriotic unionism” (a subject several Scottish historians, including Tom Devine, have written about).

Whilefewwoulddisputethat many aspects of the Empire were “brutal and repressive” (as Macaskill stated on 11 June) he failed to mention the transfer of knowledge in engineering, medicine and agriculture that came with colonisation. For example, it was a Scotsman, James Taylor from Kincardineshire, who introduced tea plantations to Ceylon in 1867 – a crop that is still of immense value to the postcolonial Sri Lankan economy.

This week Kenny gets hot under the collar about Scotland being turned into “north Britain”. However if he extended his reading to cover postroman Britain he wouldn’t see anything particularly unusual in that name. When the Romans abandoned the British island in the 5th century they left a weakened state that collapsed into chaos and was subject to invasions from Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings. What eventually emerged was (roughly) 12 mutating kingdoms that rose and fell, fought and merged. In the south the kingdoms of Wessex, Sussex, Kent and Essex emerged, in the midlands Mercia and East Anglia developed, and in the north, Northumbria(stretchingfrom the Humber to the Forth), Strathclyde (which covered territory from Cumbria to the Clyde), Dalriada (modern Argyll) and “Pictland” (which covered much of what is now central and northern Scotland) took shape. The Hebrides and northern isles were largely controlled by their own Norse-gaelic kings who were as much answerable to Norway as anyone on the mainland until the Middle Ages.

But it wasn’t until the 9th century that Dalriada and Pictland merged under Kenneth Macalpine(firstkingofscots) to form the beginnings of Scotland

– even then the new kingdom (Alba) only existed north of the Forth-clyde line. Northumbria (once the most powerful kingdom on the British island) only joined the other southern kingdoms to form a united England in the 10th century.

One could argue that the trend of British history has been to move towards larger geo-political units – from the multitude of pre-roman Celtic kingdoms and tribes, to the post Roman kingdoms, the formation of the larger kingdoms (or principalities) of England, Wales and Scotland – and then the Union. There was no inevitability in the post-roman kingdoms coalescing into the different countries that crystallised along the current border lines that split the British island. The further blurring of the boundaries in 1707 brought conspicuous wealth to the whole British island and many are unconvinced that returning to lines first drawn in the 10th century (separating “north Britain” from the rest of Britain) would be to contemporary Scotland’s (or the UK’S) advantage.