One attraction of the latter, admittedly counter-intuitive proposition is that it offers an explanation for the second problem: why Scottish nationalism has failed, for more than thirty years, to win more than minority support, even under the Thatcher and Major régimes. (Indeed, the SNP have never subsequently repeated the percentage of the poll they achieved in the general election of October 1974.) Why, in other words, were most Scots able to display high levels of both Scottish national consciousness and British nationalism. If a Scottish nation only came into existence after the construction of the British state, and if the formation of this Scottish national consciousness was historically inseparable from the formation of British national consciousness, then for Scots, particularly working-class Scots, ‘Britishness’ may have taken political priority, because it was at the level of the British state that crucial class battles had always been fought out.

John Foster once argued that there were five main ‘theoretical problems posed by Scotland’s history as a nation’: the origins of Scottish nationality; the end of Scottish statehood; the survival of Scottish nationality; the duality of Scottish and English national allegiances; and the timing of demands for greater Scottish self-government. [2] As can be seen from the summary above, my book deals with the first four. Given that I disagree with the solutions which Foster has proposed to these problems, I turned to his review expecting to meet an unfavourable critical response. In this, at least, I was not disappointed. I was disappointed, however, to find that Foster had, for the most part, chosen not to engage with what I had actually written, but to dismiss my argument, a priori, on theoretical grounds. Foster ignores most of my material on Scotland, except for issues concerning Scottish economic history – issues which are important in their own right, but peripheral to this discussion. [3] Indeed, most of his review is a critique of the general positions set out in my first two chapters. Foster tells us that Marxism is not wrong over the origin and class content of nationhood – I have simply failed to understand it properly: Marxism apparently posits no necessary connection between nationhood and capitalism, or indeed any mode of production. [4]

I do not intend to repeat my arguments about either nationhood in general or Scottish nationhood in particular, since they are set out at length in Origins and space is short. I want to focus instead on two issues. First, the arguments with which Foster seeks to challenge my understanding of Scottish history. Second, the theoretical assumptions which Foster himself brings to this debate (since these raise issues of concern, not only to socialists based in Scotland like Foster and myself, but to the Left more generally).

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Neil Davidson

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