The Rousing Of The Scottish Working Class

The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class

Red Scotland!

An excellent resource for teaching and learning, this book explores the rise and decline of left radicalism in Scotland c.1872 to 1932. A journey through these turbulent times observes the response of Scottish artisans to legal restrictions on trade-union activities in the 1870s, trade union formation among the unskilled from the late 1880s, and the origins and impact of the Scottish socialist movement. The Labour movement in Scotland was to face many new challenges by the twentieth century. During the era of 'Red Scotland', 1910 to 1922, we see Scottish workers fully engaged in the labour and social unrest in the years before the Great War; monitor the incubation of workers' grievances during the war; see the growth of the anti-war movement and the influence of revolutionary politics from 1918; and witness Scottish Labour on the threshold of an extraordinary political breakthrough by 1922. The 1920s saw the rapid rise of Labour, but growing unemployment and a massive emigration of Scottish workers helped to fragment the left and set in motion the decline of left radicalism in Scotland. This book represents a major and up to date survey of the most dramatic years in the history of Scottish Labour.

Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society, 1700-1850

Between the early eighteenth and the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Scottish society was transformed by industrialisation, urbanisation and major changes in agriculture and rural society. The rate of town and city growth was among the fastest in western Europe, migration and emigration accelerated and the traditional way of life in the Highland and Lowland countryside was brought to an end through the pressures of market demand and landlord strategy. Such a major upheaval created increased social tension. Conflict and Stabilitiy in Scottish Society challenges the previously accepted view that this major upheaval in Scottish life did not stimulate much unrest and that a modern industrial society developed relatively smoothly. The papers here, given at the Scottish Historical Studies Seminar at Strathclyde University in 1988–89, suggest that protest was more common, more enduring and more diverse than is usually supposed.