Technology and Nationalism

Scots seem to be of two minds when it comes to Britain. On the one hand, Scots have fought and died for King (or Queen) and Country for nearly 250 years, supplying what is arguably the world’s best infantry to the British Army. The “feathered bonnet” worn by Scottish bagpipe bands traces its ancestry to the tall bearskins worn by Napoleon’s Old Guard. Scots picked up the headgear on battlefields across Europe when the original owners no longer needed it. Similarly, the leopard skin tunics on the bass drummers are from the Sudan where Highland regiments defeated an army of radical Islamists on the outskirts of Khartoum in the late 1800’s.


On the other hand, Scots do not really see themselves as British, Tony Blair (an Edinburgh native) not withstanding. They almost never refer to the English by that name, preferring “our neighbors to the south” or some other euphemism. It reminded me of Harry Potter, where the name of Voldemort is never called out. That actually makes a certain amount of sense, since J.K. Rowling, another native Edinburgher, wrote the early drafts of her first book in a coffee shop by George IV Bridge.


This can go to extremes; around downtown Edinburgh, you can see stickers proclaiming “Scottish not British” with the blue and white flag of St. Andrew.


Alec, who spent a semester at the University of Edinburgh, tells the story of a student-organized Scottish nationalism rally. The organizers xeroxed dozens of copies of the flag and slogan and posted them on campus bulletin boards, with the time and place. Some wag, with his or her own sense of history and nationalism, scrawled across the paper: Cornish, not Scottish—get a color printer. It seems the flag of Cornwall (the cross of St. Piran, patron saint of tin miners) has a white X-shaped cross on a black background.