Invented Tradition & Romantic Nationhood

1. Scope and evidence

Established: That "invented tradition" is a real and influential historiographical concept, defined by Hobsbawm in 1983; that the systematic clan-tartan system is largely a 19th-century creation tied to commercial weavers, the 1822 royal visit and the fraudulent Vestiarium Scoticum (1842). Shared/Traditional: The popular belief that each clan has worn a unique, unchanging tartan "since time immemorial" — this is the tradition the scholarship dismantles. Disputed: Several of Trevor-Roper's own specific claims — above all that the small kilt (fèileadh beag) was "invented" by Thomas Rawlinson around the 1720s. This card flags that the myth-busting essay itself requires critical scrutiny; the Rawlinson story rests on a lone 1768 letter and is contradicted by earlier pictorial evidence.

2. Hobsbawm and Ranger's theoretical framework

The intellectual value of this card lies less in the Scottish facts than in the tool used to analyse them. In 1983 the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and the Africanist Terence Ranger published The Invention of Tradition, a collection of essays under the Past and Present imprint at Cambridge University Press. In his introduction, "Inventing Traditions," Hobsbawm supplied the definition that has since become one of the most cited passages in modern historiography: an invented tradition is "a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past."

The crucial move is Hobsbawm's insistence that "where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past" — but that "the peculiarity of 'invented' traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious." In short, invented traditions are "responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations." Hobsbawm distinguished "tradition" (fixed, ritual, symbolic) from "custom" (which can adapt and change), and argued such inventions cluster when "a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which 'old' traditions had been designed" — pre-eminently the 19th century of industrialisation, mass politics and nation-building. He identified three broad functions: to establish social cohesion, to legitimise institutions and authority, and to inculcate beliefs and values.

The concept is deliberately general. The Scottish essay is only one of seven. David Cannadine analysed the British monarchy's ceremonial "c. 1820–1977," showing that much royal pageantry now assumed to be immemorial was elaborated only from around 1870 as real royal power waned. Bernard Cohn examined the invented rituals of the British Raj (the "imperial assemblage" durbars). Ranger himself wrote on colonial Africa, where administrators codified fluid customs into rigid "traditional" authority. Prys Morgan covered the Welsh cultural revival, and Hobsbawm closed with "Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914." The cultural historian Peter Burke, writing in Diogenes (Cambridge University Press, published online 4 January 2024), observed that "it is of course much rarer for historians to lend concepts and models to their neighbours than it is to borrow them," and that only three examples came to mind — E. P. Thompson's "moral economy" (1971), Hobsbawm's "invention of tradition" (1983), and one other — a striking measure of the concept's reach into sociology, anthropology, nationalism studies and heritage studies. It sits alongside Benedict Anderson's near-contemporary "imagined communities" (1983) as a cornerstone of the modernist account of nationalism.

3. Trevor-Roper's argument about the Highland tradition

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003), Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, contributed Chapter 2. His thesis is stated with characteristic relish: "the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention." Before the late 17th century, he claimed, the Highlanders "did not form a distinct people. They were simply the overflow of Ireland" — culturally a "colony" of Ireland. The apparatus of Scottish nationhood — kilt, clan tartan, bagpipe — "to which they ascribe great antiquity, is in fact largely modern," developed "after, sometimes long after, the Union with England."

Trevor-Roper structured the "forging" of Scotland into three myths (later expanded in his posthumous 2008 book The Invention of Scotland): a political myth (the fabricated ancient royal line advanced by George Buchanan and Hector Boece); a literary myth (James Macpherson's "Ossian," a genuine literary fraud that Trevor-Roper argued was a "usurpation of Irish culture"); and a sartorial myth (the kilt and tartan). Within the sartorial myth, two claims stand out. First, that the small kilt or fèileadh beag — the tailored, sewn-pleat garment worn today, as opposed to the older belted plaid or fèileadh mòr — was "invented" around the 1720s by Thomas Rawlinson, an English Quaker ironmaster, for the convenience of Highland furnace workers at Invergarry. Second, that the systematic assignment of specific setts to specific clans was substantially a 19th-century commercial creation, driven by manufacturers such as William Wilson & Son of Bannockburn and consummated by the fraudulent Vestiarium Scoticum of the Sobieski Stuart brothers. On this second point Trevor-Roper was largely right, and later specialists agree.

4. The critical reassessment of Trevor-Roper's specific claims

Here the "accuracy over patriotism" standard must be turned on the myth-buster himself. Trevor-Roper's essay is a brilliant, mischievous polemic — but it is not reliable in all its particulars, and Scottish dress historians have subjected it to sharp correction.

The Rawlinson kilt story is the weakest link. Its sole primary source is a single letter written in 1768 by Ivan (Evan) Baillie of Aberiachan and published in the Edinburgh Magazine in March 1785, under the pointed title "The Felie-beg, no part of the Highland dress." Baillie wrote that "about 50 years ago, one Thomas Rawlinson, an Englishman," running ironworks in Glengarry and Lochaber, "thought it no great stretch of invention to abridge the dress and make it handy and convenient for his workmen," and certified "from my own knowledge, that till I returned from Edinburgh to reside in this Country in the year 1725… I never saw the felie-beg used." That is the entire documentary basis. Later scholars have noted that Baillie was a Lowland-educated unionist writing at a moment when there were moves to discontinue Highland dress in the regiments — a possible political motive to present the garment as a recent English contrivance. The folklorist J. G. Mackay, in The Romantic Story of the Highland Garb and Tartan (Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 1924), dismissed it as a "myth," alleging that "the article in question was written with the intention of discrediting the dress as a national garb"; Sir Thomas Innes of Learney called it "a wretched story"; and the musicologist John Purser observed that there is no support for the tale in Rawlinson's own copious surviving papers.

Against the single letter stands pictorial evidence predating Rawlinson. The armorial bearings of the Chief of the Skenes, dated 1692, appear to show a figure in a small kilt; textile historian Peter MacDonald of the Scottish Tartans Authority argues that because the belted plaid was made from two joined cloth-widths, "it is therefore not beyond the wit of man not to join them," and that wearing only the lower portion "seems to have come into fashion in the latter part of the 17th century." The modern scholarly consensus, reflected at the National Museums of Scotland and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is that the small kilt evolved gradually from the belted plaid in the late 17th/early 18th century; Rawlinson's, at most, may be an early documented instance of sewn-in pleats, not the invention of the garment.

The most pointed published rebuke comes from within Scottish academia. In From Tartan to Tartanry (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Murray Pittock wrote that it is "ridiculous to suppose that an English Quaker industrialist could determine the sartorial priorities of… a national culture," and characterised Trevor-Roper's treatment as marked by "easy vehemence and lack of either rigour or depth," noting that the thesis "became prestigious and influential, despite its author's lack of acquaintance with Scottish history or Gaelic scholarship." Hugh Cheape, the leading historian of Highland dress and former head of the Scottish Material Culture Research Centre at National Museums Scotland, judged that the whole debate "has tended to be circular, without adding much more than value judgement to our knowledge of Highland dress," while conceding — importantly — that the individual clan tartans known today were indeed largely "the inventions of astute manufacturers in the nineteenth century." Ellen Beard notes bluntly that "the Rawlinson thesis has been refuted."

Pittock had made a related point earlier, in "The Jacobite Cult" (2002). Tartan, he argued, was already a symbol of old and traditional Scotland in the 16th-century ceremonies for Anne of Denmark's marriage to James VI. Michael Lynch has found it at the Holyrood court of James, Duke of Albany (the future James VII) in the early 1680s. Throughout the Jacobite century it was a badge of patriotism. On this reading Scott "re-animated a corpus of existing ideas and images" rather than inventing a national myth single-handed. What changed in the 19th century was that the imagery was stripped of its political meaning and turned into heritage and kitsch.

The lesson is methodological: the general concept of invented tradition survives intact; the systematisation-of-clan-tartans claim survives; but a specific, vivid, much-repeated factual assertion by an eminent historian turned out to be built on a single tendentious source. That Trevor-Roper's own reputation was, in the very year The Invention of Tradition appeared (1983), "severely damaged" by his authentication of the forged Hitler Diaries is a further, salutary irony for a scholar so alert to fabrication in others.

5. Sir Walter Scott's role (see also: History-series card on the Jacobite Risings)

Scott is the card's prominent figure because he is the hinge between the literary and the ceremonial. His achievement was twofold. In literature, The Lady of the Lake (1810) and above all Waverley (1814), the first historical novel, humanised and romanticised the Jacobite Highlands, transforming a culture recently suppressed and "othered" after Culloden into an object of nostalgic pride for Lowland Scots and English readers alike — while carefully reconciling that romantic past with loyal membership of the British Union. As one modern assessment puts it, Scott created "a Scotland of sublime Highland landscapes… peopled by courageous heroes in kilts fighting battles we already know they will lose."

In stagecraft, Scott orchestrated the 1822 visit of George IV to Edinburgh — the first by a reigning monarch since 1633 — as a "plaided panorama." He issued a pamphlet of guidance (Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh, and Others, in Prospect of His Majesty's Visit), set a Highland dress code for events, and choreographed a "gathering of the clans," with the portly king appearing in Royal Stewart tartan and flesh-coloured tights. (The visit and the Vestiarium Scoticum are treated in detail on the History-series card on the Jacobite Risings; here they matter only as the mechanism by which an invented tradition was publicly consecrated.) Notably, Scott himself was sceptical of the very clan-tartan claims the pageantry popularised, having in 1829 expressed doubt about the Sobieski Stuarts' manuscript.

Richard Finlay questions the usual straight line from 1822 to Victorian tartanry. Few people saw George IV's visit, many who did found it ridiculous, and the monarchy was then in disrepute after the king's treatment of Queen Caroline. No monarch returned for twenty years. In Finlay's account it was Victoria, with Balmoral, the railways, the popular press and her Highland Journals, who made the "cult of Scottish monarchy" a mass phenomenon, and who rested it on middle-class and presbyterian values rather than aristocratic display. He adds that its invented character "does little to take away" from its success. He also suggests the tartan monarchy offered a template for how the Crown later adapted itself to India and the wider empire.

6. Four ages of Scottish myth

Colin Kidd and James Coleman, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), argue that tartanry was only one of several national myths, and not the most important. They identify at least four overlapping phases. In the sixteenth century Hector Boece and George Buchanan refashioned a medieval origin legend of forty-odd ancient kings. In 1729 the Jacobite priest Thomas Innes demolished it by comparing medieval king-lists, leaving Scotland briefly "under-mythologized". In the 1760s Ossian supplied a new, equally fabulous Celtic antiquity. Then came romantic Highlandism, which did not depend on any single text and so could not be exposed as Ossian had been. Finally there was the nineteenth-century Presbyterian story of liberty.

Highlandism grew from several sources: the repeal of the ban on Highland dress in 1782, a safely sentimental Jacobitism, and a new taste for the sublime that made rugged mountains beautiful. Kidd and Coleman argue that Queen Victoria's blend of Presbyterian and Jacobite enthusiasms did more to fix the tartan image than George IV's brief visit of 1822. Lowlanders adopted the Highlands as the image of all Scotland. The antiquary John Pinkerton tried to give Lowlanders a separate myth by tracing them, wrongly, to the Picts, but Walter Scott mocked his Pictish theories, along with the legendary king Fergus, in The Antiquary.

The dominant myth of the nineteenth century was not tartan but Presbyterian liberty. It ran from Wallace and Bruce, through Knox and the Covenanters, to a Union of equals in 1707, a view historians call "unionist-nationalism". At the 600th anniversary of Stirling Bridge, Lord Rosebery said Wallace had made Scotland great, "and if Scotland were not great the Empire of all the Britons would not stand where it does". The Hungarian exile Lajos Kossuth spoke at a Wallace Monument meeting in 1856, and letters from Garibaldi and Mazzini were framed in wood from "the Wallace Oak". Jacobites and Mary, Queen of Scots fitted badly: they were for songs and novels, not for national politics. The parchment in the 1881 Culloden cairn honoured the Highlanders who died, not the cause.

In the twentieth century the myths were turned upside down. Writers of the Scottish Renaissance, led by Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, blamed Knox and the Reformation for stifling Scottish culture. With industrial decline and the end of empire, a new myth of victimhood and glorious failure emerged, from Flodden to Culloden, the Clearances and de-industrialisation, alongside the claim that tartanry had "anaesthetised" the nation. Kidd and Coleman stress that these arguments were "no less mythological than the myths they criticized". When the Conservative Scottish Secretary Ian Lang said in 1993 that Bannockburn had made an equal Union possible, it came as a jolt, though a century earlier it would have been the common view.

7. A northern test case: Up Helly Aa

Shetland's fire festival is often cited as a textbook invented tradition. The dates support that label in part. The historian Callum G. Brown, in Up-helly-aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland (Manchester University Press, 1998), traces it to the riotous Old Christmas and New Year tar-barrelling of 19th-century Lerwick. The festival was first kept on 29 January in 1873, gained a torchlit procession in 1881 and a burning Viking galley in 1889, and its leader became the Guizer Jarl in 1906. The Jarl's squad has dressed as Vikings every year only since 1921. Its Norse imagery drew on a Victorian Norse revival among Shetland writers. [Established]

Brown nonetheless rejects "invention" as a verdict. He argues that the word is often used as a dismissal of the participants, and that the festival was reshaped by Lerwick's young working men themselves, not imposed by an elite. On his reading, what survives is not the Viking costume but the town's old habit of mocking authority, kept alive in the satirical Bill and the guizing squads. Other scholars, including the social anthropologist Jonathan Church, have used the invented-tradition framework more directly. The case shows the concept's value for dating practices, and its limits as an account of what those practices mean to the people who keep them. [Shared]

8. Broader significance and a nuanced conclusion

Beyond Scotland, "invented tradition" reframed how historians read national symbols everywhere — from the "ancient" Welsh eisteddfod to the durbars of British India to the seemingly timeless choreography of a coronation. It taught a generation to ask not "is this old?" but "when, by whom, and for what purpose was this made to seem old?"

On the Highland question specifically, the defensible position is a middle one. Tartan cloth is genuinely old: the Falkirk fragment is a third-century check, and the Glen Affric tartan is a true multi-colour tartan of c.1500–1600. Regional or "district" variation was real, but it reflected the local availability of natural dyes — plants, lichens, roots — rather than any codified family system; a sett told you roughly where cloth was woven, not to which family the wearer belonged. What is substantially invented is the specific system — the idea that each clan possesses a unique, ancient, regulated tartan — together with much of the kilted pageantry, both products of late-18th- and 19th-century Romanticism, military uniform, commercial marketing and royal theatre. To deny the older roots is as unhistorical as to accept the Victorian system as immemorial. Authenticity, as one dress historian implies, comes from record and recognition and roughly two centuries of continuous practice — not from a spurious claim to antiquity.