TOM DEVINE

So intense was the Scottish engagement with Empire that almost every nook and cranny of national life was affected by this powerful force. Despite their long-term and profound role in colonial history, however, the Scots seem to have responded to the loss of overseas territories in the 1950s and 1960s with remarkable equanimity. Indeed, the British as a whole accepted decolonisation with an extraordinary sang-froid.

No single cause conspired to weaken the emotional attachment of the Scots to Empire but the profound crisis which overwhelmed the nation between the two world wars was arguably of primary significance. The disastrous inter-war experience was the culmination of structural weaknesses reaching much further back in time.

Admittedly, the close connections with imperial markets helped boost productive capacity enormously in Victorian Scotland. One significant consequence was a marked increase in Scottish population as the economy created more employment opportunities. In 1701, Scotland had a population of around 1.1 million. By 1831 the figure stood at 2.3 million, and in 1911 it reached 4.7 million. Further confirmation of a dynamic economy was the large increase in immigration in the Victorian era.

Trading with the Empire made some Scots very rich. The increases in the outflow of capital from Scotland after 1870 were also reflected in the new affluence of the Scottish middle classes. The level of overseas investment was one of the most telling manifestations of this new wealth. It grew from an estimated £60m in 1870 to £500m by 1914. In the 1880s it was reckoned that three-quarters of all British companies established for overseas investment were of Scottish origin.

Here was confirmation that Scotland's imperial economy had generated huge increases in capital. The social elites and many in the business and professional classes had done rather well out of Empire. The picture is, however, somewhat gloomier for the rest of the population. Scotland was a grossly unequal society in the heyday of imperial success. R D Baxter's contemporary calculations for 1867 suggest that around 70% of "productive persons" in Scotland, almost a million people, belonged to his two bottom categories of lower-skilled and unskilled male workers who earned on average less than £50 a year.

Short-term unemployment was always a threat. In the major cities there were large pools of seasonal and casual labour, reckoned in the early 1900s to number around one-quarter of the workforce, engaged in jobs such as portering, catering and street selling. Earnings were paltry and volatile. For most of the period between 1830 and 1914, Scottish industrial wage rates were lower than the English average. Living costs, on the other hand, were higher.

That Victorian industry founded on Empire was not a source of general prosperity is confirmed by the examples of Scottish migration and housing. Precisely when manufacturing was achieving remarkable success in overseas markets, the Scots were leaving their native land in large numbers for the United States, Canada and Australasia.

More than two million people emigrated from Scotland overseas between 1815 and 1939 (another 600,000 moved south of the Border). It seemed that many Scots were voting with their feet. The condition of working-class housing confirmed that mass poverty was a marked feature of Scotland's age of Empire. In 1911 nearly half of the Scottish population lived in one-room or two-room dwellings, compared with just over 7% in England. Rents were significantly higher north of the Border. In 1914 more than two million Scots, nearly half the population, lived more than two persons to a room, fulfilling the contemporary criteria of "overcrowding".

For families on limited earnings, it made economic sense to take small tenement flats at a rental sufficiently affordable to allow them to avoid arrears or eviction. The problem for very many was how to pay rent. In 1914 in Glasgow alone there were more than 20,000 unoccupied houses, one-tenth of the city's total stock - the most striking manifestation of the depth of Glasgow's poverty in the very decade when it proclaimed itself Second City of the Empire.

Despite high levels of emigration, Scotland suffered from a chronic oversupply of labour in the heyday of Empire. Low pay, underemployment, casual work and broken time are consistent with that pattern. Some Scots had grown wealthy, but the majority remained mired in poverty.

Unemployment soared to unprecedented levels in the early 1930s. In the industrial heartland of the western lowlands, the famed "Workshop of the British Empire", more than one-quarter of the entire labour force, nearly 200,000, were out of work in 1932. New industries failed to develop and poor housing and slum conditions remained as bad as ever.

The unprecedented scale of emigration in the 1930s intensified anxieties. Many of those who left were skilled and semi-skilled workers, the economic lifeblood of an industrial nation.

Rather than being seen as evidence of the virility of an imperial race, emigration was viewed as absolute confirmation of terminal national crisis. The most arresting illustration of the economic irrelevance of Empire to Scottish prosperity was the experience between the wars of the Dundee jute industry. By the 1890s, Bengal had overtaken its Scottish parent to become the world's dominant centre for jute sacks and hessian cloth. Not surprisingly, in the depressed market conditions of the 1930s, Dundee jute interests pleaded for tariffs on cheap imports from Calcutta. But their pleas were in vain. Now it was Dundee which looked more like the colony, and Bengal the metropole.

All this shattered faith in Scotland as the powerhouse of Empire. Long before decolonisation took place, the old imperial markets were no longer seen to be of vital benefit. Though the economy recovered during the Second World War and the immediate post-war period, the fully enfranchised masses now had other and more pressing social priorities which could be delivered through the ballot box. It was hardly surprising that the majority of the Scottish people reacted to the end of Empire with equanimity, despite Scotland's historic role in imperial expansion.

After 1945, as imperial decline set in, government intervention in industry, political commitment to full employment and, above all, the beginning of the welfare state, slowly delivered unprecedented security and material improvement. The age of Empire may have passed, but, ironically, the Union in the 1940s and 1950s was now even more important than before.

As one of the poorer parts of the United Kingdom, Scotland was likely to gain more than most other regions from an interventionist social and economic policy guaranteeing decent standards of life introduced in the very decade when India, the jewel in the imperial crown, won independence. It was now government support from cradle to grave rather than the old connections of Empire which became the sheet anchor of the Union state.