SCOTLAND AND INDUSTRIALISATION

The period from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign to the Second World War was a good one for the history of the Scottish economy. It was characterized by flourishing heavy industry, based on iron and steel manufacture that generated a diversity of engineering products and was fuelled by coal. This was the era when the railway network spread throughout the economy, even to remote parts of the Highlands, and when British finance and technology played a leading part in fostering economic progress throughout the world. Scotland was a full participant in that process, providing more than its fair share of inventors, scientists, industrialists and financiers. Indeed, for Scotland, the Victorian era produced much to support the claim that it was the country’s greatest era of innovation and growth. Industrialisation proceeded on a scale hitherto unsurpassed and created a continuous urban sprawl in the central belt, along the valleys of the Clyde and the Forth. It was an era in which Scottish goods were traded throughout the world, and in which Scottish finance helped underwrite the expansion of the international economy.

In popular perception, too, the great period of Scottish economic advance took place in Queen Victoria’s reign. As Devine observed in his survey of Scottish history, in the formal opening of Glasgow City Chambers by the Queen in 1888, and in hosting the 1901 International Exhibition in Kelvingrove Park, an event attended by 11.5 million visitors, Glasgow had established its position as a great international centre of industry and as the second city of the Empire.