Lying behind the changing fortunes in politics in Edinburgh is its changing economy. It is, however, not a question of reading one off the other, assuming that ‘politics’ is simply the expression of the ‘economy’. Furthermore, we have grown so used to defining Edinburgh as a city of professions, money and culture that we tend to assume that this has always been so. Our examination of the city's politics indicates otherwise. Small, local, capital had expression in its ‘non-political’ politics for such a long time, occupying most of the twentieth century, and thus shaping what came after it.

In 1914, the Merchant Company of Edinburgh proclaimed its local patriotism:

This begged many questions which the Merchant Company was aware of. It was no longer

The Company, in other words, now represented ‘many various and sometimes antagonistic interests’.

EDINBURGH CASTES

It had tended to be ever thus. John Heiton's Castes of Edinburgh, fifty years previously, had made that plain:

Robbie Gray's study of the labour aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh showed how status differences –caste distinctions –ran all the way down Edinburgh's class system, but that ‘the city's notorious snobbery seems to have derived from social and political rivalries encouraged by this heterogeneity of the wealthier classes’ (Gray 1976: 20). It is not difficult to characterise Edinburgh as a city of class distinctions –‘ snobbery’ –but these social distinctions were not bi-modal, but subtle and multi-varied.