Since 1707, in the absence of independent statehood, the ‘abstract coherency’ of the Scottish people as a ‘nation’ has frequently been predicated on stylised readings of Scotland's past and complementary inferences regarding native sensibilities. As has been highlighted elsewhere, ‘the historic sense’ is often more vivid ‘in the dispossessed than in those who are themselves the visible guardians of tradition’. And indeed, in a very real sense, ‘Scotland’ has survived the Union and the subsequent emigrant diaspora as a set of shared values evoked by its history and personified in its heroes.

Significantly, this association of principle and precedent has encouraged the conflation of the discourses of radicalism and patriotism at various stages in Scotland's political evolution. Most particularly, the historicism of the Scottish Labour movement perpetuated this vision in the twentieth century. In 1924 James Maxton considered that Scotland was ‘a nation which, above all, has the democratic spirit’, and in her biography of Ramsay MacDonald, Margaret Agnes Hamilton considered that to the Scot, ‘a sense of the dignity and equality of man is native’. In arriving at such and similar conclusions, the influence of history was profound. William Haddow recounted that