Perhaps the original exponents of ‘nationalist unionism’ were the Scottish Liberals. Scotland's dominant party for around half-a-century following franchise reform in 1868, it – alongside the Scottish Conservatives – campaigned via the Convention of Royal Burghs for a Scottish Secretary in 1884. And after the Liberal split over Irish Home Rule in 1886, the party grappled with pressure to follow its own logic and establish a devolved Parliament in Scotland as well as Ireland.

For much of their electoral ascendancy, the Scottish Liberals presented themselves as the natural party of Scotland, defender of its distinctive position within the Union and more intuitively ‘Scottish’ than the Conservative and, later, Labour parties. Its nationalism, meanwhile, evolved, from support for administrative devolution that it shared with the Scottish Conservatives in the 1880s, to a sudden conversion to legislative devolution in 1886, something it (and its various permutations) continued to champion – to varying degrees – until into the early twenty-first century.

Although Liberal nationalism went beyond that of the Conservatives, it still counted as ‘nationalist unionism’ in that it did not countenance an end to the Anglo-Scottish Union, with even legislative devolution posited as a means of strengthening the UK and its empire, chiefly by keeping Ireland as part of the colonial metropole. In keeping with this book's broader thesis, it will also argue that the Scottish Liberals were the main ‘carrier’ of this nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the mantle was taken up by Scottish Labour and the Scottish Unionists.

Combining the historical and theoretical approach of the previous chapters on the Scottish Unionist Party, this chapter will highlight the Liberal claim to ‘stand up for Scotland’, examine how the Scottish and UK Liberal parties interacted over Home Rule and examine whether the nationalism in question was civic or ethnic in nature. In doing so, it will firmly refute the notion (see Nairn 1981) that nationalism was somehow ‘absent’ from latenineteenth-century Scotland.

The Scottish Liberal Ascendancy

From 1881, the Liberal Party in Scotland was organised on a ‘national’ basis, following the merger of the Liberal Associations in the ‘East and North’ and ‘West and South’ of Scotland. This produced the ‘Scottish Liberal Association’ (SLA), which, unlike the Welsh Liberal Federations, were not linked to the (English) National Liberal Federation.