TOM DEVINE at GLASGOW UNIVERSITY

Tom Devine is the leading authority on modern Scottish history and through his books (among them, 'The Great Highland Famine' and 'The Scottish Nation 1700 to 2000') that for most people Tom Devine will be best known.
Professor Tom Devine contends that the English created the British Empire , but the Scots ran it through the provision of Bankers, Administrators , Generals , Soldiers , Governors , Missionaries that England , which at the time only had Two Universities ( both Schools of Divinity) when Scotland had Four ( Mostly producing Technocrats , Lawyers , Engineers and Skilled Captains of Industry and Commerce) , more or less the ingredients of vast Imperial expansion and maintenance.
Sir Tom Devine has recently declared himself in favour of Independence for Scotland.

In this lecture entitled "An Empire of Commerce: Three Centuries of Scottish Enterprise in the East" we are told of the dry statistics and telling contributions of the massive Scottish presence that made the English Empire into the International dominating force in the 18th , 19th and most of the 20th Century.



The "High Noon" of Unionism , according to Devine , was in 1957 when Scotland was a nation returning more Conservative MPs than at any time before or since.Even though the final outcome of the referendum was 45-55% against Independence , he is adamant that the momentum away from staying in the Union from the high point of the late fifties is getting shorter and the option of Devo-Max will no longer be able to appease the drive towards full Independence.

In this lecture he tells the story of Scotland in The Union and also his conclusions about the present and future of Scotland.



In this lecture ( he comes on at the 4mins 30sec mark) he explains Scottish over-representation of the architects and cognitive drivers of the Empire meant to North America and the development of the Superpower of the late 20th and early 21st Century.