Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott

Author:J. H. Elliott [Elliott, J. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300234954
Google: lN5mDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300234953
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Call for Home Rule

1860–1975

Grievance and Redress

A sense of grievance can easily become all-consuming. Grievance was no stranger to nineteenth-century Scots and Catalans as they contemplated the nature of the relationship between the central government and themselves. Unequal unions inevitably encourage in the junior partner a feeling that the stronger party fails to understand it and ignores its concerns. Every indication of neglect – or, even worse, of deliberate ill-treatment – every misunderstanding, and every perceived or actual slight, is set alongside others in the storehouse of collective memory. As memories accumulate they create a mentality of victimhood that goes looking for some fresh grievance to add to the store. In a famous leading article of 4 December 1856 The Times unkindly described Scotland as ‘manifestly a country in want of a grievance’.1 It was not entirely wrong.

Catalonia and Scotland, however, from the seventeenth century onwards, did in fact have many good reasons to feel aggrieved. Greuge – ‘grievance’ or ‘affront’ – was a word frequently to be heard on Catalan lips. Among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Catalans there lurked a memory of the oppressive policies of Olivares that had led their countrymen to revolt in 1640. To this were added the rawer memories of the repression that followed the surrender of Barcelona in September 1714 and the abolition of the principality’s Constitutions, followed by the harsh periods of martial law under the government of successive captains-general. The collective memory of Scotland, shaped by its medieval Wars of Independence and its frequently unhappy experience of English behaviour both before and after the dynastic union of 1603, had at its forefront the repression that followed the uprisings of 1715 and 1745, the suppression of Highland culture, and the continuing tragedy of the Highland clearances.

On the other hand incorporating union had brought benefits to both countries, even if these were not always acknowledged or even obvious. The disaster of 1714 may or may not have administered a salutary shock to the Catalan psyche, but the eighteenth century had been a period of undeniable growth and prosperity for the principality, which took advantage of expanding domestic and imperial markets to lay the foundations of the commercial and industrial society that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century. Scotland, for its part, gained from the Union of 1707 full membership in what was rapidly becoming a dynamic political, commercial and imperial enterprise. This had allowed it to develop its native talents and ingenuity to a point where it was able to take its place as one of the great success stories of nineteenth-century Europe. It undoubtedly seized with both hands the opportunities that came its way, but it is hard to imagine that Scotland would have enjoyed such success, or that the success would have taken the form that it did, if it had remained outside the British imperial project.

Yet grievances rankled and by the final decades of the nineteenth century were leading to demands for major changes in the existing political and constitutional systems of both Spain and Britain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.