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Spinning a Yarn

campaignlive.co.uk

32 pointshooboy5 comments

I feel vindicated. The article points out that the ancient tradition of Scottish tartans is actually a commercial invention about 250 years old, with a clear and unambiguous origin story. Hilarious example of capitalism at its, er, most... vigorous. Sir Walter Scott, not fooled for a minute, even plays a cameo role.

What a relief. As a US citizen with extensive Scottish ancestry this has puzzled me because I couldn’t find much historical evidence of this practice. While I loved the idea of a family tartan and so did my kids. But I also didn’t like the idea of being bamboozled, giving us Yanks an even worse reputation. So much falls into place...

The bogosity of clan tartans has been documented since at least 1940; see the footnotes in the chapter on Highland culture in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983).

> since at least 1940

According to the article, since The Glasgow Herald article in 1895. It turns out that Father Christmas isn't real either, but some things people really don't want to interrogate.

The chapter in The Invention of Tradition (there are PDFs of the book online if you're interested in the topic) is about the efforts by Scottish nationalists over the century prior to the Allens to establish the idea of kilts and clan tartans (and efforts by historians against these ideas - the author of the chapter points to a 1940 book by McClintock as making the case "conclusively"). Clan tartans were not, as represented in the article, "all made up in 1829 by two brothers from Surrey" - the Allens were popularizers, not the origin of the idea.

I mention this because I think that the whole idea of political "invention of tradition," while it has lost currency because it seems to reflect poorly on anti-colonial nationalist movements, is far more interesting than that of "random people making up stories for gain."

Crucially tartan was banned for about forty years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_Act_1746

Not quite a lifetime, but enough to totally disrupt any kind of continuity of history.

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