Unenlightened days when racism was thought to be trendy

This strain of intellectual racism was not confined to the universities, but trickled down into school textbooks. I was shocked recently to open a popular school history book of the late 19th century which began with an account of Scotland’s place in the Aryan race family.

Perhaps we console ourselves that we knew some of this already. We reassure ourselves that alongside an unpleasant Scottish tradition of conservative imperialism there ran a worthy counter-current of radicalism, liberal virtue, anti-imperialism and anti-slavery.

Unfortunately, the Left was just as complicit in racism as the Right. Racism was just as compatible - if not more so - with a progressive outlook. Some Scots thinkers, such as Robert Knox, the anatomist and author of The Races of Men, combined racism with hostility towards empire. The reasoning ran as follows: separate races of men belonged to their specific environments, so the colonising of territory A by inhabitants of continent B ran against the grain of nature. Such a wrong committed against the law of nature could only result in the deterioration of the guilty race. Anti-imperialism was therefore justified by sound racist theory.

Race wasn’t only about colour differences between whites and non-whites. The obsession with racial classification led to demarcations being drawn between different categories of white peoples and even within nations. Most obviously, 19th-century Scots hurled abuse at Irish immigrants. The Irish were unwelcome not only on account of their alien religious ways, but also because they were reckoned to belong to a different - and inferior - race: the Celts.

The political commentator John Steill continued the comparison, complaining of "murderous incursions of human locusts from Ireland" which were eating away at Scotland’s inherited racial characteristics.

But were Celts not native to Scotland? We have to confront an historical revelation even more incomprehensible to our current understanding of what it is to be Scottish: that 19th-century Scots as often as not prized their racial identity above their national one. Many Lowlanders thought of themselves as a Germanic super-race, describing themselves as Teutons or Anglo-Saxons; their fellow Scots of the Highlands they often denigrated as an inferior race of Celts.

Not only did these Scots think the Union of England and Scotland was a good thing; they felt it to be inevitable and natural, an amalgamation of the Saxon peoples of England and Lowland Scotland into a common political home.

Some racist historians took this position to its logical extreme and wondered why the Saxons of Lowland Scotland fought their Saxon brethren in the Scottish War of Independence. Several historians found themselves depicting the deeds of Wallace and Bruce as heroic, but somewhat unfortunate, deeds in an unnecessary and fratricidal civil war fought within the confines of the Saxon race-family. Wallace enjoyed a new cult-status as a Saxon race-hero. Similarly, Robert Burns was praised by the provocatively racist intellectual, Thomas Carlyle, as "a piece of the right Saxon stuff".

Strangest of all, one of the proudest claims of 19th-century Scottish Saxonists was a patriotic boast that the Lowlanders of Scotland were more genuinely "Olde Englishe" than the English themselves, who from the Norman Conquest onwards had become a melting pot of various immigrant groups.

Ironically, the one form of racism which still seems to be acceptable today in an otherwise politically correct Scotland is an antipathy towards the Auld Enemy, a form of ethnic hostility which 19th-century Scottish racists would not have understood.

Dr Colin Kidd, a Reader in History at the University of Glasgow, will deliver a lecture on "Race and the Scottish Nation, 1750-1900" at the Royal Society of Edinburgh tonight at 5:30pm.