T. M. Devine
Sir Thomas Martin Devine , usually known as Sir Tom Devine, is a Scottish academic and author who specializes in the history of Scotland. He was knighted and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to Scottish historiography, and is known for his overviews of modern Scottish history. He is an advocate of the total history approach to the history of Scotland. He is professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and was formerly a professor at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Aberdeen.
Life
Early and personal life
Thomas Martin Devine was born on 30 July 1945 in Motherwell in Lanarkshire, southern Scotland. His family is Scots-Irish from Irish Catholic roots. His four grandparents had migrated from British-ruled Ireland in 1890. His father benefited from what savings they accrued from working in the steel and coal industries, and went to university, going on to become a life-long schoolteacher. Tom Devine himself has five children.He attended Our Lady's High School in Motherwell, where, he has recounted, he gave up history in his second year because the way that history was taught at the time was "endlessly boring", choosing geography instead.
Before his academic career commenced, Devine had several vacation jobs as variously a grave-digger, a Butlins Bluecoat in the holiday camp at Filey, and an uncertified French language teacher in schools in Lanarkshire.
Academic career
Devine graduated from the University of Strathclyde in 1968 with First Class Honours in economic and social history. In 1969, a few months after commencing doctoral research, Devine was hired at the University of Strathclyde, where he was appointed assistant lecturer in history and eventually rose to head of the history department. In 1981 he and T. C. Smout were the founding editors of the periodical Scottish Economic and Social History, which was later to become the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, Devine editing it until 1984.He was appointed professor of Scottish history in 1988, and later became dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences, and then deputy principal of the university from 1994 to 1998. In 1991, Devine was awarded the degree of DLitt by the university in recognition of the quality of his published research to that date.
In 1998, he moved to the University of Aberdeen and became the founding director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, later the UK Arts and Humanities Research Centre in I&SS. He was also appointed to the externally-funded Glucksman Professorship of Irish and Scottish Studies.
From 2006 to 2011 Devine was the Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, retaining the title as Emeritus Professor afterwards.
From 2008 he was also the first director there of the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies
In 2010, Devine participated in the Royal Society of Edinburgh's yearly symposium on the relationship between Scotland and slavery, where he delivered a plenary lecture.
Devine was listed #16 in 2014 in "Scotland's Power 100: The 100 most powerful people in Scotland" by The Herald, which described him as "the country's pre-eminent historian".
He was ranked seventh most influential Catholic in Britain by The Tablet in 2015 which described him as "widely seen as the intellectual heavyweight behind Scottish nationalism".
Politics
Devine tried to avoid politics in his writing, stating in a 2010 interview with the Scottish Review of Books that he hoped that people could not tell his politics from his writings, in support of which he observed that the blogosphere had had him down as a Scottish Nationalist in the 1990s and yet as an obvious Unionist a decade later.He noted that he had often told people that "the future is not my period" when asked about current events, a statement that he had initially also made when asked about the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
He was, however, later to take a public stance on the referendum, voting "Yes" for independence.
He presented a public statement explaining his reasoning for this to reporters in a Glasgow restaurant on 15 August 2014, stating that he had himself never been a member of any political party, although members of his family, grandparents and parents, had supported the Labour Party.
After giving his views on the Scottish Parliament, Scottish history and arts, the economy and education system of Scotland, and Irish Catholic Scots, he explained why he rejected "devolution max" as "just a sticking plaster" and came to the conclusion that he would be voting "Yes". He is now among Scots who have changed their mind on Independence, and wants a united front to evict the Conservatives from Downing Street.
He has also spoken out on other political issues, such as objecting to the campaign to remove the statue of Henry Dundas from St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, stating that it was based upon bad history, a simplistic view that gave Dundas sole responsibility for something where larger forces were in fact at play, an argument that brought him into conflict with Geoff Palmer.
Another issue on which he has publicly commented was the removal of David Hume's name from a tower in George Square, Edinburgh.
He has expressed the opinion that "argetting statues is a largely meaningless gesture" that "does little to address the very real and ongoing issue of racial prejudice".
Addressing a petition in 2020 to remove the names of the Tobacco Lords from streets in Glasgow, he stated that they should be retained "as a reminder of past, warts and all" and that "Scotland and slavery should be embedded firmly in the school curriculum".
Works
Devine is a leading proponent of Scottish-Irish historical studies, and has authored five monographs and edited over a dozen collections.He is a proponent of "total" history, which seeks to incorporate all aspects of history, from economic through social to cultural.
He has written on a wide range of subjects in 18th and 19th century Scottish history, from the colonial trade through agriculture to migration, with works dealing with both Highland and Lowland Scotland.
Early: ''The Tobacco Lords''
Devine's 1975 book The Tobacco Lords about the Tobacco Lords originated in work that he had done for his doctoral thesis on the period after 1775.It followed in the footsteps of Jacob Myron Price and dealt with the "golden age" of the tobacco merchants of Glasgow, dealing with who the merchants were, their trading methods, what they did with their profits, and how the American Revolution affected them.
Divided into four parts, the book addresses the investment of profits in part 1, trading methods in part 2, the period after the American Revolution in part 3, and the period after 1783 in part 4; and is structured as a set of questions and answers around specific points.
In it, Devine propounded the traditional view about how a consumer goods industry in Glasgow arose in part in order to exchange for tobacco from Virginia and Maryland, and has detailed accounts of merchants like William Cunninghame and Company.
James H. Soltow of Michigan State University observed that Devine's account contained "few surprises".
Professor of history Joseph Clarke Robert of the University of Richmond called it "an excellent book", providing just the one quibble that the map facing page 12 had Jamestown on south of the James River rather than in its correct position to the north.
Jacob M. Price of the University of Michigan observed "a fair number of petty errors" in American geography.
Devine had only addressed America incidentally, focussing upon Scotland.
Price also observed some confusion resulting from the same words meaning different things in English and Scottish business terminology.
T. C. Smout called it "a useful and thought-provoking volume" that "does not entirely satisfy" because it left unanswered questions about what happened to the tobacco trade and did not go into enough detail on an "important conclusion" that the American Revolution in fact did not fundamentally alter the tobacco trade, and that merchants in Glasgow largely picked up where they had left off after the war had finished.
Devine had pointed out that the diversification into sugar processing, leather tanning, boot and shoe manufacturing, and the iron, glass and coal industries, extension to Caribbean and European markets, and involvement in banking and land investments all preceded the American Revolution, rather than followed it.
William J. Hausman of the University of North Carolina agreed with Smout that in a "generally of high quality" book it was "disappointing and annoying" that although Devine had documented the pre-war investment pattern well, explanation of exactly how the Glasgow merchants reestablished their businesses remained "vague", Price concurring on the last point.
Devine was, in later life, to acknowledge the omission of the context of its entanglement with overseas slave-based economies as a blind spot in his early work on the Tobacco Lords.
1980s: ''The Great Highland Famine''
His 1988 The Great Highland Famine is an analysis of the impact of the late 1840s failure of the potato upon the Western Highlands of Scotland.It covers a longer period than its title might suggest, dealing with the 1840s and 1850s.
Based upon in-depth research using a wide range of historical records from the government, charitable institutions, censuses, local parishes, and the great estates of the period, it both in places reinforced earlier conclusions that had been made upon less evidence and elsewhere refuted some accepted ideas.
Devine divided the Highlands into east and west, and his conclusion about the western Highlands exemplified this.
His conclusion that the western Highlands were at risk was not a novel one, but his further conclusion that there was no real famine mortality was characterized by L. M. Cullen of Trinity College Dublin as "quite surprising".
One of its revisions to accepted ideas was to ascribe the population fall after the famine not to altered sex ratios, simply the fact that young men emigrated, but rather to a deliberate inhibition by Scottish estates on family formation without adequate land, in "an openly Malthusian way".
Another point discussed in the book was the hidden involvement of Charles Trevelyan in various nominally private sector charitable famine relief projects.
David Dickson of Trinity College Dublin observed that this "remarkably comprehensive account" was possible because of the small size of the Scottish famine in comparison to the Irish one, with under 290,000 people in the Highlands of Scotland in 1841, which Ireland equalled with just the population of County Clare alone.
Dickinson observed that to an Irish reader Devine, whilst not setting out to explicitly compare the two famines but having "made notable efforts to have an Irish angle", had provided "a fascinating combination of the familiar and the alien" showing both parallels and differences, although that Devine had not explored such differentiating factors as population density; and that Devine had indicated several ways in which future differential analyses of the Irish famine could be made, to note whether factors present in Devine's analysis of the Scottish famine could explain unevenness in the Irish one, that led to milder impacts in some counties such as County Donegal.