Sir Thomas Martin Devine OBE FRHistS FRSE FBA (born 30 July 1945) is a Scottish academic and author who specializes in the history of Scotland.
[citation needed] 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.
[23] 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 [our] past, warts and all" and that "Scotland and slavery should be embedded firmly in the school curriculum".
[25][26] 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.
[30][31][32][28] 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.
[34] 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.
[35] Jacob M. Price of the University of Michigan (and author of France and the Chesapeake[36]) observed "a fair number of petty errors" in American geography (Fredericksburg and Falmouth being incorrectly located on the Potomac River and a non-existent "Berkshire County" in Maryland).
[37] 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.
[31][32] 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.
[31][38] 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.
[40] 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 (at the time) accepted ideas.
[42] One of its revisions to (then) 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 (in T. C. Smout's words) "an openly Malthusian way".
[44] Another point discussed in the book was the hidden involvement of Charles Trevelyan in various nominally private sector charitable famine relief projects.
[44][42] 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.
[51] The second has a paper by Devine presenting Lowland Scotland as a society regulated by the landowning class with emigration as a release valve for the discontented, preventing civil unrest and violence.
[58] MacKillop observed that Devine's synthesis of work to date served to highlight a deficiency in historical research into the economic transformation of the region, well studied in the North-West but understudied in the South-East.
[67] He painted a picture of Scotland as well positioned, from roots in its mercantile and military practices from the 15th century, to take advantage, with the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain, of what was then the largest free trade zone in all of Europe, and the British Empire that was to follow.
[63] Devine soundly rejected the thesis that there had been a "crisis in Scottish nationhood" in the second half of the 19th century, as the result of assimilation, Anglicization, and cultural collapse.
[63] Emerson observed that it was somewhat lacking in both political and intellectual history, with little on the Glasgow Boys, Hugh MacDiarmid and contemporaries, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh and associates.
[10] Knox observed that cultural history was weaker in the book, with youth culture seemingly ended with Elvis Presley, women's political activity becoming (in Knox's words) "no more than a footnote in a political narrative dominated by male concerns and interests" following the Glasgow Women's Housing Association and the rent strikes of 1915, and Asian immigrants referred to as "coloured".
[69] He ameliorated these criticisms by suggesting that a "more analytical, rigorous, and thematic survey of Scottish history that the historical profession" — as opposed to a popular readership — "might prefer is now beyond the capacity of a single author, however gifted".
[74] To The Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Disapora (2011) was aimed at the popular history market, in thirteen chapters with accompanying pictures and photographs.
[78][26] The book deals with Scottish trade with all parts of the planet, from the Hong Kong firm of Jardine, Matheson, and Company through markets in Latin and South America to the United States and the Middle East.
[26] The book is structured such that each chapter is in the form of setting up an initial question about a particular aspect of the Diaspora, which is then answered with an overview of the (then) current state of historical research in the area.
[81] She praised it for giving more than a mere nod to the relationship between the Diaspora and people in Scotland as many other such histories do, and for its exposition of the several qualitative differences between the migrations of Scots and Catholic Irish.
[86][83] Devine's book also challenged the theretofore established popular view that the sole cause of the Clearances was landlordism, ascribing it instead to many causes: the majority of Scottish emigrants to the Americas being from the Lowlands rather than from the Highlands, who emigrated in search of better prospects than they had in Scotland; bankruptcies of land-owners and a new more absentee land-owning class that lived beyond their means; a rising population in areas of subsistence agriculture; decreases in available arable land thanks to increased sheep farming; insufficient responses to the potato famine; increased enforcement by authorities on the untaxed distillation of whisky; racist ideas about Celts and Gaels; and victim-blaming by the Church of Scotland telling people that their present circumstances in life were punishment for their own sins.
[88][39][85][89] In the book Devine also pointed out that landlords were not wholly callous and wicked with no redeeming features, as they had been painted, with some worried about their duties as feudal chiefs, others generous in both investing in job creation and funding relief efforts, and even the infamous Countess of Sutherland creating a new village on the coast for her tenants.
[39] In answering his own question in the closing chapter of the book, Devine ascribed the more widespread identification of loss of land in Scotland with only the Highland Clearances to the fact that they, in contrast to the Lowland ones, took place in an age of steam railways, the telegraph, and 19th century Christian movements for drawing attention to the plight of the poor.