47 Facts About Tom Devine

1.

Sir Thomas Martin Devine was born on 30 July 1945 and is a Scottish academic and author, who specializes in the history of Scotland.

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2.

Tom Devine is known for his overviews of modern Scottish history.

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3.

Tom Devine is an advocate of the total history approach to the history of Scotland.

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4.

Thomas Martin Tom Devine was born on 30 July 1945 in Motherwell, Scotland.

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5.

Tom Devine's 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.

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6.

Tom Devine 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.

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7.

Tom Devine graduated from the University of Strathclyde in 1968 with First Class Honours in economic and social history.

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8.

In 1969, a few months after commencing doctoral research, Tom 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.

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9.

Tom Devine 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.

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10.

In 1991, Tom Devine was awarded higher degree of DLitt by the university in recognition of the quality of his published research to that date.

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11.

Tom Devine was appointed to the externally-funded Glucksman Professorship of Irish and Scottish Studies.

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12.

From 2006 to 2011 Tom Devine was the Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, retaining the title as Emeritus Professor afterwards.

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13.

Tom Devine 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".

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14.

Tom 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.

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15.

Tom Devine noted that he had often told people that "the future is not my period" when asked about current events, a statement that he initially made when asked about the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

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16.

Tom Devine was later to take a public stance on the referendum, voting "Yes" for independence.

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17.

Tom Devine is among Scots who have changed their mind on Independence, and wants a united front to evict the Conservatives from Downing Steet.

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18.

Tom Devine has 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.

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19.

Tom Devine has expressed the opinion that "[t]argetting statues is a largely meaningless gesture" that "does little to address the very real and ongoing issue of racial prejudice".

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20.

Tom Devine is a leading proponent of Scottish-Irish historical studies, and has authored five monographs and edited over a dozen collections.

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21.

Tom Devine is a proponent of "total" history, which seeks to incorporate all aspects of history, from economic through social to cultural.

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22.

Tom Devine 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.

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23.

Tom 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.

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24.

Tom 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.

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25.

Tom Devine's 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.

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26.

Tom Devine divided the Highlands into east and west, and his conclusion about the western Highlands exemplified this.

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27.

The first has a paper by Tom Devine discussing changing landholdings in the 19th century in Higland Scotland, with an appendix of data.

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28.

The second has a paper by Tom 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.

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29.

The third includes an introduction by Tom Devine, discussing the paradoxical nature of Scottish emigration, why skilled urban residents emigrated despite the growing domestic demand for skilled labour during Scotland's industrialization, and a paper by Tom Devine highlighting the roles of landlords in the Highland emigrations since 1760 and of the 1840s and 1850s in particular.

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30.

The fourth has a paper by Tom Devine challenging the accepted history of "lowland clearances".

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31.

Tom Devine's 1995 Clanship to Crofters' War is a digest of his work to date on the Highlands updated by drawing on recent work by Allan Macinness of the University of Aberdeen, Ewen Cameron, and others.

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32.

Pivotal chapter, for Durie, was the one where Tom Devine explained the late 18th century to early 19th century transformation of the Highlands from a "barren wilderness inhabited only by savages to a romantic landscape", in a process that Tom Devine named "The Making of Highlandism".

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33.

Tom Devine attributed the book's success to a "new mood of [Scottish] cultural confidence" and serendipitous timing.

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34.

Roger L Emerson of the University of Western Ontario observed that Devine had "succeeded remarkably well" in his announced purpose of "present[ing] a coherent account of the last 300 years of Scotland's past with the hope of developing a better understanding of the present" and incorporating the work of the most recent generation of Scottish historians.

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35.

Tom Devine 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.

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36.

Tom 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.

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37.

Knox ascribed this in part to a more general weakness in the book's coverage of the period after World War Two, which he suggested was not necessarily solely because of Tom Devine's focus on the period from the late 18th century to the advent of World War One, the core of the book, but simply because of there being less historical scholarship to work from for that period.

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38.

Tom Devine discussed some of the influences of Ulster Scots on the South of the United States, including how the obsessions of Scottish descendants in other countries with the likes of tartans, clans, and other Scottish symbols can seem "risible" or "offensive" to people in Scotland.

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39.

Tom Devine 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.

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40.

Tom Devine structured it into three parts, the first an introduction, the second part examining the Lowland Clearances, and the third part addressing the Highland ones.

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41.

Ewen A Cameron, Devine's successor as the Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography, described Devine has having "la[id] out this history with admirable lucidity" in "a comprehensive account".

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42.

In both Morton's and Cameron's views, Tom Devine introduced one "very important point" that Prebble lacked, an account of the people who were dispossessed, and their resistance to the clearances.

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43.

Tom Devine was awarded the Senior Hume Brown Prize for the Best First Book in Scottish history ; the Saltire Society Prize for Best Book on Scottish History ; and the Royal Society of Edinburgh Henry Duncan Prize and Lectureship in Scottish Studies.

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44.

Tom Devine was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1992, of the British Academy in 1994, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2001, and to the Academy of Europe in 2021.

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45.

Tom Devine is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society,.

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46.

Tom Devine was awarded the RSE's Royal Medal in 2001, the RSE's inaugural Sir Walter Scott Prize in 2012, the American-Scottish Foundation's Wallace Award in 2016, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the UK all-party parliamentary group on Archives and History of the House of Commons and House of Lords in July 2018, and Honorary Membership of Scottish PEN in 2020.

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47.

Tom Devine was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2005 New Year Honours for services to Scottish history, and was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for "services to the study of Scottish history".

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