Scottishness and Foreignness: The Developing Structures, Powers and Capacity of the Scottish ‘Machinery of Government’ Before 1939

Before 1939, continental Europeans were settling in Scotland, in a polity shaped by distinct religious and legal traditions. In the same period, a Scottish machinery of government was gaining significant powers over welfare, public health and local government. This chapter, in providing the essential institutional context for a study of migrants in Scotland, uses state records to examine this machinery’s attempts to engage with foreignness, both as a concept and as something that was subject to its management. It concludes that, although officials largely engaged on the basis of increasingly restrictive alien legislation covering the whole of the UK from 1905, this was also a period in which migrants would experience the official Scottishness of both ministers and mandarins. Evident in terms of principles, practices and priorities, this Scottishness made for a distinct migrant experience and, even if the ‘common good’ was always a central aim, it could also on occasion prove beneficial to migrants.