Scotland’s Foreigners: Making Identities in Scotland

When migrants came to Scotland from continental Europe in the late nineteenth century and afterwards, they came with identities which in themselves were multi-layered, dependent on context and subject to change. Informed and animated by this kind of reasoning, this chapter will then attempt to demonstrate that there certainly is some evidence that Jewishness, Italian-ness, German-ness or Lithuanian-ness in Scotland were all affected by interactions with state officials in the period 1885–1939. Socially, psychologically and sometimes politically they might find it possible to elaborate an identity which could acknowledge their unique origins, which could facilitate ongoing relationships with their homelands and yet be of use to them in the evolving institutional context of the Scottish polity. Scottishness, however, became, if anything, an even more immediate issue for migrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Just as ‘foreigners’, ‘aliens’ and ‘migrants’ individually contended with the legal realities of their identities in the UK of the interwar period, they might to widely different degrees experience the impact of the growing reach and consolidation of a Scottish state machinery.