Tartanry

Tartanry is a word used to describe the kitsch elements of Scottish culture that have been over-emphasized or super-imposed on the country first by the emergent Scottish tourist industry that grew up with the British state in the 18th and 19th centuries, and later by an American film industry.

Tartanry refers to often mispresented or invented aspects of Scotland such as clan tartans, kilts, bagpipes, Scottish Gaelic and Highland culture more generally.

While the Highlands were relatively peripheral to the functioning of the Scottish nation-state, the Hanoverian ascendency and the British government, which followed from the Act of Union between the Scots Parliament and the English Parliament in 1707, selectively promoted aspects of Scots Highland identity for both sentimental and practical reasons. The British state co-opted the military tradition of the Highlands and used this to create crack Scottish infantry regiments wearing Crown approved uniform tartan. In this way, the recruiting of the poor into an imperial military thus became a selling point of British Scotland.

ee also

*Scotlandshire
*Scottish cringe
*Scottish national identity
*Visit of King George IV to Scotland