Unlike other recently published books on Scottish history - Devine's The Scottish Nation being the most obvious example - William Knox's Industrial Nation has been studiously ignored by the media in Scotland. It is easy to see why.

"This book," writes Knox, "is about Scottish workers: their culture, their working lives, their politics... By focusing on the working class as the most disadvantaged and exploited section of society, and its relationship with other more advantaged groups, the nature of power and authority in all their guises is made clearer."

Knox adopts what he terms "a totalising historical approach" to the history of the Scottish working class over the last two centuries. This approach "establishes linkages between the workplace, the community and the political system, and takes account of the relationship of material conditions to thought and language."

As such, his book is a powerful indictment not only of "post-modernist" historiography (which rejects class and class struggle as the motors of social change) but also of the various brands of left-nationalist historiography now gaining currency amongst sections of the Scottish left.

Knox's starting point is "the nature of the economy and the level of technology." The emergence of capitalist relations of production in Scotland was simultaneously the emergence of a working class. It could not have been otherwise: without a working class to exploit, there can be no capitalism.

Economic change and technological advance constantly restructure the composition of the working class: "The working class is not a static economic category. It is remade and remakes itself in a dialectical interplay as changes which occur in the economic and social structure of capitalism elicit political responses."

The working class is never simply the victim of capitalist exploitation. Workers join together to resist and to defend their interests: "Organisation is at first localised. However, as capital grows and nationalises itself, labour follows suit."

Labour initially organises in pre-industrial forms - the oath-bound secret society. Over time, however, this gives way to local, then regional, then national trade union organisation. Eventually, the trade unions intervene into the political arena:

"Recognition of bias in the state's actions pushes the trade unions in the direction of politics, eventually resulting in the formation of an independent working-class political party, since middle-class parties cannot accommodate in whole the interests of labour."

If Knox had done no more than trace the structural and organisational evolution of the Scottish working class over the past two centuries, his book - by reasserting the centrality of the category of class - would still be worth reading.

But Knox goes well beyond this. He address the question of what factors led the trade union and political organisations of labour in Scotland to adopt - or abandon - a particular policy or ideology at a certain stage of their development:

"The question of speed of formation, the nature of the ethos and ideology of the party, is more problematic and draws in factors concerned with ethnicity, gender, religion, regionalism, and nationality".

"Reliance on sloppy theories of 'false consciousness', or vanguardism, prevents us from engaging with the realities of working-class consciousness and creates ultimately unhistorical categories of analysis."

The Scottish working class in Knox's book is not an anonymous mass of wage slaves. It evolves over time, drawing initially upon pre-industrial values, accommodating at times to middle-class respectability, and developing its own forms of organisation in the midst of a hostile capitalist society. Thus, in the opening years of the nineteenth century, "trade unionism and worker politics in Scotland were dominated by the concerns and ideology of skilled, predominantly male, Protestant workers." Their value system was based on independence in the workplace, temperance, and religion.

For Scottish (and English) working-class radicals the enemy at this time was not the bourgeois state and the emerging capitalist class. The enemy was the land-owning class and aristocracy which lived off the wealth of the land and controlled the institutions of the state.

Working-class political unrest in the early nineteenth century was therefore a united struggle with the middle classes in pursuit of (partial) democratisation of the British state. Knox easily dismisses the attempts of James D Young to misrepresent such unrest as an expression of Scottish nationalism:

"The main aim of the reform movement was the democratisation of the British state, rather than establishing a Scottish republic... At mass anti-government demonstrations in Paisley in 1819 banners referred to Bruce and Wallace, but there were others which referred to the Magna Carta and the rights of Britons. ... It was clear that in the period 1817-20 Scottish radicals looked to England for leadership."

The same holds true of the electoral reform agitation of the early 1830s and the Chartist movement of the 1840s:

"Scots were able to combine a sense of Scottish identity with an equally powerful and compelling sense of being North Britons. The fact that in the reform agitation and again in the Chartist campaigns Scottish republicanism played no role in mobilising workers tends to point to the essentially ephemeral nature of this political phenomenon."

The attachment of skilled workers in Scotland to the values of independence in the workplace, temperance and religion continued into the second half of the nineteenth century.

It created what Knox terms, "a culture of exclusion which sought to reproduce the status hierarchies of the workplace in the wider society and shore up gender divisions by increasing the dependency of women on men."

Temperance was not a passing fad but a hallmark of working-class respectability. For some three decades Edinburgh Trades Council met in a coffee bar and then in a temperance hotel. For the Boilermakers' Society drinking was "the greatest evil in society". According to the Ironfounders' Society, non-unionists were, by definition, "drunkards, idlers and very often improvident men."

The notion of the respectable working class shaped the demands of the labour movement in this period. Glasgow Trades Council's "Address to the Working Men of the United Kingdom" of 1861, for example, advocated "manhood suffrage, with a residential qualiffcation." No vote, in other words, for women, slum-dwellers, and the "rough" elements of the working class.

The second half of the nineteenth century was witness to a major expansion of the Scottish economy, especially in heavy industry. This was accompanied by the development of new managerial strategies of control, and by the introduction of unskilled or semi-skilled labour into trades previously the preserve of the skilled.

"The intensification of exploitation through the implementation of new technology and stricter codes of industrial discipline," writes Knox, "fractured the reciprocity between capital and labour ... and elicited a more class-oriented response from labour".

"In this climate, workers' concerns and values underwent a transformation, and this resulted in an improvement in the mechanism of self-defence... Trade unionism was seen as the only viable form resistance could take, and this realisation saw numbers increase sharply, particularly amongst the unskilled."

But the growth of trade unionism and the emergence of a more class-oriented response by labour to industrial restructuring did not create a fertile ground for the socialist organisations which emerged in Scotland in the 1880s:

"Trade unionists found the political programme of these organisations too wide and revolutionary in nature. The avant-garde lifestyle and dress of the more middle-class members also alienated the working class.

"The SDF of Hyndman and the Socialist League of Morris and their various splinter groups... were seen as imported products and not organisations organically rooted in the Scottish political tradition.

"Their anti-parliamentarianism was also anathema to the Liberal/democratic tradition of the organised working class in Scotland. Finally, a large part of the membership of the revolutionary left was atheistic and intemperate."

The working class in Scotland remained heavily imbued with Liberal principles until the First World War: "Liberalism appealed to Scots workers, especially the skilled stratum, because it emphasised free trade, self-help, a dislike of hereditary privilege, and mild identification with patriotic Scottish or nationalist sentiments within a federal UK state."

The hegemony of Liberalism was an obstacle not just to the socialist left but also to thc very principle of independent labour political representation.

In the opening years of the twentieth century the Independent Labour Party (ILP - at that time the Labour Party had no individual membership) received little support from trade unions and Trades Councils. It lost branches faster than it created them. And Labour candidates polled even worse in Scotland than in England. Knox concludes:

"The cult of respectability, of which religion and temperance were the outward signs, weakened the class message of Labour... Marx was attacked for 'the glorification of the material as opposed to moral forces' and for 'emphasising the necessity of a class war'.

"It is hard to conclude otherwise that what political progress Labour achieved before 1910 was at the expense not of the Liberal Party, but of the revolutionary left."

Even the years of the First World War, redolent with the imagery of "Red Clydeside" and hagiographical idolisations of John Maclean, did not mark any breakthrough for the revolutionary or syndicalist left:

"The preservation of skill and independence was at the heart of the engineers' struggle. Those shop stewards who were brought to trial apologised to the court and made it clear that they had no desire or intention of hindering the war effort.

"To actively oppose the war meant consciously accepting the risk that one's country might be defeated. Since the Clyde Workers Committee was never prepared to take that risk it was unable to utilise its industrial power to bring Britain's participation in the war to an end... There was a general failure to politicise the industrial struggle by the shop stewards."

On to part two of this article