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Sir Thomas Martin Devine, Kt OBE FBAFRSE FRSA FRHistS (born 30 July 1945[1]), is a Scottish academic and historian.

Devine's main research interest is the history of Scotland since c. 1600 and its global connections and impact.[2] He is regarded as the leading authority on the history of modern Scotland and its diaspora.[3]

For Devine's CV please click here.

Summary

Devine was born in Motherwell, Scotland. He was educated at the University of Strathclyde from 1964 to 1968, and graduated with first class honours in Economic and Social History, followed by a PhD and DLitt. He rose through the academic ranks from Assistant Lecturer to Reader, Professor, Head of Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He was Deputy Principal of the University of Strathclyde from 1993 until 1997 before moving to the University of Aberdeen. He was appointed to the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. He was Head of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology from 2008 to 2010 and until his retirement was Director of the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies.

Tom Devine was a member of the Research Awards Advisory Committee of the Leverhulme Trust from 2003 to 2009 (adviser on all history fellowship applications) and holds Adjunct Professorships at the University of North Carolina and the University of Guelph, Canada. Devine has also been a member of the Board of Trustees of National Museums Scotland, a Member of Council of the British Academy and a Trustee of the Scottish Review of Books. He chaired the joint committee of National Museums Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland which developed and established in 2001 the National Museum of Rural Life at Kittochside, East Kilbride.

Irish and Scottish Studies

In 1998 Tom Devine accepted the Directorship of the world's first centre of advanced research in Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen (the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies), which was formally inaugurated by President Mary McAleese of Ireland on St Andrew's Day 1999. Over the following five years, more than £2.5m was raised for the Centre's research programmes from AHRC – which led to the establishment of the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, funded competitively over 2 phases – the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, and a further £1.6m endowment given by the Glucksman family in the USA for a Research Chair in Irish and Scottish Studies, which Devine held as Founding Professor until 2005.

University of Edinburgh career

In April 2005, he was appointed to the Sir William Fraser Chair of Scottish Historyand Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, the world's oldest and most distinguished Professorship of Scottish History, which he took up in January 2006. In 2008 he became Director of the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies at Edinburgh, established by an external endowment of £1 million by a leading Scottish fund manager and his family. This is reckoned to be the single largest private donation ever made to a UK university for the development of historical studies.

Devine retired from the Fraser Chair in the summer of 2011 but returned to employment by invitation at the University of Edinburgh in January 2012 to a Personal Senior Research Chair of History which was especially founded for this purpose. He finally retired from the University in summer 2015 and is now Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography Emeritus at the University.

Published works

He is the author of close to 100 articles on topics as varied as emigration, famine, identity, Scottish transatlantic commercial links, urban history, the economic history of Scotland, Empire, the Scottish Highlands, the Irish in Scotland, sectarianism, stability and protest in the 18th century Lowlands, Scottish elites, the Anglo-Scottish Union, rural social history, Caribbean slavery and Scotland, merchants in the China opium trade, tea and empire, English migrants in modern Scotland, the global impact of the Scottish people and comparative Irish and Scottish relationships.

Devine is the author or editor of some forty books, one of which The Scottish Nation (1999) became an international best-seller. The volume was listed first in the '100 Best Books to Build a Better Scotland' compiled by ListMuse.com. As at 2018 it has sold almost 100,000 copies in the UK alone.

Honours and awards

Devine has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research (Hume Brown, Saltire and Henry Duncan Prize Lectureship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (elected 1992), a Fellow of the British Academy (elected 1994), and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy(elected 2001): the only UK Humanities scholar elected to all three of the national academies in the British Isles for which he is eligible.

He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS), the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (FSAScot). Professor Devine holds honorary degrees of DLitt from Queen's University Belfast and the University of Abertay Dundee, the honorary degree of DUniv from University of Strathclyde and the Honorary Fellowship of the University of the West of Scotland.

In 2001 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's highest academic award, by Queen Elizabeth II - the only historian so honoured since the inauguration of these awards in 2000.

Devine was appointed OBE in the 2005 New Years Honours List for "services to Scottish history". In 2006 he was awarded the first John Aikenhead Medal for services to Scottish education by the Institute of Contemporary Scotland and in the same year Bell College, now part of the University of the West of Scotland, conferred on him an Honorary Fellowship in recognition of his contributions to Scottish culture.

In 2012 he won the Senior Royal Society of Edinburgh/Beltane Prize for Excellence in Public Engagement across all Disciplines and also the Society's Inaugural Sir Walter Scott Senior Prize for Excellence in the Humanities and Creative Arts. He received the 2016 Wallace Award of the US-based American Scottish Foundation for his outstanding contributions to the building of ties between the United States and Scotland.

He was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for "services to the study of Scottish history", the first scholar to be so honoured for this reason.[4]

Devine was listed in the Top Twenty of The Herald newspaper's 'Scotland's Power 100: The 100 Most Powerful and Influential People in Scotland' and was the highest placed member of a university on the list: 'The nation's preeminent historian, a towering and fearless intellect ... an academic tornado from early in his career (who has) reshaped the way the Scottish past is viewed' [The Herald, 30.11.2015]. He was nominated seventh in The Tablet (the international Catholic journal) list of 'Top 100 Catholics in the UK' [The Herald, 14.05.2015; The Tablet, 15.05.2015].

When Sir Tom Devine retired from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, messages of congratulations were received from and read out at a public celebration of his career from the First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and the leaders of the UK Labour and Liberal Democratic parties.

In 2016 Edinburgh University Press published Global Migrations: The Scottish Diaspora since 1600, edited by Professors Angela McCarthy and John MacKenzie, as 'a tribute to Professor Sir Tom Devine FBA, the leading historian of modern Scotland and its diaspora'.

In 2018 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Historical Studies from the UK All Party Parliament Group on History and Archives, the first historian from a Scottish university to receive the award. Previous recipients include Professor Eric Hobsbawm, Lord Asa Briggs, Lord Kenneth Morgan, Sir Michael Howard and Sir Keith Thomas.

His most recent book The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900 has met with acclaim by reviewers. See extracts here.

Lectures

Named Lectures presented over the last decade or so include:

  • Post Office Lecture;
  • Edinburgh Lecture;
  • Trades House of Glasgow Lecture;
  • Educational Institute of Scotland Lecture;
  • Haldane Tait lecture;
  • Annual Adam Smith Memorial Lecture, Kirkcaldy, 2013;
  • Annual University of the Highlands and Islands Lecture;
  • Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Memorial Lecture, Saltire Society;
  • Prothero Lecture, Royal Historical Society;
  • General Council Lecture, University of Edinburgh in Hong Kong;
  • O'Donnell Lectures of the University of Wales;
  • General Teaching Council for Scotland National Lecture;
  • Royal Society of Edinburgh Annual Christmas Lecture;
  • Royal Society of Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Prize Lecture;
  • Royal Society of Edinburgh/Beltane Prize Lecture for Public Engagement;
  • AB Emden Lecture, St Edmund Hall, Oxford;
  • Margaret Harris Lecture on Religion, University of Dundee, 2013;
  • Roy Paterson Memorial Lecture, 2013;
  • St Mungo Lecture, Glasgow Cathedral, 2014;
  • Road Ahead Prestige Lecture, Engineering Scotland, Strathclyde University, 2014;
  • Stevenson Lecture on Citizenship, University of Glasgow, 2014;
  • John Durkan Centenary Lecture, University of Glasgow, 2014;
  • Sir John A Macdonald Bicentenary Lecture, Glasgow City Chambers, Canadian High Commission, 2015;
  • The Clayton Lecture, Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 2015;
  • T.C. Smout Annual Lecture, University of St Andrews, 2015;
  • Tannahill Trust Lecture, University of Glasgow, 2016;
  • British Academy Event, EIBF, 2016;
  • National Library of Scotland Event, EIBF, 2016;
  • Welsh Governance Centre, Cardiff University, Annual Lecture, 2016;
  • Cardinal Thomas Winning Lecture on Education, University of Glasgow, 2017;
  • Canada 150 Lecture, Centre for Canadian Studies, Edinburgh;
  • Black and Ethnic Minorities Scotland (BEMIS) St Andrews Day Lecture 2017;
  • Royal Celtic Society Annual Lecture, 2018;
  • Moleinder Annual Lecture, City Chambers Glasgow, 2019;
  • Edinburgh World Heritage Lecture, 2019;
  • Inverness Town House Lecture, 2019;
  • The Tannahil Lecture, University of Glasgow, 2019;
  • Aye Write Book Festival, 2019;
  • Edinburgh World Heritage Annual Lecture, 2019;
  • Inaugural Thomas Muir Lecture, College of Arts, University of Glasgow, 2019;
  • Inaugural Innes Duffus Lecture, High School of Dundee, 2019.

Devine regularly addresses sell-out audiences at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Previously...Scotland's History Festival, National Library of Scotland author events, and numerous bookfests and bookshops throughout the UK.

Media Profile

Devine has a high media profile both at home and abroad, regularly contributing articles and comments in the press and often appearing on TV and radio in historical, cultural and current affairs programmes. He has written for The Times, The Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, The Herald, TLS, The Tablet, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Independent, The Scottish Review of Books, and Le Monde Diplomatique, among others. One of his books, Scotland's Empire 1600–1815, formed the basis of a six-part BBC2 series in 2005. Devine has made numerous appearances on BBC1, BBC 2, C4, STV, Radio Scotland, BBC Radio 4, RTE, CNN, Aust BC, Italian Radio, and CBC.

Devine was appointed to the advisory board of the European Association of History Educators – EUROCLIO in 2010.

List of Key Publications

• The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900 (Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 2018)
• New Scots: Scotland's Immigrant Communities since 1945 (joint editor and contributor, Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
• Independence or Union: Scotland's Past and Scotland's Present (paperback edition, Penguin Press, 2017). 'Number One Scottish Bestseller' on Amazon UK, 2017
• Tea and Empire: James Taylor in Victorian Ceylon (joint author, Manchester University Press, 2017)
• Scotland and the British Empire (joint editor and contributor, paperback edition, Oxford University Press, 2016)
• The Scottish Experience in Asia c. 1700 to the Present: Sojourners and Settlers (joint editor and contributor, Cambridge Imperial and Colonial Series, Palgrave and Macmillan, 2016)
• Independence or Union: Scotland's Past and Scotland's Present (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2016). Serialised in The Times. Book of the Year 2016, Scottish Review of Books.
• Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection (editor and contributor, Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Book of the Year 2015, The Herald.
• Clanship to Crofters War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994; Reprinted 2013, Manchester University Press)
• The Scotland Trilogy (2012, Penguin) (published as a set in new paperback format, 1630 pp.)
• The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, 1500–2010 (joint editor and contributor, 2012, Oxford University Press)
• Scotland and the British Empire (joint editor and contributor, 2011, Oxford University Press)
• To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750–2010 (US edition, Smithsonian Books, 2011)
• To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750–2010 (Allen Lane and Penguin Books, 2011, paperback, 2012). Book of the Year: The Spectator, New Statesman, Scotland on Sunday, 2011; Book of the Week: The Guardian 2011. Special commemorative 1st edition of BenRinnes 23 year old single malt cask strength 'To the Ends of the Earth' 2011. £155 per bottle of exclusive limited edition.
• Scotland and Poland: Historical Connections (joint editor, John Donald, 2011)
• Scotland and the Union 1707 to 2007 (editor and contributor, Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
• The Scottish Nation 1700 to 2007 (revised editions, Penguin, 2006, 2012). New Statesman and The Herald, Book of the Year, 2012.
• Clearance and Improvement: Land, Power and People in Scotland 1700–1900 (John Donald, 2006)
• The Transformation of Scotland; The Economy since 1700 (co-editor with Clive Lee and George Peden, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-7486-1433-8)
• Scotland's Empire, 1600–1815 (Penguin Books, 2003, 2012). Serialised in The Scotsman; shortlisted for Saltire History Book of the Year Prize 2004
• Scotland's Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600–1815 (Smithsonian Books, 2003)
• Being Scottish: Personal Reflections on Scottish Identity Today (2002, co-editor and contributor, Edinburgh University Press)
• Scotland's Shame?: Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland (editor and contributor, Mainstream Publishing, 2000, ISBN 1-84018-330-6)
• The Scottish Nation: 1700–2000 (Penguin, 1999, ISBN 0-14-023004-1). Serialised in The Herald. Chosen in 2017 for Academic Book Week as one of 'The Top 20 Academic Books that Shaped Modern Britain'.
• Celebrating Columba: Irish-Scottish Connections, 597–1997 (co-editor, 1999)
• Eighteenth-century Scotland (co-editor and contributor, Tuckwell Press, 1998)
• Scotland in the Twentieth Century (co-editor and contributor, Edinburgh University Press, 1996)
• Exploring the Scottish Past (John Donald, 1995)
• St Mary's Hamilton: A Social History, 1646 – 1996 (editor, John Donald, 1995)
• The Transformation of Rural Scotland: Social Change and the Agrarian Economy, 1660–1815(1994)
• Industry, Business and Society in Scotland since 1700 (co-editor and contributor, 1994)
• Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770–1914 (editor and contributor, John Donald, 1994)
• Scottish Elites (editor and contributor, 1994)
• Clanship to Crofters' War (Manchester University Press, 1994)
• Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society (editor and contributor, John Donald, 1992)
• Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (editor and contributor, 1991)
• Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society, 1700–1850 (editor and contributor, John Donald, 1990)
• Improvement and Enlightenment (editor and contributor, John Donald, 1989)
• The Great Highland Famine, John Donald, 1988, 1995, 2008). Saltire Society Prize for best book in Scottish history 1989.
• People and Society in Scotland, Volume 1, 1760–1830 (co-editor and contributor, John Donald, 1988)
• Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770–1914 (editor and contributor, John Donald, 1984)
• Scotland and Ireland, 1600 to 1850 (joint editor and contributor, John Donald, 1983). Translated into Japanese
• A Scottish Firm in Virginia, 1767–1777, William Cunninghame and Co. (Scottish History Society, 1982)
• Lairds and Improvement in the Scotland of the Enlightenment (editor and contributor, Scottish History Society, 1978)
• The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and their Trading Activities, c. 1740–90 (John Donald, 1975; Edinburgh University Press, 1992). Senior Hume Brown Prize for best first book in Scottish history

References


1. ^ Prof Tom Devine on Debrett's Limitedwebsite.
2. ^ "www.scottish.parliament.uk". Archived from the original on 5 June 2011.
3. ^ "Scotland's Chronicler" (The Herald, 17 July 1999); "nobody has done more over the past thirty years to bring Scottish historiography into rigorous and unsentimental alignment with developments elsewhere than Tom Devine" (Colin Kidd, The Times Literary Supplement, Scotland's Empire: The Origins of the Global Diaspora); "no individual has done more than Devine to advance our understanding of modern Scottish history at home and abroad over the last three decades" (Scottish Historical Review 2012); "the undoubted doyen of the field" (Prof David Armitage, Harvard, Times Literary Supplement, 13 January 2012); "Professor Tom Devine is as close to a national bard as the nation has" (Magnus Linklater, 24 January 2013); "'Time to drop Burns myths that disguise true nature of Scotland'", The Times; "Tom Devine is Scotland's leading historian" (Scottish Review, 6 November 2013); "His three great works, published in the last fifteen years ... form the most extensive and lucid narrative yet published about Scotland" (The Observer, 21 June 2014); "Tom Devine has had a huge intellectual influence in Scotland in recent decades" (Scottish Review, 23 March 2016).
4. ^ "No. 60895", The London Gazette (Supplement), 14 June 2014, p. b2.

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