Abstract

What began as an inexpensive dress for peasants and workers became a form of rebellion, and then the tool with which the Highlands became a modern industrialized society. This evolution was enhanced by the English, through the creation of the kilt, the institution of first the Act of Union and then a Hanoverian Government, and then the formulation of the manner with which the Highlands would use the economy to modernize. Within this paper I hope to argue that Scottish national identity was formed around Highland dress in the eighteenth century, and for their assimilation into the Greater British Isles.