HISTORIANS GENERALLY ACCEPT THAT interpersonal violence was a common feature of relationships between men in the past and that the contexts in which violence was perpetrated can reveal something about the mentalities and social roles of men in past societies. Nevertheless, it is also agreed that the modes of and occasions for violence vary according to their context, and thus there is a need to understand precisely the conditions that facilitate and legitimate interpersonal violence between men in different locales and time periods. While male violence appears to be ubiquitous – men form the overwhelming majority of perpetrators and victims of violent behaviour – its meaning is historically specific.

This chapter examines a type of modernising society – the Scottish Highlands in the period 1760–1840 – in which a code of violence governed by an indigenous culture of manhood was gradually superseded by a new culture with a new code concerning violence. This was in part the consequence of changing economic and social conditions in the Highlands as well as the imposition of a judiciary and law enforcers serving the aspirant bourgeois ideology of local elites and the demands of a distant state. It argues that violence against the (male) person was regarded as commonplace and to some degree legitimate in the rural Highland counties until at least the 1820s, that men of the rural labouring classes regarded violence as a means to protect or affirm their status, to restore honour or to avenge a wrong, and that this had previously been accepted or tolerated by Highland elites. But this association between a certain model of manhood and interpersonal violence was challenged increasingly from around 1800 by those who advocated civility and restraint amongst men, especially in the growing Highland town of Inverness, the centre of an emerging middle-class culture with changing social sensibilities. The borderline between acceptable and unacceptable, legitimate and illegitimate male violence shifted as a new conception of what constituted respectable manhood was disseminated. In the wake of the Jacobite risings and the repressive measures aimed at taming the Highlands, there was a more subtle and longer-term taming of everyday Highland manhood.

IN DECEMBER 1944, SIX months into his period of military service in the Caribbean, George Johnstone Brown made his feelings for his wife explicit. Only with her could he find emotional satisfaction and fulfilment. Wartime service represented an interruption to their life together, a necessary, dutiful but irritating interlude before they could resume their married love affair. In this chapter a neglected facet of Scottish men's sense of self is under scrutiny. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire – these are not qualities commonly identified in the accounts of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century, a history populated by the so-called hard men of the shipyards and coalmines, the heavy drinkers, the gang members of city streets and the political heroes, some of whom appear elsewhere in this book. Historians have tended to portray work, and the leisure activities contingent upon that work, as the key to masculine identity despite evidence that romantic love and its expression in the couple relationship was a key characteristic of the modern age. The emotional turn that is shifting historical attention and interpretation away from publicly articulated standards and cultural discourses towards subjectivity is beginning to recast the historical landscape and has the potential to complicate and expand understandings of male identities. By recovering articulations of selfhood and emotion, by bringing ‘subjectivity and emotion back into view’, historians have begun to write an alternative history of men and masculinity that privileges subjectivity and the self.

IN JUNE 1844 GEORGE MacLennan appeared before Dingwall sheriff court accused of assaulting John Williamson, a farm servant, causing him serious injury. MacLennan proffered this statement in his defence. ‘I had been at the Muir of Ord market that day and had had a dram. Williamson seeing this said to me I was drunk and further provoked me by saying I was a tailor and not a man.’ MacLennan answered him ‘that if he would not be quiet I would show to him what I was’. When Williamson refused to react to MacLennan's provocations, MacLennan took hold of the spade with which Williamson was working and in the ensuing struggle Williamson was struck in the mouth. A commonplace confrontation between two men on a roadside in rural Scotland provides us with an entry point into everyday understandings of masculinity. George MacLennan felt insulted by Williamson's insinuation that he was not a real man because he was a tailor – presumably an effeminate trade to be contrasted with Williamson's physical labour – and furthermore, that he could not hold his drink. The verbal altercation descended into a physical one as the pair allegedly tussled over the spade, but in this case it is the slight perceived by MacLennan that should interest us rather than the fight alone. George MacLennan felt insulted by a man who cast aspersions on his manliness and that manliness, in this case, was defined as being able to take a drink, undertaking physical labour and being up for a fight. It is rare for the historian to come across such an unequivocal statement regarding what men in the past understood as constituting masculinity. More often we use descriptions of male behaviour or representations of ideal and alternative masculinities as indicators of masculine gender norms. George MacLennan regarded himself as just as much of a man as John Williamson, notwithstanding his occupation and his drunken demeanour. And he sought to prove it by provoking Williamson to a fight.

The relationship between cultural production and power politics in Germany, and to a lesser extent in the rest of German-speaking Europe, has often been uneasy, characterised by reluctant accommodation if not by tension and mutual distrust. Whilst it has often been said that German intellectuals, including writers, emphasised the superiority of the spirit (Geist) over politics, denying the reality of Germany's socio-political development, it is undeniable that from the cultural philistinism of the Wilhelmine state to the postmodern aesthetics of the present day, German culture, and not least literary output, has rarely remained indifferent to, and has often existed in a state of tension with, the prevailing political authority. The following discussion of the major social and economic developments and politically transformative moments in the modern history of German-speaking Europe (Austria is treated as an independent state but part of the wider German cultural nation) will, I hope, provide a contextual background against which not only the writers considered in this volume, but also their readers, should be understood. The leitmotiv running through this brief historical panorama is the disjuncture between society and culture on the one hand, and politics on the other.