The Great War and Parliament House, Edinburgh

Abstract

The Great War is said to have dramatised the transition from the Victorian and Edwardian eras to the 1920s, and, as a watershed, it emphasised that things would never be the same again: it was the boundary between two different societies. Not least of the remarkable consequences of the war was the price in human life: the scale of the war losses for Scotland was perhaps 74,000 individuals. The effects of war were widespread and generally immediate and an economic turning point. The effects of conflict came to be experienced everywhere: ‘the post war world was in large part a world paralysed by grief’.