OUT of this week’s news headlines, “telly historian flees from Twitter” perhaps isn’t one that will burn too brightly in the archives of the future. But Neil Oliver – presenter of TV histories on Scotland, coastlines, Vikings, Celts, Cleopatra and God knows what next – is at least fulfilling his role as a Scottish public historian.

Which is often about writing two-fisted opinion pieces, based on your research standing, and readying yourself for the forthcoming scrap. Apart from getting social-media pelters for spluttery Sunday newspaper columns – “Salmond is a big, round wrecking ball of a man, shaped only to do damage”, etc, etc – Oliver has had a previous run-in with, arguably, an even bigger bruiser.

Professor Tom Devine, the magister of modern Scottish historical studies, once described Oliver’s 2009 series A History of Scotland as “fatally flawed and profoundly disappointing” and “resembling a mediocre B movie” (and worse, as an archaeologist, he wasn’t even a historian). Oliver’s response? “His business is lecturing students in a classroom and he doesn’t know anything about how to make a television series.”

Maybe not – but Devine certainly knows how to keep the burning questions of Scottish history alive in the public’s mind. He features twice in the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s major historical theme for this year, The Scotland That Shaped Us.

One book is his account of the Union, post the 2014 indyref result, which wonders at the end whether Westminster “has enough satanic realism to grab permanent control of England by letting Scotland go”. For the second book, Devine has co-edited a powerful set of studies on Scotland’s role in the slave trade. They don’t just refute the belief that we were less involved in the gory business (the mentality of “it wisnae us”, as Devine puts it). They demonstrate that, on a per capita rate, Scotland had more of everyday investment in colonial slavery than England.

At the last moment, Devine advocated a Yes vote in 2014 – and as far I know, hasn’t recanted it. But I do admire the way he sticks to what he calls, in his afterword to Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past, the “classic credo of historical scholarship – to aspire towards convincing conclusions, based on professional scrutiny of relevant and representative evidence, without either fear or favour”. And if that causes indy supporters to climb down from a few of their moral high horses, then better to stand on solid, rocky ground, than be easily knocked off your mount.

I have no doubt that Murray Pittock, vice-principal of Glasgow University and a leading member of its School of Critical Studies, also adheres to Devine’s rigorous credo. But his own forthcoming book promo at the EIBF couldn’t provide more succour for political Scottish nationalists.

Culloden: Great Battles makes some powerful claims, based on recent archive and battlefield research, that dispel the tragi-romantic myth (and mist) that wreaths the momentous clash on April 16, 1746. The legend of doomed, primitive, kilted Jacobites, clumsily facing English rifles with mere swords, turns out to be wrong. The Jacobites were “heavily armed with French and Spanish musketry as well as captured Land Pattern muskets” – it was the cavalry blades that cut them down.

It suits the historians of Union, and then of Imperial Britain, says Pittock, to render the Jacobites as an example of hamfisted “noble savages” – stumbling souls who could be integrated and “reconciled” with the UK, particularly through soldiery and the formation of regiments. This became the template for other “civilising missions” of empire.

And Pittock – in the classic carnaptious mode of the Scots historian – takes further issue with his fellow scholars. From the 1960s, the professor says, they start to render Culloden as a “civil war”, not as a battle between two nations. This interpretation gathers pace – surprise, surprise – just as modern Scottish political nationalism begins to make significant advances. “Without doubt the force facing the Jacobites was the British Army, but almost no history of the battle or heritage interpretation of it willcall them that. Why not?” asks Pittock.

So there’s one history that dethrones the Scottish-nationalist pieties – and there’s another history that tries to give them a better foundation. And if the historian’s credo is followed assiduously, there are doubtless even more histories that occupy the subtleties between these poles. Had we all but world enough, and time, we might devote ourselves to juggling these accounts, coming to our own conclusions – instead of reacting to passing reviews and headlines.

But as I chatted with Christopher Harvie the other day, who was also launching a new version of his contemporary history of Scotland, No Gods And Precious Few Heroes at the Book Festival, his worry was that it may only be the leisured and retired (apart from the academically employed) that would want to “do history” properly. “I was on stage with Tam Dalyell, it was a sell-out – but looking out at the 200 souls before me, I think I was one of the youngest there. That doesn’t bode well, does it?”

Now, in my youthful middle-age,

I’ve always been somewhat opportunistic in my approach to Scottish, or any other, history. There’s always been a sense, at the back of my head, that history should only be a resource for action in the present. We possess so much existential freedom, right here and right now. If we are to read history, let it help us make history.

As Yuval Noah Harari’s forthcoming book Homo Deus (the follow-up to Sapiens) puts it: “studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not, or did not want us to imagine”.

I’d use Tom Devine’s slavery project in this way. We are all proud of the “civic”, non-ethnic, ideologically-based nature of Scottish nationalist politics, consciously forged by far-sighted politicians.

But what better way to maintain and extend that achievement, than by being maturely aware of the crimes and failures of Scottish colonial history?

Pittock’s research also helps, if you want some extra juice to your arguments that Scottish politics have always been “Scottish-national”. If we study with care the early moments of Scotland’s incorporation into the Union, and with equal care how those moments have been narrated in the dominant historical accounts, we can currently resist those who – for political reasons – want to erase Scottish distinctiveness.

Now, to what ends do you use that Scottish distinctiveness? That’s the question we’ve been trying to answer in independence politics for a century or more. The current answers are, I think, attractive. Our centre-left policies and ambitions can easily be informed by the great coming challenges of the 21st century, be that energy and environment, or automation and employment, or migration and mobility. We stand well-resourced and ready for full sovereignty.

But I appreciate and value the historians of Scotland, no matter the glories, horrors, complexities or banalities they reveal. Their labour assumes that the entity known as Scotland exists in the first place – and that, implicitly, its future is worth struggling over.

Neil Oliver may rail as much, and as sulphurously as he likes against Salmond, Sturgeon and perfidious Scottish nationalism. But in a world of endless and momentary digital distractions, where our consciousness is pulled this way and that by merchants of desire, anyone who tolls the bell of Scottish history deserves credit for even wanting to.

Come back on Twitter, Neil.

It’s the tough love of compatriots. Why else would we bother?

Murray Pittock speaks at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Mon 22 Aug 2:15pm, Garden Theatre £12, £10, sold out, but check for returns. Pittock’s Culloden, OUP (£18.99). Tom Devine co-edits Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past, Edinburgh University Press (£19.99)