The Strategic Revolution: Scottish Ideals and Transnational Exchange in Golf Course Architecture, c. 1860s–1930s

Abstract

Professional golf architects emerged in the early twentieth century across the English-speaking world. These new professionals coalesced around ideas that promoted a Scottish national conception of proper golf. When golf first migrated from the Scottish coasts inland, south into England, and across the oceans to the United States and the British Dominions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, no standardized form or set of ideals on Golf course architecture existed. Through their collective writings, professional golf architects from Britain, the United States, and Canada codified the values, design principles, and the romance of the ancient Scottish linksland courses as the standard way to design and construct golf courses. We therefore position golf courses as important sites of historical inquiry into the transmission of national styles. These Golden Age (1910–37) golf architects thus encouraged the transnational exchange of sport through the construction of golf courses in a peculiarly Scottish sense.