Modern games
The modern Highland games are largely a 19th-century development, from the period following the Jacobite rebellions and subsequent ban on Highland dress.
By the mid-20th century, annual Highland games events, modelled on the traditional events in Scotland along with some elements borrowed from the mòd festivals, had been established not just in Scotland but throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, among other places with a notable Scottish diaspora, which totals about 50 million people worldwide. (The earliest such events in North America go back quite a way, to 1836 in New York and at least 1863 in Nova Scotia.) The modern, rather commercialized gatherings have done much to promote tartan, kilts, and other elements of Highland culture abroad, having up to tens of thousands of attendees, a large proportion of them in Highland dress. The games are the primary source of business for a cottage industry of professional kiltmakers outside of Scotland, and are the main recruiting grounds of the numerous clan societies.
While the Scottish Highland Games Association says there are dozens of such events in Scotland, there were at least 260 annual Highland games events worldwide as of 2000, more than 100 of them in the US alone, and dozens more in Canada. They are closely intertwined with bagpipe band competitions (which date to 1781), a lasting source of Highland imagery in their regiment-inspired uniforms; the 2013 World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow drew over 8,000 pipers and drummers from all over the world.
The games' rather flamboyantly tartaned subculture, a "shortcut to the Highlands", is sustained outside Scotland primarily by multi-generational Scottish descendants rather than by direct Scottish expatriates. Sir Malcolm MacGregor, chief of Clan Gregor and then convenor of the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs (well aware of tartan's connections to tourism and other Scottish economic interests) wrote in 2016 of the games events beyond Scotland that "it is the stuff of kilts and cabers, but it is the Scotland those not living in Scotland want it to be." Ian Brown (2012) coined the term tarantism (as distinct from tartanry) for this international tokenization of tartan, kilts, and other symbols of the Highlands as ethnic-identity markers, evolving to some degree independently to suit the cultural needs of the New World Scottish diaspora and unrestrained by the views of the originating Scottish "home" culture. Michael B. Paterson (2001) hypothesizes that the fondness for Highland symbols and activities among the diaspora may be due to the European-descended populations in these countries lacking much of a direct experience of culture deeper than a few generations, and being dominated by nuclear family structure; Highland games, clan tartans, Burns suppers, St Andrew's societies (more than 1,200 of them just in the US), etc. provide a sense of shared roots, heritage, identity, and a broader and more elastic notion of family, as well as fostering Old World, "mother country" connections. Fiona K. Armstrong (2017) writes: "It is a feudal longing in a modern age. It is a yearning for some supposedly comforting and ordered past."
Tartan and the kilt encapsulate many facets of a heritage which people aspire to access; they may also represent a part-mythical family origin for those seeking roots .... The number of Americans who choose to adopt a Scottish element as part of their identity can be attributed in substantial part to the power these symbols possess.
This swell of diasporic tartan enthusiasm seems to have been triggered in the 1950s, the beginning of the age of affordable powered flight, as clan chiefs like Dame Flora MacLeod of Clan MacLeod travelled abroad to promote Scottish tourism and other connections. (At least 1 in 5 Scottish-descended people surveyed in 2017 by VisitScotland, the national tourism board, expressed an interest in travelling to Scotland.) However, in 2009, the US-based Council of Scottish Clans and Associations reported a drop in the number of active clan societies (which peaked at 170, and drive considerable tourism as well as historic-place restoration efforts), with up to a 25% decrease in individual memberships, as well as some of the annual games events coming to an end; "new technology" (i.e. the Internet) seemed to be related.