I first became interested in Orangeism at the academic level after I was appointed in the 1990s to the Foundation Glucksman Chair of Irish and Scottish Studies and became the first Director of the AHRC Centre of Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen(in association with Trinity College, Dublin and Queen's University, Belfast). Our remit was to carry out advanced comparative and interdisciplinary research on Irish and Scottish History, Literatures and Languages. Few subjects combined such a close association between the North of Ireland and Lowland Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the history of the Orange Order.