Back Again

I had planned to leave this blog as it is and not to contribute anymore to it; however in the light of some recent comments, notably:-

Scotsman SNP what u just said has got no back up. when did the scottish kicked our arse? you never did if u research your history england invaded scotland after the jacobite invasion (which was a failure as u retreated) and england slaughtered the jacobite army. America? that has no culture it is a country formed by rebels, it has no history, what ever culture it is based upon english culture. England has an idenity, world greatest empire, a major power in the world where Scotland isn’t even counted as a minor threat, that got to count for something. If Scotland claims indepence im sorry to say but you’re country will go down the drain because it’s england who foots a £8million bill for Scotland. I don’t like when people critise my country after all it’s done for you.

Which just goes to show that the English Nationalists have not changed one iota from the inherent racism that they spout; and when I replied with:-

Picking up on one point you make Benjamin, I think that you will find that two thirds of the people who ran your “world greatest empire” were Scots; and that is a conservative estimate so don’t criticise my adopted country after all it has done for you…

The above commenter simply became even more insulting with:-

yer beacause the scots were drafted into the army cause of bein criminals says much about the scottish…
but scotland would be in trouble if england didn’t foot the bill of £8billion a year (made an a mistake on me last comment it was pose to b 8billion not 8million)

I just goes to show that a Leopard NEVER changes its spots; I also note the appaling lack of Grammar, failure to properly capitalise, and not least the failure to research the argument.

I, for one, am fed up with hearing the bleating of these “so called” nationalists constantly crying that Scotland is sucking the life blood of England; when in fact the South East of England is the biggest sucker of the life blood of England, but that is another argument.

The person who made the above assinine comments can in no way justify his argument; whereas I can and would point him in the direction of an excellent reference Scotland’s Empire: 1600-1815 by Tom Devine. Which if he reads it might just illuminate his thinking. Who am I kidding here? These people don’t want facts, they just want to pour forth their insulting racist diatribes come what may…

For those who are interested I include (apologies in advance it makes for a long post) the Introduction to this excellent book:-

Introduction

The two centuries and more covered by this volume were of fundamental importance in the development of the British Empire whether judged by territorial expansion, size of population, commercial hegemony or global influence. Indeed, it was in the early years of the eighteenth century that the very term ‘British Empire’ was coined. Only after 1707 and the union between Scotland and England could existing overseas possessions be termed ‘British’. Before that, contemporary maps simply described the transatlantic colonies as ‘the English Empire in America’. Significantly, a year after the Union of Parliaments, John Oldmixon’s two-volume treatise. The British Empire in America, containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and Present State of all the British Colonies on the Continent and Islands of America (1708), confirmed the new usage.¹ The name would stick. ‘England’ might still be often used to describe the new union state in Britain. But the term ‘the English Empire’ was less common. As will become apparent in the course of this book, the widespread acceptance that the developing empire was ‘British’ and not simply ‘English’ had a practical rationale which went far beyond mere political symbolism.

Of course, several of the foundations of the later empire had been laid by the end of the seventeenth century. The English presence m North America was particularly well established. The original colonies of Virginia and Maryland were joined by New York, the tiny Scottish settlement at East New Jersey, Pennsylvania and parts of what later became North and South Carolina. Further north, the Hudson’s Bay Company was already active in the remote areas which would form part of modern Canada. In the Caribbean, the English held Barbados, Jamaica and the Leeward Islands. Possessions in Africa, however, were limited to a few trading posts on the east of the continent and in the Gold Coast or Gambia. In Asia there was no imperial presence as such but the East India Company had a base on the island of Bombay and grants of some territory in Calcutta and Madras.

In the eighteenth century, and especially after the Seven Years War (1756-63), there were huge territorial gains as a result of conquest and annexation. By c.1770 the population of the North American colonies had grown to around 2.3 million. Georgia, East and West Florida, Quebec and Nova Scotia had all been won from Spain and France. Then came the American Revolution in 1776 and the emergence of an independent United States, born out of the thirteen British colonies. Their departure left only a rump of underpopulated territories in the north of the American mainland. Known as British North America, they would in due course become the Dominion of Canada. Elsewhere, however, the momentum of territorial expansion seemed unstoppable. In the West Indies the Ceded Islands and Trinidad were acquired in 1763, while the most spectacular gains were achieved in India where the whole of the eastern subcontinent and a large part of the Ganges valley were under the administration of the English East India Company by 1815. At that date, it was reckoned that 40 million Indians were now living under British rule which was also fast extending into Ceylon and Mauritius. The Company at the same time was raising some £18 million in taxation within its territories, a sum amounting to around one-third of peacetime revenue in Britain itself.² Exploration was also being pursued in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean by the voyages of such famous navigators as Captain James Cook. A permanent British colony was established for the first time in Australia when the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales in 1788.

By 1815 Britain ruled over a global population in America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Antipodes of around 41.4 million people.³ In 182.0, British dominion already encompassed a fifth of the world’s population.⁴ Contemporaries, such as Sir George Macartney in 1773, revelled in the scale of this vast empire ‘on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained’.⁵ Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire of 1814 had the revealing subtitle ‘in every Quarter of the Globe’. But even these figures underestimated the real extent of British imperial influence. In addition to territories under formal rule there were other areas of ‘informal’ empire where Britain could, and did, impose its will. At the same time as British dominion was being carved out of the Mughal empire in India, commercial influence was spreading along the Malay coast and as far east as the Chinese port of Canton. Great Indian states such as Awadh (Oudh) and Hyderabad, which were still nominally independent, were nevertheless effectively brought within the sphere of hegemony through Britain’s military and naval muscle. Again, in the Caribbean, Dutch or Danish sugar islands became dominated by British planters and capital. It was a similar story in parts of South America, where Britain also began to exercise substantial political influence.

Above all, perhaps, this unprecedented expansion of empire was most significant because it unambiguously confirmed the final victory of Britain over its great national rival, France, in the epic struggle for global dominance. Seven times between 1689 and 1815 the two nations had fought each other in wars which extended well beyond Europe to North America, the West Indies and Asia. The final outcome always remained uncertain. France’s population was substantially larger than Britain’s and its martial power was formidable. Britain was victorious in the Seven Years War and then annexed much French imperial territory in the Americas and the Caribbean. But the successful revolt of the American colonies after 1776, in alliance with France, was equally a humiliating defeat for the British. Only British success in the Napoleonic Wars and the signal triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo finally settled a global contest which had raged for over a century. By 1815 Britain had become Europe’s most powerful imperial state. That provided the vital foundation for yet further territorial expansion in India, south-east Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century.

The irony was that as the eighteenth-century empire expanded it steadily became less English and more British. Certainly, English common law continued as the basis of imperial law, and London’s dominance as the financial capital of empire remained unchallenged, English politicians for the most part remained the prime influences on imperial policy and the English East India Company’s hegemony in Asia was never stronger. Yet, as one historian has put it, by mid-century, ‘to all intents and purposes, the English empire had become a fiction … slowly, almost imperceptibly, the empire had been transformed into a multinational business and military enterprise’.⁶ This was partly due to the increasing extent of foreign investment in the English capital markets which were so crucial to the imperial enterprise. It can also be explained by the numbers of Dutch Sephardic Jews and Huguenots who gained greater influence in the eighteenth-century London merchant community. The fact that German immigrants were moving to the American colonies in large numbers after 1750, and that Britain had acquired many French Canadian subjects in the aftermath of her conquests during the Seven Years War, were also significant factors.⁷ But, above all, the dilution of an English empire came about because of the enhanced presence within it of Irish and Scots.

Modern Ireland tends sometimes to suffer from acute historical amnesia when the role of the Irish in the British Empire is considered. Yet the Catholic Irish were recruited into the imperial armies in much greater numbers than the English, Scots or Welsh. Indeed, especially after the Act of Union of 1800, ‘the Irish of all descriptions entered enthusiastically into the business of empire’, as it offered career opportunities which were simply not available in Ireland itself.⁸ Nevertheless, from 1700 to 1815, at least, the Scottish factor was immensely more significant. The Scots thoroughly and systematically colonized all areas of the British Empire from commerce to administration, soldiering to medicine, colonial education to the expansion of emigrant settlements. They were also much to the fore in the transformation of the demographic profile of the North American colonies. In the seventeenth century, transatlantic migrants to the plantation economies were overwhelmingly English and Welsh. Between 7,000 and 9,000 Scots can be accounted for in the period 1601 to 1700, compared with over 350,000 English and Welsh emigrants. During the eighteenth century these patterns were transformed. English and Welsh migration fell to less than 100,000 between 1701 and 1780, while Scottish and Irish migration substantially increased, especially from the i76os. One estimate suggests that down to 1780, perhaps 70 per cent of all British settlers in America were Scots or Irish.⁹ It is also the case that for much of the period most of the ‘Irish’ were in fact ‘Ulster Scots’, Presbyterian descendants of those who had moved in large numbers from Scotland to the north of Ireland in the seventeenth century. They were part of the Scottish ethnic family, retaining strong Scots cultural affiliations and connections.¹⁰

In a sense, however, even more important than these mass migrations of Highland Gaels, Lowland farmers and Ulster Scots was the relentless penetration of Empire by Scottish educators, doctors, plantation overseers, army officers, government officials, merchants and clerics. When the statistical record for virtually any area of professional employment in the empire is examined, Scots are seen to be over-represented, and in some cases, like the senior military ranks in India, massively so. In both North America and India after the 1750s, as one writer has put it, they claimed ‘not merely a reasonable but a quite indecent share of the spoils’.¹¹ By mid-century, Scots also dominated the Hudson’s Bay Company, which laid claim to the vast expanse of what is now Canada, as well as its great rival in the fur trade, the North West Company. The success of Glaswegian merchants in the transatlantic tobacco trade was such that competitors in London, Bristol and Whitehaven feared by the IJ-JOS that they would monopolize this lucrative branch of imperial commerce. The visibility of the Scots in the imperial project was further confirmed by their own attention to profile. As one of the most literate nations in Europe they publicized their achievements widely in the press and in books.¹² This talent for self-publicity and the arriviste triumph in securing many of the glittering prizes of empire goes some way to explaining the rampant Scottophobia which broke out in London and some of the American colonies in the 1770s. The final irony was, of course, that a mere few years before the union with England, Scotland’s own ambitious colonial project, the visionary strategy to establish a trading entrepot at Darien on the isthmus of Panama, had been a catastrophic failure. Penetration of the English empire by stealth after 1707 turned out to be much more effective and profitable.

The Scottish role in the forging and expansion of the eighteenth-century empire is the central theme of this book. It seeks to explain it and evaluate the effects of imperial development both on Scotland itself and the overseas colonies. So intense was the Scottish engagement with empire that it affected almost every nook and cranny of Scottish life: industrialization, intellectual activity, politics, identity, education, popular culture, consumerism, labour markets, demographic trends, Highland social development and much else. In a word, empire was fundamental to the moulding of the modern Scottish nation. The discussion, therefore, needs to maintain a continuous dialogue between domestic Scottish issues and those generated at the global peripheries. Scottish history has always been aware of that broader picture. But one major contention in this book is that the subject in the modern period needs to integrate the national story much more closely with the experience of the Scots overseas. Scotland also impacted profoundly on imperial development. As some of the chapters in this book will argue, Scottish educational traditions and the intellectual achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment had a significant effect on the American colonies, not least in the ferment of political thinking which was one factor in the American Revolution. Governance in India was also affected by a similar intellectual agenda, as was the growing debate on slavery. There is finally the matter of time-frame. The Scottish role in this crucial period of imperial expansion can only really be understood if we move back before the Union of 1707. It is in the seventeenth century, and even earlier, that not only the continuities emerge but also some of the many roots of imperial Scotland.

1 P. J. Marshall, Introduction, in P. J. Marshall, ed.. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), p.5.

2 Rajat Kanta Ray, -Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1763-1818′, in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, pp.5o8-29.

3 Marshall, Introduction, pp.z-4. 4 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (London, 2002), p.4.

5 Sir G. Macartney, An Account of Ireland in 1773 by a Late Club Secretary of that Kingdom (London, 1773), quoted in Thomas Bartlett,’ “This famous island set in a Virginian sea”: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690-1801′ in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, p.z62.

6 H. V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688-1775 (Basingstoke, i996),p.i5o.

7 ibid., pp. 151-2.

8 Bartlett,’ “This famous island”‘, pp.273-4.

9 James Horn, -British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680-1815′, in Marshall, ed., Oxford History, pp.30-3 2.

10 See below, pp. 144-9.

11 David Allan, Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Harlow, 2002), p.i85.

12 John M. MacKenzie, Foreword, in S. Murdoch and A. Mackillop, eds.. Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers, 0.1600-1800: A Study of Scotland and Empires (Leyden, 2003), p.xvi.