‘Can It Be Murder to Kill a Tyrant?’

I’m a fairly conventional product of the Scottish education system - having studied history to Advanced Higher level I left school able to name all of Henry 8th wives (and how they died) and with the narrative Nazis Bad (but we were the good guys), Russians Bad (again were the good guys), Britain invented democracy and women got the vote because of their hard work during WW1. Now, there is obviously a lot to say about any one of these skewed perspectives, but the more important point for this topic is that not once was Empire, Colonialism or Racism mentioned or the point made that history, and how we tell it, mattered for the present. 

I was probably 3 years into a history degree at Edinburgh University before I had fully grasped the extent of the British Empire, and well out the other side before I started to wrap my brain around Scotland's role in it. It's easy as a Scottish lefty to feel smug, simply because you're not English. In the weird upside down world of identity hierarchy where everyone is jostling to present their marginalized bits, whilst ignoring the lived experiences of people actually excluded by society, being English is definitely not cool. The smugness is, for many, a cover up of a very real experience of internal colonization and cultural hierarchy and in that sense I still find a good old bit of ‘we hate the English’ both funny and satisfying. The problem with it though, is that it shuts down an essential conversation about Scotland's role in the British Empire and adds to the deafening lack of awareness of the ways in which white Scottish people have, and continue to, benefit from colonialism and empire. It's a bold choice, given the lack of awareness most of us have about the role of Scotland in the Empire, to look at the topic of Resistance to Scottish Imperialism, but I wanted to tell an empowering story of action and power. I want people working against Racism, Colonialism and Imperialism in Scotland today to know that they are part of a lineage that stretches back through time and to see that there were always people who knew or could imagine a world different to this!

In 2020 the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown into the Bristol docks by Black Lives Matter protesters. It sparked a conversation about history, how history is depicted and displayed, who is commemorated and honored and who is made invisible. Similar, though tamer, conversations occurred in Scotland around the Melville Monument in Edinburgh. The backlash to the action was serious, 4 Bristol protesters were criminalized and right wing activists took to the street to defend other statues of prominent white men. There more ‘moderate’ or ‘reformist’ criticism was that taking down statues (or changing street names) makes parts of history invisible, that perhaps a plaque could be added with additional info, that violence (even against inanimate objects) is never legitimate and that ‘those were the ideas of the time’.

‘Those were the ideas of the time’ is a dangerous idea, not least because it isn’t true, but also because it seeks to legitimize historic injustice, and thus offer the idea that the vast injustices of our current times are perhaps also part of some gradual progress towards a better future. Racial hierarchy, the entitlement to capture and Enslave people, to seize land, to eradicate hundreds of thousands of years worth of culture were certainly the ideas of some people from the past. In fact many of these ideas were developed in Scotland at our ‘elite’ universities by men such as David Hume. However, these are not the ideas of the past - we live in a world where Aboriginal Australians and Indigenous Americans are still cleared from land, or have their ancient culture or living kin destroyed for mining, fracking or logging. At best, forced labor, if not modern slavery still provides us with the Cobalt, Lithium and other minerals we need for our laptops, phones and solar panels! Few people think to mention Haiti alongside France and America when they talk of the Liberal Revolutions which created our current systems of nation states, civil rights and democracy. 

History is not a linear narrative of progress as many scholars would have us believe, there is no time when everyone thought the same thing. Whilst many have held oppressive and violent views both in the past and now, there has always been a counter and a multitude of forms of resistance. Aboriginal Australians genocidally attacked by Gaelic speaking displaced Highlanders fought back by killing the European livestock which decimated their natural ecology, executed white settlers and kept some of their languages and culture alive through centuries of enforced Christianisation, Anglicisation in Residential schools. Likewise though it is clear that the majority of Scottish people of all social class both supported, and actively benefitted from the Slave Trade, there was also an active network of abolitionists - both Black and white - working in Scotland and internationally to end the practice as well as a transnational series of Slave Rebellions which rocked the Imperial world and ultimately made it too expensive for the British Government to continue the Slave Trade. 

People like Robert Wedderburn the mixed race child of a Scottish Plantation owner and enslaved African woman, who ran a series of radical abolitionist lectures around England & Scotland titled ‘Is it murder to kill a tyrant’. His written work is one of the few places we can find testimony of the way in which Enslaved women resisted within the narrow confines they were allowed, through the story of his mother. The Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society who carved the words ‘Send The Money Back’ into the side of Arthurs seat and unlike many of the white abolitionists of the time called for the full emancipation of all Enslaved people, rather than simply a cease in the naval trade and capture. Jamaican Maroon rebel leaders such as Nanny Maroon who organized autonomous communities for freed formerly Enslaved people, and rose up against the predominantly Scottish Plantation class over and over again. Abolitionist educators such Frederick Douglas and Ida B. Wells who toured the UK including many small Scottish towns and villages. The crowds of predominantly white people who attended those thousand strong events. The wee lady from Hawick (where I grew up) who had never left the town but wrote to the British Parliment after hearing Fredrick Douglas speak, asking for an immediate end to the Slave Trade. 

The names and ideas of people who fought against Imperialism both in Scotland, and against Scots who participated in the British Empire, have until recently been unknown to me, learning what little I now know has changed me forever. There is so much further to go to understand what Scotland's role in the British Empire was, and how that has influenced and built our society today - but if we are ever to have the conversations we need around Race, Structural Inequality, Reparations, Abolition or how knowledge is constructed in our society, then this work is essential!