Introduction

We chose this topic because many people in Scotland and globally live with the impact of colonialism and racism every day. Migrants, refugees and people of the Global Majority are under attack from the media, the state and grassroots fascist organising. Most white Scottish people know very little about our role within the British Empire, and feel defensive about the subject because the conversations make us feel stupid, our culture promotes shame over responsibility and our own experiences of harm also aren’t acknowledged. The aim of this topic is to understand Scottish people's role in the British Empire and how colonial and imperial ideas have also impacted our society. This topic also explores what resistance to Scots in the Empire, and anti-colonial resistance within Scotland have looked like, and how we can learn from these histories.

One of the biggest misconceptions around Scotland and the British Empire was that it ‘wisnae us’- to use Graham Campbell's phrase. This has meant, as Cal Flyn points out in Thicker Than Water, that ‘It's easy as a Scot, to assume a certain martyr complex. Historically speaking, we have been cast as the plucky victims who struggled bravely in a fight that was against us from the beginning.’ Whilst it is true that many Scottish people have suffered huge material and psychological impacts from things like The Clearances. It is also true that Scots of every level of society also participated in the colonial violence throughout the British Empire, causing similar material and psychological impact to many other people. 

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit” ― Edward Said 

Cal Flyn discovered to her horror that her ancestors, like many others, left Skye and became the perpetrators of genocide against Aborigional people in Western Australia. In the ABC series the ‘Australian Wars’ Aboriginal film maker Rachel Perkins traces the brutal expansion of frontiers by white settlers, and tells the largely silenced history of resistance by Aboriginal communities. Like with all colonialism, there is a first violence of occupation and a second violence of invisibility and misrepresentation. Conventional history of Aboriginal people has portrayed them as stupid, weak and passive, which the Blackfella Film company has done a lot to debunk. 

In Canada, Scots arrived first through the Hudson Bay Company, which traded in furs and was predominantly populated by people from Orkney. Scottish emigrants were integral to the formation of Canada, making up much of the social and political elite. Perhaps most devastatingly, Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada's first Prime Minister was also integral to the creation of the Indian Residential school system. In 1879 he said “When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who has learned to read and write.” Often surviving this system was all the resistance that was possible, and as shown by the mass unmarked graves discovered in 2021, many did not. 

The work of scholars such as David Alston has thankfully shone a light on Scottish participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In his book ‘Slaves and Highlanders’ he makes it clear that Scots of all levels of society participated in, and benefitted from the Enslavement of hundreds of thousands of African people. This trade in human life was legitimised by key Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and it was Scots such as Henry Dundas who violently suppressed uprisings in Jamaica and Grenada and argued for a ‘gradual’ approach to the abolition of slavery, delaying it by almost 15 years.  Resistance to the Transatlantic Slave Trade took many forms and it is thanks to the work of educators such as Lisa Williams that we know so much about it. 

The Haitian Revolution and other rebellions in the late 1700s terrified the western world because Enslaved people rose up and often killed their so-called ‘masters’. In response agitators such as Robert Wedderburn, the mixed race child of a Rosanna and Enslaved woman and Scottish Plantation owner James Wedderburn asked ‘Can it be murder to kill a tyrant?’. Meanwhile transnational organising for abolition saw speakers like Frederick Douglas tour small communities in Scotland. In his ‘Selected Speeches and Writings’ he stated ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will’. In her book ‘A Kick in the Belly’ Stella Dadzie details the integral role women played in resistance, from every day acts of defiance, to women like Nanny of the Maroons and the Amazons of Dahomey leading armed rebellion. Contrary to the popular mythology of William Wilberforce and other white abolitionists saving people, it was the financial ruin threatened by these many forms of resistance which eventually prompted the British State to abolish the trade. 

It is ongoing work to make clear Scotland's role within the British Empire, and uncovering what resistance looked like means wading through layers of silencing and misrepresentation of colonised people. The broader question also remains, of why the ideas of colonialism have become so embedded in our society and what we can do about it. As James Baldwin puts it “There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.” 

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