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 © Copyright protected – it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

General Editor: Andrew S. Thompson

Founding Editor: John M. MacKenzie

When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded

by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than twenty-five
years ago, emphasis was laid upon the c­ onviction that
­‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant
an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’.
With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains
the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work
has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural
phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex,
frontiers and law, science and the environment, language
and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much
else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present
comparative work on European and American imperialism,
and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these
areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects,
shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to
lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of
studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic
in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge,
responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs
of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Scotland, empire and decolonisation

in the twentieth century

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 © Copyright protected – it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES

WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES

ed. Andrew S. Thompson

MUSEUMS AND EMPIRE

Natural history, human cultures and colonial identities
John M. MacKenzie

MISSIONARY FAMILIES
Race, gender and generation on the spiritual frontier
Emily J. Manktelow

THE COLONISATION OF TIME

Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire
Giordano Nanni

BRITISH CULTURE AND THE END OF EMPIRE

ed. Stuart Ward

SCIENCE, RACE RELATIONS AND RESISTANCE

Britain, 1870–1914
Douglas A. Lorimer

GENTEEL WOMEN
Empire and domestic material culture, 1840−1910
Dianne Lawrence

EUROPEAN EMPIRES AND THE PEOPLE

Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Germany and Italy
ed. John M. MacKenzie

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

ed. Saul Dubow

MUP_Glass_MacKenzie.indd 2 11/06/2015 10:44

 © Copyright protected – it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Scotland, empire and

decolonisation in the
twentieth century
Edited by
Bryan S. Glass and John M. MacKenzie

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

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 © Copyright protected – it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2015

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press,

copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter
may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of
both author and publisher.

Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA, UK
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 07190 9617 4 hardback

First published 2015

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs

for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or­ ­appropriate.

Typeset in Trump Medieval by

Koinonia, Manchester

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C ONT EN TS

List of contributors vi

1 Introduction John M. MacKenzie and Bryan S. Glass 1

PART I – Migration, diaspora and identities

2 Initiatives, impediments and identities: Scottish emigration
in the twentieth century Marjory Harper 25
3 Applying the diasporic lens to identity and empire
in twentieth-century Scotland Graeme Morton 44
4 The strange case of jute Gordon T. Stewart 65
5 Scots in early twentieth-century British Columbia:
class, race and gender Michael E. Vance 86

PART II – Anti-colonialism, the military,

decolonisation and nationalism
6 Anti-colonialism in twentieth-century Scotland
Stephen Howe 113
7 Beating retreat: the Scottish military tradition in decline
Stuart Allan 131
8 Newspapers and empire: bringing Africa to the Scottish
public Bryan S. Glass 155
9 David Livingstone, the Scottish cultural and political revival
and the end of empire in Africa John M. MacKenzie 180
10 Three referenda and a by-election: the shadow of empire
in devolutionary politics Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen
and Stuart Ward 200

Index 223

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C ONT R I BU TO RS

Stuart Allan is Principal Curator of Scottish Late Modern Collections at

National Museums Scotland. He has published widely on Scottish military
history, including (with Allan Carswell) The Thin Red Line: War, Empire and
Visions of Scotland (2004).
Bryan S. Glass is Senior Lecturer in History at Texas State University. He
is the author of The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End (2014) and is founding
member and General Editor of The British Scholar Society.
Marjory Harper is Professor at the University of Aberdeen. Among her many
books on emigration is the recent Scotland No More: The Scots who Left
Scotland in the Twentieth Century (2012).
Stephen Howe is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. Recent
publications include The New Imperial Histories Reader (2009).
John M. MacKenzie is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of
Edinburgh and Honorary Professor at the Universities of Aberdeen and St
Andrews. He is the author of The Scots in South Africa (2007) and co-editor
(with T. M. Devine) of Scotland and the British Empire (2011).
Graeme Morton is Professor of Modern History at the University of Dundee.
His publications include The Scottish Diaspora (with T. Bueltmann and A.
Hinson) and William Wallace: A National Tale (2014).
Jimmi Østergaard Nielsen is a postgraduate student at the University of
Copenhagen. He has worked on Scottish nationalism relating to Empire,
particularly the Hamilton by-election of 1967, and is preparing a dissertation
on the semantics of British identity in the processes of global decolonisation.
Gordon T. Stewart is Professor at Michigan State University. He has published
extensively on Dundee and jute. A recent book is Journeys to Empire: Enlight-
enment, Imperialism and the British Encounter with Tibet 1774–1904 (2009).
Michael E. Vance is Professor at St Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Among his books is Imperial Immigrants: Scottish Settlers in the Upper
Ottawa Valley 1815–1840 (2012).
Stuart Ward is Professor at the University of Copenhagen and Provost of
Regenson College. He co-authored (with Deryck Schreuder) Australia’s Empire
(2008).

[ vi ]

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CHA P T E R O N E

Introduction
John M. MacKenzie and Bryan S. Glass

The relationship between Scotland and the British Empire in the

twentieth century was both wide-ranging and highly complex. In the
opening year of the century, the Scottish economy was still strongly
connected with imperial infrastructures (like railways, engineering,
construction and shipping), and colonial trade and investment. The
industrial profile of Glasgow was securing a ‘war dividend’ for the
city in booming production connected with the Anglo-Boer War of
1899–1902. Perhaps as a result, Glaswegians – and people in many
towns and cities throughout Scotland – were eager to take time off to
indulge in notable street celebrations for such events as the Reliefs of
Ladysmith and of Mafeking.1 Nevertheless, for many Scottish people,
migration remained a major means of escaping poverty or unemploy-
ment, or of seeking opportunities not available at home, and within
a few years the migratory routes would be undergoing a major shift
from the United States to the British dominions.2 Many Scots were
serving overseas in the army or other services, not least in the war in
South Africa, while in the election of 1900, the imperial and patriotic
party, the Conservatives, won a major victory, even if their triumph
was to prove ephemeral.3 Scottish missions were active throughout
the empire and many Scots portrayed themselves as a distinctively
religious – largely but far from exclusively Protestant – people, notably
distinguished for their work in proselytisation, in education and in
medical work.4 Scottish intellectual, political and literary figures
appeared to continue to be intrigued by the possibilities of empire, not
least by its capacity to transform a small and marginal country with a
slight population into a source of major global influence.5 The supposed
national characteristics of the Scots seemed to be inseparably bound
up with empire – the martial race visibly active in campaigns every-
where, hardy settlers coping with harsh frontier conditions, devoted
missionaries and well-trained doctors and educationalists active in

[1]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

many colonies. In addition to all of this, for the great majority of Scots,
slight increases in both leisure time and income had produced a great
burgeoning of popular cultural activity, including some forms where
patriotic and imperial content was mixed in with other fare – the music
hall, variety, other theatrical forms, exhibitions, and later the cinema.6
By the end of the century, however, the Scottish economy, its
politics, and its society had been through major upheavals which many
connected with the decline and end of the British Empire.7 The dramatic
swings in the economic cycle during the century had fully exposed the
fragility of an economy over-dependent on heavy industries. Scottish
politics had at least given the impression of being more turbulent
than elsewhere on the British mainland, reacting strongly to events in
Ireland, producing in ‘Red Clydeside’ a reputation for radicalism, and
appearing to spawn lively nationalist sentiment, even if this has to be
qualified by the fact that the voting behaviour of the Scottish people
showed little inclination either in the direction of a major leftward
shift or towards genuine nationalism, in the latter case at least not
until the century was well advanced.8 Moreover, Scotland had become
a strikingly secular society, Presbyterian Church attendance falling
strongly from its highs early in the century, with only a relatively brief
resurgence in the decade or more after the Second World War.9 Migra-
tion also experienced a new boom during the decades at the middle of
the century, but swiftly tailed off as such migration became increas-
ingly restricted by quotas and financial or other qualifications.10 After
a peak of electoral performance in the 1955 election, the power of the
Tory party went into a long decline, reaching its nadir by the end of
the century, impelled by a Scottish revulsion against Thatcherism.
Scotland had also become a much more notably diverse religious and
multi-ethnic society, even if in some respects less so than England and
Wales. Intellectual and literary Scotland had passed through the post-
colonial revolution, in which various forms of guilt, revisionism and
distancing had replaced the old certainties, however much the latter
had always been hedged about with qualifications. Although echoes of
empire continued to resonate through modern mass media like televi-
sion or the cinematic revival at the end of the century, these tended to
take forms of nostalgic questioning very different from their counter-
parts a hundred years earlier. In any case, in many respects they were
largely drowned out by the vast range of popular cultural forms as well
as the almost overwhelming diversity of information and communi-
cations opportunities available on the internet and on social media.
Perhaps paradoxically, however, empire at the same time was resur-
rected as a major source of study, research and publication for scholars
in a number of disciplines, perhaps arising from a sense that empire

[2]

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INTRODUCTION

had been, at least in theory, a precursor of modern globalisation, or at

the very least had been a significant component in the framing of the
world we had inherited. But the global and the international were also
being placed in the context of the national and local. Simultaneously
with these scholarly developments, the problems of the nature and
manufacture of Scottish history, as well as of allegedly Celtic identi-
ties, were also subject to considerable debate.11
Yet these snapshots of the relationship between Scotland and
empire at the beginning and end of the twentieth century should not
be seen as symbolising a shift from one absolute to another, from some
starkly positive to strikingly negative attitudes. If there is one word
which symbolises most strikingly the relationship between Scotland
and empire over this period, it is surely ‘ambivalence’. Some commen-
tators a hundred years and more ago saw empire as a vast zone of
opportunity, with even those on the Left like James Keir Hardie and
James Ramsay MacDonald viewing the colonial world as a global field
for the spread of socialist ideas or for the extension of moral political
action (see below for some fleshing out of the thinking and influence
of these two personalities). But others saw it as draining away Scottish
talent and Scots population, as well as diverting attention from social
deprivation. The apparently intractable poverty and slum conditions
of Scottish cities and towns seemed to be emphasised by the overseas
investment practices of a bourgeoisie apparently distracted from oppor-
tunities for development at home. Indeed, the low wages that helped to
produce the profits that went into such diversionary investment served
to emphasise endemic consumer under-consumption.12 Many spotted
the fact that the Scottish economy remained dangerously skewed while
even aspects of the well-defined Scottish social hierarchy, embedded
in land ownership and certain agricultural specialisms, seemed to be
promoted by the imperial relationship. Wars, such as the Anglo-Boer
at the beginning of the century and the Great War after 1914, seemed
to produce a tremendous resurgence in imperial sentiment, even in the
use of the words Britain and British, which to some critical commenta-
tors appeared to detract from efforts to maintain the distinctiveness of
Scottish politics, culture and society.13 And if that were not enough, the
old accusation of Dr Samuel Johnson about the ‘high road to England’
still seemed to hold good.14 Those Scots who did not leave for the
empire were just as likely to head south looking for work, while, as
is well known, Scottish companies often departed in the same direc-
tion in order to maximise their opportunities. All this seemed to be
reflected in the decennial censuses which continued to reveal that
Scotland, uniquely among advanced societies, had a population that
was more likely to decline or ‘flat-line’ rather than exhibit any signs

[3]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

of dynamic increase, a situation destined to continue until 2001. But

however ambivalent Scots were about empire, we can be absolutely
sure that they were neither indifferent nor absent-minded.
Historians often view the long nineteenth century as running from
1815 or even 1789 to 1914. But although the First World War clearly
did produce a major earthquake in so many aspects of life in Britain,
it does sometimes seem as though many of the characteristics of the
nineteenth century continued until the 1950s. This would be true
of the Scottish economy with the two world wars of the twentieth
century actually putting the brakes on change by providing fresh
stimulus to the heavy industries that were the bread and butter of
so many Scottish workers. It would also be true of the religiosity of
the Scots, of participation in the military, of certain cultural forms,
and of educational organisation and attainments. The first half of the
twentieth century, while producing some major changes, notably in
the growth of state controls and intervention, as well as in the creation
of the Welfare State following the Second World War, also seemed to
produce inhibitions to change, inhibitions that were bound up with
both war and empire. While it is true in the case of Dundee that the
jute industry was in steep decline as Bengal began to bring together
the production of raw jute with its processing,15 other sectors of the
Scottish economy seemed to survive within the old relationships even
as import substitution became significant in so many places, such as
the British dominions which had formerly been the protected markets
of Scottish heavy industries. Dramatic change was only to take place
after the 1950s, accelerating in the final decades of the century. Thus,
to take Glasgow as an example once more, the Clyde continued to look
like the imperial artery it had become in the nineteenth century – with
shipbuilding, whatever its weaknesses in the face of Far Eastern compe-
tition, continuing much as before. This was also true of the docks and
imperial communications, like the Anchor Line services to India and
some trans-Atlantic links. Glasgow’s newspapers still recorded the
arrival and departure of ships, the export of railway engines and much
else, almost weekly ship launches, with vessels undergoing their trials
on the ‘measured mile’ on the Clyde. The sound of riveting was to
be heard anywhere near the river. Dixon’s Blazes, the great iron blast
furnaces founded in Govanhill by William Dixon in 1837, continued to
light up the Glasgow night sky until as late as 1958, consuming vast
quantities of coal in the process. Great rivers of workers emerged from
shipyards and factories to board ferries and trams, as in the past. The
very survival of the Glasgow trams until the 1960s seemed to epito-
mise the continuation of the nineteenth century.16 All of this obscured
deep underlying weaknesses which would produce collapse in the near

[4]

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INTRODUCTION

future, but still in some respects the nineteenth century seemed to be

alive and well, a proposition apparently confirmed by the number of
Scots leaving for overseas well into the 1960s. Moreover, the celebra-
tion of distinctive Scottish heroes was still rooted in Scots’ activi-
ties within the empire, formal and informal. David Livingstone and
Mary Slessor in Africa, Alexander Mackenzie in Canada, General Sir
Colin Campbell (Lord Clyde) in India, General Sir Hector Macdonald
(‘Fighting Mac’) in Africa and South Asia, and to a lesser extent John
Rae in the Arctic, William Spiers Bruce in the Antarctic, Thomas Blake
Glover in Japan, as well as such entrepreneurs as Andrew Carnegie
in the United States or Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona and George
Stephen, Lord Mount Stephen, both so powerful in Canadian railways
and banking, seemed to remain the exemplars trotted out to inspire
Scottish youth. If the twentieth century produced any heroes at all,
they were figures whose Scottishness seemed to be ironed out by a
close association with England as well as the empire: John Buchan or
Orde Wingate perhaps.17
The defining of Scottishness partly through the supposed charac-
teristics of its heroes is a reminder of other themes that have run
through studies of the relationship between Scotland and empire. One
is the concept of Scottish civil society, preserved in the reservations
of the 1707 Act of Union, those relating to education, law, religion
and banking. Religion and education, as we have already seen, were
the most obvious of these. But Scots seemed to export aspects of the
others to the British Empire (Scots law to a lesser extent, although it
did have an influence in the Cape and in Ceylon, Sri Lanka, as well
as in legal training).18 In the process they developed specialisms in the
economic field, not only in banking, but in insurance and the concept
of ‘mutuality’.19 The second is the manner in which an overall Scottish
culture paradoxically became inextricably associated with Highland
culture (but not its language), through tartan, dancing, singing, the
bagpipes, and Highland games. And thirdly the cultural norms of
Scotland became inseparably assimilated into the celebration of its
iconic literary figures (as it happened, neither of them immediately
from the Highlands), Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, as well as with
the historicism and Romanticism reflected in the work of the latter. To
a certain extent this same historicism and Romanticism spread across
Europe through not only the setting of Scots songs by mainstream
composers, but also the use of Scott novels in so many of the operas of
the nineteenth century. Continuing aspects of historicism and Roman-
ticism went on to infuse the work of later writers such as Robert Louis
Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, Lord Tweeds-
muir, all of them with connections with the British Empire. It has

[5]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

been suggested that all these aspects of Scottish civil and literary
society ensured that Scots’ identity survived and prospered within the
British Empire, ultimately to be transmitted back towards Scotland in
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scotland thus survived as
a wholly separate entity within the ‘four empires’ which were consti-
tuted by the four nations of the British and Hibernian Isles.20
But what we have so far lacked is any study of the ways in which the
lineaments of Scottish civil society were transformed or overlaid in
the twentieth century, or of the manner in which Scottish culture was
similarly rebuilt in that century. And how far was such remodelling
associated with and influenced by the decline and ultimate collapse
of empire in the twentieth century? This is a large and important
area which still requires close study. Moreover, despite the almost
continuous commentary by politicians, trade union leaders, journal-
ists and literary figures about the continuing and highly controversial
connections between Scotland and empire in the twentieth century,
there has been surprising little interest on the part of modern histo-
rians, with the clear exception of those involved in migration studies
and in some aspects of economic history. Even the most significant
Scottish historian of modern times, not least in connecting domestic
history to its wider imperial and global contexts, Tom Devine, has
been relatively silent on the key issues of the twentieth century.21 As
a result, only very recently have historians begun to take an interest
in such important questions as whether the Scots had a highly specific
and distinctive reaction to or contribution to the sequence of events
now commonly referred to as decolonisation. After all, the ‘wind
of change’ that blew through the empire was heralded by a prime
minister called Sir Harold Macmillan, grandson of a ‘tacksman’ (often
billed as a crofter) from Arran and the whole sequence of retreats from
empire was pushed forward by a colonial secretary called Iain Norman
Macleod, only one generation removed from the Isle of Lewis where
he spent most of his holidays.22 Similarly, we have had few close
studies of the strand of Scottish anti-imperialism running through
Scottish life. Nor have we moved on from anecdotal approaches to the
analysis of truly hard evidence, insofar as it is available, for the influ-
ence of imperial issues upon Scottish politics. The alleged connections
between the end of empire and the rise of Scottish nationalism have
often been suggested, but never before examined in close detail. The
digitisation and availability online of some at least of the Scottish
press have rendered studies of newspapers’ treatment of the decline
and end of empire more open to access and consequently perhaps
easier to assess.23 Many other significant studies suggest themselves.
To what extent has the emergence of Edinburgh as a major financial

[6]

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INTRODUCTION

services centre been based on earlier foundations at least partly rooted

in empire? How far can we chart developments in ‘municipal imperi-
alism’ for a variety of different cities and towns, including changing
relationships with empire – as, for example, in the case of Dundee?
Can we survey the role of the Scottish universities in these processes
as well as the ways in which geo-political changes were influenced by
or reflected in developments in scientific, environmental and medical
disciplines? And then there is the highly significant field of popular
culture. How was both the continuation of the imperial ethos and the
end of empire reflected in popular cultural forms? And what influ-
ence, if any, did these tectonic changes in colonial and imperial affairs
have upon gender relationships within Scotland? Or upon the Scottish
churches and religiosity in general? Moreover, we need to know more
about the reciprocal influences of Scottish culture in, for example,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand upon Scotland itself. The mainte-
nance of Gaelic and musical traditions in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia,
and their ultimate reverse influences upon Scotland is a well-known
example, but are there others? How were Scottish communities – or
at least communities that claimed close connections with Scotland
– themselves changed by these developments in Scotland itself? And
indeed, is there any further evidence for the notion that Scottish
identity, preserved at the so-called periphery, actually ‘looped back’ to
promote a separate sense of identity within Scotland itself?
It is an intriguing fact that it was in the later twentieth century that
Scottish connections with empire, both formal and informal, came to
be re-emphasised. Various Scottish cultural institutions became inter-
ested in these connections in the 1980s. The National Portrait Gallery
mounted a display on Scottish Empire in 1980.24 The National Library
of Scotland held a series of exhibitions about Scots and the British
Empire in the 1980s. ‘Scotland and Africa’ was mounted in 1982, ‘Scots
in India’ in 1986, and ‘Scots in Australia’ in 1988.25 The Royal Museum
of Scotland (now the National Museum) published a book entitled The
Enterprising Scot, based on its collections, in 1986.26 The new National
Museum building, opened in 1998, contained a prominent feature on
Scots overseas, including a display on Scottish place names around
the world and artefacts taken to New Zealand from Scotland by early
settlers, though interest in this (with a change of personnel) subse-
quently waned. ‘Great Scots’ was a sequence of exhibitions inaugu-
rated in the same museum, often featuring Scots particularly famous
for their exploits overseas. David Livingstone had been the subject of
a massive exhibition on the centennial of his birth in 1913 and was
the subject of another (much smaller) one in the National Museum
on the bicentennial in 2013. In the same period there was a consider-

[7]

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SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

able growth in popular works on Scottish migration (as well as schol-

arly equivalents) as well as interest in Scottish associations and clan
organisations around the world.27 In recent years, there have also been
television programmes about Scots in the British Empire and about
notable Scots overseas (featuring David Livingstone, Thomas Blake
Glover, William Spiers Bruce, and John Muir). A number of questions
arise from all this activity. Why did it appear at this time in the first
place? Was it associated with the development of a Scottish cultural
nationalism, in turn connected with investigations of forms of global
identities? Were there stimuli coming from the interests of academics
forming at the same time? Was this entirely separate from or did it
run in parallel with the development of Scottish political nationalism,
albeit hesitatingly at first, in the same era? Did the cultural develop-
ments influence the political or vice versa?
2014, the year in which this book is being prepared for publication, is
another Year of Homecoming. Indeed the whole question of Scotland’s
exploitation of its global ethnic connections also awaits scholarly
attention. Clan associations, interestingly, were largely founded in
the twentieth century, associated with the greater ease of travel in
that century, with the efforts of clan chiefs to raise funds for their
often crumbling castles, and with the apparent need of people with the
same name to associate with each other in (for example) the United
States and Canada, but also recreate connections with their origins in
Scotland itself. We know of the large number of Scottish associations
still in existence around the world, of both the survival and indeed
growth of Highland dancing, clan gatherings, and pipe bands, of the
incidence of Burns suppers and of Highland games, but what contribu-
tion do all of these make both to Scottish politics and to the Scottish
economy? The Scottish National Party’s administration, initially as a
coalition from 2007 and then as a majority government from 2011, has
been assiduous in emphasising the existence and role of global Scots.
In 2007 Alex Salmond, not long after taking over as Scotland’s First
Minister, declared a ‘Year of Homecoming’ for 2009, coinciding with
the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. Event Scotland and
Visit Scotland websites declared that ‘for every single Scot in their
native land, there were thought to be at least five more overseas who
can claim Scots ancestry’. Indeed, 25 million Scots descendants in this
category seemed to be a relatively conservative estimate, since, as
Graeme Morton shows below, a report commissioned by the Scottish
government suggested that the figure might be closer to 28–40 million.
Moreover, there is a tendency for people around the world to claim
Scots ancestry when they had only one grandparent or one great grand-
parent who were genuinely Scottish.28 This is a curious but verifi-

[8]

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 © Copyright protected – it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

INTRODUCTION

able phenomenon, and seems to be related to the, for many, attractive

‘performativity’ of Scottishness in dress and dance, music and song.
Indeed, the 2009 exercise was deemed to have been such a success that
another was announced for 2014, clearly designed to exploit the fact
that the Commonwealth Games would be coming to Glasgow in that
year. Both ‘Homecomings’ were clearly designed to enhance tourism
as a major component of the Scottish economy, as well as promote the
export of distinctively Scottish products, now more likely to be in the
areas of dress, food and drink.
This book is designed to be a first shot in this scholarly campaign.
Here are collected some nine essays, dealing with both Scotland and
the empire itself, that begin the process of dealing with some of the
issues laid out above. It is divided into two sections: Part I deals
with migration, diasporas, issues of identity, and related questions of
opposition to empire itself. Since emigration inevitably stands at the
centre of the relationship between Scotland, empire and a wider world,
the first chapter deals with various aspects of migration during the
twentieth century. Marjory Harper points out that no fewer than two
million Scots migrated out of Scotland in the eight decades after the
First World War, thereby matching the numbers who left during the
‘long nineteenth century’. Yet the more modern migration has received
a great deal less attention than the earlier one. In her chapter she goes
some way to rectifying this, analysing the different motives for such
migration, the range of forms that it took, the variety of expectations
reposed in the receiving societies, and the greater propensity to return
when things failed to work out. Twentieth-century conditions were
of course different in a number of respects from those of the previous
hundred years. Expectations were, perhaps, higher, not only of the
conditions to be encountered in the new territory of settlement, but
also of the comforts of travel, the opportunities for swift communica-
tion with people at home, and the possibility of a rapid return. The
dramatic cycle of booms and busts of both the Scottish and the world
economies of the period ensured that ‘boomerang’ migration was both
more likely and more easily achieved. But as Harper has demonstrated
in all her work, migration has to be seen as essentially a personal
experience, involving individuals with both aspirations and disap-
pointments. Migrations should never be viewed as an entirely imper-
sonal statistical phenomenon. The ways in which it happened to real
people must always be kept in sight – as indeed should the fact that it
then impacted upon other real people, namely the indigenous popula-
tions of empire. And we should also note that for various economic
and social reasons – as well as the unquantifiable factor of personal
ambition – the Scots continued to contribute a high proportion of their

[9]

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 © Copyright protected – it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

SCOTLAND, EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION

population to these movements in the twentieth century, even if their

emotional and other responses to the processes of migration were no
different from those of people from elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
Closely related to such issues of migration and the reciprocity of
influences, Graeme Morton examines the ‘diasporic’ dimensions of
identity formation. He reveals the apparent means used to assess,
seldom successfully, the complexities of linking places of birth to
migration and to various modern attempts to appeal to ethnic diasporas,
from the Imperial Census of 1901 to the Book of Scottish Connections
in the early twenty-first century. He points out the extent to which so
many Scottish literary figures and nationalists had connections with
the diaspora both geographically distant in formal and informal empire
and also rather nearer in England or in Europe. He reveals just how
important the military was in the creation of such diasporic relation-
ships while identities were curiously both overlaid and confirmed by
the major wars of the twentieth century. Once again, in some respects,
the vista remains rather misty and hard to discern, but some features
do emerge that point to conscious efforts to link Scottish, British and
Imperial identities during the twentieth century. One of the distin-
guishing characteristics of modern Scottish nationalism has been the
effort to look in two directions at once – towards Europe as a means
of outflanking the English (formerly perhaps the Auld Alliance with
France and the British Empire itself performed the same function) and
towards a more global Scottish ethnicity as a means of apparently
compensating for a relatively small domestic population.29
Among Harper’s categories of Scottish migrants are sojourners, those
who migrate for a season with every intention of returning. Yet they
too formed diasporic identities which looped back to Scotland itself.
Such a group were the jute wallahs in Calcutta, most of them recruited
from Dundee. Gordon Stewart refers to the ‘law of unintended conse-
quences’, and it is indeed a thread which runs through the relation-
ship between Scotland and formal and informal empire. When Thomas
Blake Glover in Nagasaki, one of the major treaty ports of the Far East,
became involved in the founding of the future Mitsubishi company,
he did not foresee that the shipbuilding yards of his native Scotland
would ultimately be destroyed by the equivalent industries of the Far
East. Similarly, the Dundee jute men who carried their expertise (and
eventually also their machinery) to Calcutta took some time to recog-
nise that they were the means by which the jute industry of their home
city of Dundee would in the fullness of time be destroyed. Whereas it
was possible to start out by proudly declaring that Calcutta was India’s
Dundee, they would have been less inclined to recognise that Dundee
had become Scotland’s Calcutta later in the twentieth century. But

[ 10 ]

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 © Copyright protected – it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

INTRODUCTION

Stewart goes further in analysing the social hierarchies the jute men
encountered in Calcutta while back in Scotland the existence of empire,
its free trading principles and the cross-currents of imperial politics
ensured that no government was prepared to protect the interests of
Dundonian jute workers. Perhaps no city in Scotland more reflects the
tight economic connections with empire than Dundee, as reflected in
the city’s rise to pre-eminence in the trade in the nineteenth century
and its dramatic decline during the twentieth century.
Scots received a great deal of information and propaganda about the
territories of settlement in the British Empire from emigration litera-
ture, lectures and press reports as well as from the letters of those who
had gone before. It may well be that the anti-colonial arguments of
some writers and politicians had a less extensive circulation, but still
such material was produced throughout the twentieth century and, at
the very least, had an effect upon some of the ‘movers and shakers’
of the Scottish political and intellectual scene. Early in the century
both James Keir Hardie and James Ramsay MacDonald travelled exten-
sively in the British Empire and both published works on India. Of
these Hardie was both the more controversial and, perhaps, the more
influential. He visited Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and
South Africa in 1907–08. In 1909, he published a short book about
India which demonstrated support for Indian nationalism as well as
delivering a powerful, if brief, critique of the manner of British rule –
he was highly critical of British racism, discrimination against Indians,
treatment of Indian political classes, distant summer rule from Simla,
and of the incidence of famine.30 His visit to Australia included an
encounter with the leader of the Labor Party and future prime minister
(ministries in 1908–09, 1910–13 and 1914–15) Andrew Fisher, whom
he had earlier known as an Ayrshire miner and trade unionist.31 In
South Africa he got himself into severe trouble with whites for his
criticism of imperial handling of the Zulu Bambatha rebellion and his
insistence that trade unionism should be extended to African workers.
Jonathan Hyslop has argued that Hardie’s journey, his speeches and
the controversies he aroused indicate the extent to which labour
movements and associated political action should be placed within a
single empire-wide discursive field.32 MacDonald was much more on
the ‘soft Left’ than Hardie. He also travelled to Canada, South Africa,
Australia, New Zealand and India, and similarly confined his publica-
tions to India. His book perhaps confirms his reputations for ‘woolli-
ness’ and indicates that he essentially promoted ethical imperialism
rather than anti-imperialism.33 Both of them had some influence upon
Labour thinking thereafter, although we need a more refined assess-
ment of just how significant they were in Scottish, as opposed to

[ 11 ]

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