History Scotland Magazine: Review - Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire

The Scottish Empire

Michael Fry

Tuckwell Press and Birlinn, East Linton and Edinburgh, 2001. pp.xxvi + 580

This enormous book was written, as its author says in his Foreword, to fill one of the black holes in the modern historiography of Scotland. The writing of Scottish history is now a far more flourishing field than it was even a couple of decades ago, but it still has some distance to go to catch up with the denser and more sophisticated historiographies of more fashionable fields. Fry makes it clear that he has little time for attempts to annexe the history of Scotland to serve as mere corroboration for a clapped-out Marxist teleology, which was demonstrably bankrupt within Marxs own lifetime, or for an independista teleology that values any aspect of Scottish development only in so far as it is seen as serving a single controversial political objective. Clearly, this is Conservative history, but there is nothing wrong with that. The proof of any pudding lies in the eating, and that applies very much to a pudding concocted by a Scottish Conservative. At least one has the comfort that time will not be wasted on irrelevancies like Lenins attempt to rescue unfulfilled Marxist forecasts by using the crackpot under-consumptionist and surplus capital theories of an English Liberal opponent of the Boer War to blame the postponement of the Marxist millennium on Imperialism.

Furthermore, the fact that Fry is not an academic but a journalist allows him to tackle this vast topic, which he is well aware is as complex, shapeless and incoherent as the British imperial experience itself. In the eighteenth century, Common Law recognised no such entity as the British Empire. There was simply a British monarchy, so extensive in the Atlantic that the adjective imperial could be applied to it, though arguably this was deeply misleading if it was taken to imply that it had ever effectively ruled most of its North American dominions. By the later nineteenth century the term British Empire was firmly established, but large parts of it the self-governing white settlement colonies - were politically independent countries, despite the misleading red used to colour them on the map. No career academic these days would risk his or her reputation by tackling such a vast and complex field. Especially in the United States, careers are made by the radical over-simplification which enables an author to parrot a politically correct, simplifying mantra imposed on a field more often than not by ignoring the bulk of the evidence. However, if you are not going to do that, the question of imposing any kind of coherence on your narrative becomes acute in a topic like the one Fry has chosen here.

He never quite solves the problem, which is hardly surprising. Who could? Yet there is a pattern of prioritisation in the text based on two arguments. One is embedded in the title: he contends that the Scots were uniquely central to the British imperial experience, with the corollary that that imperial experience was unusually important in the development of the Scottish sense of self. Both these points are sustainable but both are controversial, especially the second. His second argument is the one that provides the spinal cord for the structure of his book. Frys empire is an empire of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose values were the unique Scottish contribution to the British imperial enterprise. It is therefore a Lowland empire and a Presbyterian one, and inevitably mainly a masculine one. Women do feature in certain contexts, like the African missions which were such an important aspect of the overseas thrust of the rival Presbyterian kirks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their absence from the political and administrative arenas until quite late necessarily reduces their role in this book.

More might have been made of the female contribution to imperial medicine, for this was an area where able and qualified women found less resistance to their campaign for equality of opportunity than at home, especially if they could work in association with missionary organisations. It is for this reviewer a shame that Fry makes so little of that very great lady, and his fellow High Tory, the misnamed Red Duchess of Atholl, Scotlands first woman M.P. Her heroic independence of judgement deserves recognition. It was shown by her criticism of the 1935 Government of India Act on the grounds that would expose Indian women to control by an abusive indigenous culture; by her hostility to the Franco and his German and Italian backers; and finally by her passionate opposition to Chamberlains Appeasement policy, on the grounds that it placed in jeopardy the survival of the British Empire. Central Office crushed her, but she should be a heroine of our times, given the unprecedented servility of New Labour MPs that has made the Commons almost as bad a joke as Blairs second chamber.

Nevertheless, one can grant Fry his point that historians should concentrate on the central and determining influences in any major phenomenon, or in this case one should perhaps say linked group of phenomena, and grant him the sustained strength of his analysis of the Scottish contribution to British imperial activity in his period, which is essentially from the Act of Union of 1707 to the abolition of patronage roughly in the mid nineteenth century. Patronage and Enlightenment were inseparable, in both Church and State, and Fry is surely right to say that its abolition was a disaster for the Scots, who never loomed so large or influential in the British imperial experience thereafter. One should overlook the superficial nature of his seventeenth-century section, since his heart is not in it, and his view of Scotland as Ulsters mother country just obscures the reality of the formation of a unique Irish identity with huge English and native Gaelic elements. By contrast his insights into the dominance of Scottish Enlightenment concepts in, say, policy formation in India, which was Westminsters real nineteenth -century empire, are invaluable. Should he ever rework this book, there would be a case for him concentrating on the period 1707 1858, from the Union to the demise of the Honorable East India Company.

But one must not complain that the author should have written a different book, the more so as his pursuit of his theme into decolonisation and the contemporary era raises some fascinating and important issues that demand consideration. By raising them, Fry does a great service, though one can have reservations about the assumptions which underlie his treatment of the more recent material. Oddly enough, this hinges on his inability wholly to transfer the healthy scepticism of his domestic politics to areas furth of Scotland. He is roughly a moderate Conservative autonomista as compared with, say, an SNP independista, in the sense that he clearly does value a distinct Scottish identity. His is a perfectly reasonable position which has recurred continually in the history of human societies. Only too often the rabid assertion of an exclusive kind of national identity has been associated with intolerance, cultural or physical genocide, and a particularly unpleasant combination of manipulative whining about ancient wrongs and the practice of a vicious contemporary imperialism. Even in 1922, for example, the IRA had no policy, as such, for dealing with the North except to bomb and shoot Irishmen there who differed from them into unconditional surrender as a prelude to cultural genocide.

The Soviet Union spent its propaganda energies denouncing Imperialism, while practising a particularly destructive and brutal version of what it denounced. That the Black Watch paraded (in the rain) at the inevitable hand-over of Hong Kong to China in 1997 is an interesting fact noted by Fry, who is quite right to see in the Scottish entrepreneurs of Hong Kong pioneers of an ongoing process of globalization unaffected by, indeed accelerated by, that handover. Nevertheless, to talk of contemporary history as a Post Colonial Era is nonsense. Ask any Tibetan. Chinese imperialism is as alive and kicking as that much more civilised variety flourishing in New Delhi. Neither has any time for nations struggling rightly to be free. Such awkward populations from Kashmir to Tibet are rewarded with permanent armies of occupation. Fry does tend to take the rhetoric of post colonial nationalism at its face value, when his text would be hugely strengthened by some vigorous deconstruction. Yes, as Fry says, Canadians of Scottish origin played a prominent role in the assertion of Canadian independent nationhood in the twentieth century, and the Kirk by Law Established strongly backed African independence movements in the latter part of that century, but what was really happening?

Canadian Premier Mackenzie King (descendant of a debatably sane Dundonian radical) flushed clockwork hares and shot paper tigers on the Commonwealth stage, knowing full well that Westminster would always give him what he wanted, whilst grovelling to the United States so abjectly that one U.S. ambassador found it embarrassing. Canada is an empire of resources inhabited by rather rich but not very coherent groups whose relationship to the neighbouring global hegemon is unmistakeably one of neo-colonial dependency. New Zealand and Australia, whilst talking about new nationalism, have recreated themselves as dependent colonial economies, dismantling their manufacturing industries and living by exporting primary products to dominant Asian markets, mainly Japan. They have even acquired shaky neo-colonial currencies to complete the process. In Africa Robert Mugabe runs a genocidal, racist regional empire of murder and plunder, as he clearly always intended to do, even in his fashionable days as a freedom fighter. In Nyasaland Dr. Banda was just a shade better, but then almost anyone would be.

It is a pity that Fry ends with Mad Mitch marching into Crater in Aden in 1967 to overawe the locals, who were duly overawed by a Brit who was clearly daft, lethal, unpredictable and had bagpipes. The episode is of purely psychological interest. Westminster wanted out as fast as possible, with or without dignity. The Falklands war would have been a far better example of the problems facing a UK anxious to sell out. Argentina had had a close relationship with the UK before Peron. There were very significant Scottish immigrant communities in the country, an expanding creole successor empire that conquered much of its land mass in the latter nineteenth century, exterminating its Indians systematically (you were paid more for a female Indian scalp than a male, as females bred). Yet with a Foreign Office anxious to give the islands to Argentina if a minimal fig-leaf could be arranged to cover the deal, the Argentine junta still preferred imperial violence to obscure their domestic failures, and secured hysterical support for it from the parrot-brained, flag-waving chauvinists who seemed to comprise all those visible in what post-modernists might call Argentinian public space.

Just how important empire was to Scotland is an interesting question. Fry shows it did matter, and future discussion must start from this book, but he naturally skips the other side of the coin, such as the centrality of the independent United States for Scots emigration and investment, and the continuing importance of European markets, not to mention the total ascendancy of European cultural norms amongst the UK ruling elites, whether they were English, Scots or Irish. Paul Cambon, as French ambassador to the Court of St James before the First World War, refused to learn English for fear of damaging his French diction which means he could take it for granted that everyone who mattered could talk to him in French. Sir Henry Campbell -Bannerman, the very rich Scots Liberal Premier of the UK between 1905 and 1908, lived north of Dundee in a palace decorated in Louis XV style. Dundees jute industry, we now know, was essentially a dependency of the ten times larger Bengal industry. Scots shrugged off formal empire surprisingly easily, which might suggest that outside a small section of the educated middle class it was not inherently very important. The Scots post-colonial problem, which they share with their English, Welsh and Northern Irish fellow- subjects is that they have been left with an unbelievably arrogant imperial-style UK executive, and a world full of extremely active and unpleasant successor imperialisms, mostly masquerading as victims.

Bruce P Lenman
University of St Andrews