Scotland the Brief

Part 2: Imperial Partner
13 Rule Britannia!

Before 1707 Scots (many of them probably ex-soldiers) tended to migrate to east Europe. Afterwards the plantations of the Caribbean and the American colonies lay at the end of 'that broad road westaway yonder'. Patronage was one of its main drivers, opening up the empire to the military, the trader and the administrator. Patronage was one of the main drivers of the Union. The soldiers from cleared Highland glens fought at the bidding of a generation of younger sons on the make, who risked their lives as army officers or clerks of the East India Company and its private rivals, and expected rewards that would suit. The breakthrough seems to have come rather earlier than the incorporation of the fighting men, and cemented the dominance of the Scots in imperial extension. They had talked an ambitious game. Now they could use their less-fortunate kinsfolk to make the gamble work. In the eighteenth century there were two main contested areas with the French: North America and India. In the first the Scots built up the trapping and fur business of the Hudsons Bay Company, and then leagued with friendly Red Indian tribes to expel the French. The fall of Quebec in 1759 was critical, and was shortly followed by the expulsion of the French from most of their East Indian territories.

Thereafter expansion was rapid: a mixture of military victory and trading deals, many on the windy side of the law. The English elites tended to replicate the hierarchies of London and the cathedral cities they were used to; the Irish moved into the big seaport towns, where they provided the labour to be managed by shrewd Scots. The latter could also be found on the land, where the botanic garden, adapting plants to new habitats, became a major instrument of imperial expansion. Dock engineering, speculative suburbs, later on railways like the Canadian Pacific and urban tramways, telegraph companies, coal depots: the Scots attended to the institutions of the new colonies. From the mid-19 th century they gained further prestige from missionary activity, prestigious enough in the hands of Dr David Livingstone to drown out discussion of the cash brought in by firewater (whisky loosened up natives for conquest) and the opium trade for which the British subjugated the Chinese in the 1840s, and took over Hong Kong.

The payoff from all this was made manifest in the grand 'baronial' mansions that loomed over many Highland glens: built out of profits from furs, steamers, whisky or opium. From the most notable, Queen Victoria 's Balmoral, built in 1852-56, the Empire itself was run in late summer, when the governing classes came north by train or yacht to shoot or fish. In their wake, housed in similar romantic discomfort, came tourists, schoolboys and - unceasingly after the 1870s - golfers.