Scotland the Brief

Part 2: Imperial Partner
16 Industry and Empire

A Union for Empire certainly provided lots of patronage, but this wasnt wholly welcome to Scots improvers. Why? Adam Smith, for one, disapproved of the idea, which he called mercantilism, of building up national strength at the expense of other nations though this described pretty fairly the relations between the states of eighteenth-century Europe . The fringes of sharp trading practice smuggling, piracy, downright fraud were murky. Until late in the 18th century the colonies were seen as captive markets, rather than as the source of raw materials: something that provoked the secession of the American colonies in 1776.

This was a setback to Scotland the trading nation. Glasgow's 'tobacco lords' were badly hit. But trade bounced back in the shape of sugar and cotton, provided by the last spasm of human slavery. Scots were not directly involved in the Africa-to-Caribbean slave trade, centred in Bristol and then Liverpool, but profited much from supplying the plantations with equipment, and building equipment to refine their products: spinning-machines, sugar boilers and so on. After the 1780s there was a take-off, with the building of water-powered spinning mills (the most famous was New Lanark, built by David Dale and passed to his son-in-law Robert Owen) linked up by turnpike roads and canals. Scots engineers were outstanding examples of a revolution in technology, involving the use of iron parts such as wheels, rails and beams (stronger than wood and of course fireproof) bricks, machine-cut stone.

Patrick Geddes, the great Scots sociologist, called the steam age 'palaeotechnic.' Eighteenth-century Scotland hadn't reached this stage instead making wind, water and animal power as efficient as possible. Think, for instance, of the Stevenson family, who built the intricate stone towers of the Northern Lights which tamed the fierce coasts of the Hebrides and the Pentland Firth. Or of Thomas Telford, who saw his canal and road projects as a great working academy and schooled such national technologists as William Dargan in Ireland, John Ericsson in Sweden and the USA and Joseph Mitchell who built the Highland Railway. Engineering also applied to the native populations Scots encountered: most importantly in India where Macaulay's 'Minute on Education' (1836) chartered the development of an Anglophone, westernised sub-continent.

After 1880 there was a scramble for territories between the European states. Had Scotland still been independent she might have picked up a few thousand square miles of jungle or desert somewhere. Empire, and the disinclination of English grandees to have much to do with trade in it, gave the Scots plenty of scope in the new metropoli: places like Montreal, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

The Scots managed to stay on both sides of the argument, imposing British rule and exploitation, but often organising the resistance of settlers, or even natives, against it. William Lyon MacKenzie headed the campaign for responsible government in Canada, Octavian Hume founded the Indian Congress in 1885, Andrew Fisher was the first Labour Prime Minister of a United Australia in 1908. By the late-twentieth century people estimated that as many as 25 million Scots lived world-wide, a smallish number in comparison with a global population of 6.6 billion, but exercising disproportionate influence. Though the question remained, could an imperial race base itself on a working-class living in the tiny tenements of Glasgow : Second City? or Naples with bad weather?