Vol. 24 No. 24 · 12 December 2002
pages 14-15 | 2496 words
We are all Scots here
Linda Colley
- The Scottish Empire by Michael Fry
Tuckwell/Birlinn, 580 pp, £16.99, November 2002, ISBN 1 84158 259 X
How is empire to be understood in an age that takes nations and nationalism for granted? For those who were once invaded by empires which have since become defunct, this rarely seems a problem. For the majority of Indians in regard to the British Raj, as for one-time satellites of Soviet Russia, empire is simply the dark before the light, an episode of alien oppression now triumphantly shrugged off. Nor in practice have those current Great Powers which are still in essence imperial found coming to terms with empire difficult. China, for instance, continues to retain territories that were conquered by Chinese emperors long after the Spanish and Portuguese invasions of the New World, and does not always do so with the conspicuous consent of the governed. Yet, as has happened with some other Great Powers, conquest and colonisation have been glossed over by an exercise in rebranding. China remains an empire, but it now trumpets itself as a nation, a People’s Republic.
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 1 · 2 January 2003
From Michael Fry
In The Scottish Empire I wrote, of the British Empire in general: 'One reason for its eclipse was that it had anyway never been … a monolith. It existed in many forms which looked different according to the origin, status and activity of the individual or collective spectators.' I stand by this as a good place, though not the only one, for Imperial historians to start their work in the first post-Imperial generation. I would be surprised if Linda Colley, who reviewed the book (LRB, 12 December 2002), did not agree.
I made the point by way of contrast with earlier Imperial histories, which often did take a monolithic view – that of the Empire's ruling cadre in London. In revising that view, which even now colours the popular British view of the outside world, we often have to devise new discourses, a number of which Colley mentions: of women, of the working class, of the colonised and subject peoples. But I do not understand why what she regards as a nationalist discourse should be illegitimate. If I had written a book on the women's Empire or the proletarian Empire, would she have said, 'Oh, but this is all just feminism' or: 'Oh, but this all just socialism'?
Devising a Scottish discourse, one which begins with native rather than metropolitan assumptions, is a demanding task; for my money, only George Davie, Tom Nairn and Colin Kidd have done it consistently and well. The rest of the best-known Scottish historians tend to write Scottish history as a variant on English history. But it seems to me that if Scots can explain their history better, then all British historians should be able to explain our common history better. The index to the third volume of Simon Schama's History of Britain, to take one recent example of the problem, contains precisely 11 references to Scotland.
Michael Fry
Edinburgh
