Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

At this point we have to start distinguishing between the political entities and the people.

English dominated Scotland

Apart from the ban on Gaelic and Highland dress for a while, and the Highland Clearances? The latter are not entirely simple, as plenty of the landowners in question were also Scottish. If I may paste a paragraph from Wikipedia:

<blockquote>

With the development of pseudoscientific racist ideas from about 1850, the Clearances were at times supported by belief that the Celtic "race" was inferior to the Anglo Saxon "race".[31] George Combe's popular and influential The Constitution of Man, published in 1828, provided a framework which would be used by some to support theories of racial superiority[citation needed]. In 1850 Robert Knox published The Races of Men which asserted the inferiority of the Celt compared to the Anglo Saxon and Nordic races[citation needed].

The view that the economic failures of the Highlands were due to the shortcomings of the Celtic race was shared and expressed by the two most important Scottish newspapers, The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald – and even the more northerly Inverness Courier.[31]

In 1851 The Scotsman wrote that

    “Collective emigration is, therefore, the removal of a diseased and damaged part of our population. It is a relief to the rest of the population to be rid of this part."

Similar views were held by senior public officials. Sir Charles Trevelyan was co-founder with Sir John McNeill of the Highland and Island Emigration Society. </blockquote>

These days we'd call it ethnic cleansing. Trevelyan was Cornish. McNeill was Scottish.

Perhaps the Scots played such an important role in Empire as they had nowhere else to go?

The desire of some Scots to rewrite the Highland Clearances and other nastiness as being perpetuated by the English is really quite ugly, a cowardly refusal to stand up to the past, and the worst kind of romanticism of history. I've read quite a few similar sentiments on the Scottish subreddit trying to pin slavery and empire on the English, with noble tartan-clad Scots shedding noble tears...

Ignoring all the blockade runners the Scottish shipbuilders built for the confederacy ;-)

Being familiar with that subreddit, I'd say that any person who claimed that Scotland was never wholeheartedly imperialist would be laughed at there. There may be the odd loony who claims otherwise, but anywhere is the same and they'd very much go against the grain of opinion there.

You cannot mention the ban on Highland dress without mentioning Bonnie Prince Charlie and his attempt to overthrow the legitimate government specifically (which ended at Culloden, with several Scottish regiments fighting on the side of the government), and the vast divide between the Lowlands and the Highlands in culture, language, religion, economy and industry, and attitudes to Union with England in general. Scottish history is very complex.

There's probably a whole other book to be cited on this subject, yes. And that arguably the Highland Line is more significant a border than the one at Berwick.

As for "legitimate": well, you can see how people might have thought that the son and grandson of James II of England might be the legitimate line of monarchs. Again there's a book, or at least an undergraduate history exam question, on "Explain the legitimacy of the House of Orange as monarchs of England". The short answer which has street legitimacy still is "they're not Catholics". Which is a whole other line of argument about how Unionism is inherently Protestant.

There are so many different ways of delineating the "Highlands" that I'm not sure how you would draw a single boundary that includes the political, cultural, historical and geographical boundaries.

NB When you say "Highland Line" I think of the rail line, then maybe the Highland Boundary Fault....

Enclosure was pretty nasty for poor Englishmen as well. It's probably just as accurate to label enclosure as an instance of class warfare as ethno-cultural warfare.

In the case of Scotland, it's complicated, since there's so much Franco-Norman-English mixture in the Scottish aristocracy through the waves of invasion both ways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com