Scotland and England have developed different conversations about the empire. Where the dominant story down south is “it was all us, and it was great”, here in Scotland, we like to think of ourselves as being a little more refined. And so we tend to say “it was awful, and it was all them”.
This is, of course, nonsense. A better way to understand the relationship is that the ruling classes of the two countries came together to form the Union so that they could more easily plunder the world. And so they did, together building the biggest empire in human history, driving the industrial revolution and ‘Enlightenment’ at home at the cost of slavery and impoverishment overseas.
There has rightly been a lot of focus on the gruesome trans-Atlantic slave trade in recent days. But let’s include alongside that the genocides of the Americas and Australia, the starvation of India, the Opium Wars and the murderous Irish famine; the castrations and the concentration camps.
