Michael Fry: Don't swallow the myths about Scotland's imperial past

Certainly, from the straths of Sutherland to the shipyards on the River Clyde, the emptiness and silence tell of a great empire that once was, yet is no more. The cold, wet, sour soil of Sutherland was relinquished by its natives long ago for a better life on the fertile plains of North America. But a time at length came when there was no further need of Clyde-built ships to carry the emigrants away or to bring back the fruits of their pioneering labours.

This vast imperial scene of triumph and tragedy gave a special character to Scotland as a small place which yet attained a global outreach. That has tended to get forgotten during the reawakening of an older nationhood in recent times. All praise, then, to Jonathan Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, for making another of his bold decisions and choosing a post-colonial theme for 2010. He surely invites us to ask where Scotland fits into it.

In former colonies themselves, the whole point of post-colonialism is to say: what's done is done, what's past is past, we're glad we're no longer there but here, and from now on we're going to rejoice in it without being dogged and dragged down by the grudges of history. That will no doubt be an underlying message to be picked up from the Australian operas, the Brazilian ballets and, for all I know, the travelling players of Papua New Guinea.

In Scotland, things are, as ever, gloomier, but I hope the locals sitting in this summer's audiences can pick the message up too. I say so because there is otherwise a tendency to wallow in one of two feelings about Scotland's imperial past. The first is to claim the fashionable victims' status for Scots, along with the convicts who were transported to Australia, the slaves who were sold in Brazil and the Papuans who saw their tropical paradise ravaged. The emptiness and silence of Sutherland and the Clyde are taken as sufficient proof of the claim.

In reality, it is a ridiculous claim, one of too many empty Scots myths. From global development, there have been both winners and losers, yet the net effect is of huge benefit to humanity. The basic process has been to supply the necessary men and money to the resources requiring them for exploitation. Before imperialism, these factors of production were isolated from one another, but today they are everywhere mobilised. While, in the nature of things, we cannot all get rich at the same speed at the same time, today the Chinese and Indians are getting richer while the westerners are getting poorer.

As for the Scots – well, the Scots played a part out of all proportion to numbers in this ultimately benign process of universal exchange. Scots built the ships, indeed, but Scots also formed the banks that channelled the funds, founded colonies such as Singapore and Hong Kong to conduct the trade, sent out missionary explorers like David Livingstone both to look for undiscovered riches and to set up schools which, a century later, would produce Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere and other agents of their peoples' freedom. And, by the way, the whole process had been theorised in advance by Kirkcaldy's greatest son, Adam Smith. None of this is what happens to victims.

The actual historical record has been, all the same, no sure cure for Scots gloom. Gloomsters who cannot swallow one myth readily fall back on another. If they do not feel miserable enough as suffering victims, they reproach the nation for having inflicted suffering on others. Of course, nobody could claim the Scots' imperial record had been squeaky clean: it was not a pleasant death for any Indian mutineer or Chinese Boxer rebel who happened to fall into the hands of a kilted regiment. But our modern self-flagellation has focused above all on slavery.

This strikes me as odd, because slavery was, in fact, one imperial delinquency in which the Scots turned out to be not all that complicit, at least compared with the big business it became for England, France, Holland and Spain.

Jamaica and Virginia had become English colonies long before the Scots were ever allowed into them in 1707, and one thing the English were not then going to do was let the Scots tell them how to run colonies. What, after Darien?

Not indeed that Scots specially wanted to dictate to the English, or preach to them the evils of slavery. Most Scots took their morality from the Bible, and the Bible forbids many things, but not slavery. Scots were often thought of in the 18th century as being an exceptionally moral people. It so happened that the biblical morality they espoused did not exclude slavery.

I am not sure we today should feel guilty about this, especially since criticism of slavery quickly arose once Scots started to work out a moral system independent of the Bible. This formed part of the project of the Enlightenment. Sure enough, slavery was soon condemned by Adam Smith and by John Millar, both at one time or another professors in Glasgow, where they could get first-hand information from the merchants who ran the colonial trades. They were not impressed by what they learned. Smith, in particular, condemned slavery for being inefficient: it gave the slaves no stake in their work, such as the humblest employee of the pin-factory in Kirkcaldy had, so they would not perform it well.

I suppose the politically correct attitude would be to concede Smith was right, but still to find a way of condemning him for being right on the wrong grounds – that is, for taking a calculated economic approach to the issue rather than a fulminating moral one. Still, I doubt if today's political correctness has much moral staying power. Just as today we laugh at the Victorians for clothing the legs of their tables to avert indecent thoughts, so I suspect our political correctness will look equally laughable to the 22nd century. The proper response is the post-colonial one: nothing can be done about the past, but the present is here and now – enjoy!

Michael Fry's book The Scottish Empire is published by Birlinn.