Robert JC Young: Scots' goal must be postcolonial nationhood

The idea of the postcolonial began in the world of literature, but now it seems that you can find it applied to almost everything, from history to law to theology. What though, in the era of devolution, has the postcolonial to say about Scotland?

At first sight, it would seem simple to consider Scotland from a postcolonial perspective. The postcolonial critique of racialism and the oppression of minorities means that it distrusts nationalism with its quest for a culturally and often ethnically homogeneous nation almost as much as colonialism.

If you walk through Edinburgh and Glasgow today they have the feel of postcolonial cities, comparable to what has been termed 'postcolonial London' - an international metropolis where cultural and ethnic mixture creates the vibrant, dynamic culture of 21st century Europe. But to label all these cities equally 'postcolonial' in this sense masks the differences within the UK.

Although none of the four nations of the UK is or ever was a colony in legal terms, for many it has seemed that Scotland, like Wales and Ireland, have always been de facto 'internal colonies'.

Until the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament, Scotland was effectively ruled from Westminster for nearly 300 years. Although the Scots are represented in Parliament, the small numbers of Scottish MPs mean that they are condemned for ever to be a minority. Today Scotland's autonomy is limited. And like many internal colonies or semi-colonies - Quebec in Canada would be a point of comparison - if it feels like a colony to the inhabitants, then at some level that is the issue. Egypt was technically never a British colony - but tell that to the Egyptians.

What is different about the post-colonial is that it takes into account not only the objective measures of history and law, but also the subjective experience of the people. Postcolonialism is all about how to resist oppressive forms of power and how to heal its psychic and cultural costs. The strength of Scottish nationalism today is a marker of how the Scottish people feel about their own situation. Even if it was never actually a colony, we could say that paradoxically Scotland is not, therefore, yet postcolonial.

The English did not simply colonise Scotland in the way for example the French colonised Algeria - literally arriving one day and marching in on a pretext to occupy the country. The English of course had been trying (unsuccessfully) to take Scotland by force since the 13th century.

From a postcolonial point of view, the paradox of Scottish history was that it was a defeated nation, doomed to become a virtual colony of England, and yet at the same time the Act of Union produced a new political machine that enabled the hugely successful expansion of the British Empire.

Imperial ambition was nothing new to the Scots. It had been the failure of a Scottish imperial venture - the Darien Scheme, an 18th century-RBS which had been backed by half the money circulating in the country and left it effectively bankrupt - that had precipitated acceptance of the union.

The historian Tom Devine has shown the extent of Scottish involvement in the British Empire from the 17th century onwards, while Linda Colley has shown how, as well as becoming enthusiastic proponents of empire, after the Union Scots successfully took over positions of power in London. Memories of Scottish involvement in British imperialism linger on: many people in India today will still dismiss Scotland's claim to be a colony for this reason.

Scots and others often complain with justification that accounts of British society, particularly of its history, assume its homogeneity, when in fact it was made up of different nations. But in all cases those nations themselves were heterogeneous, and cannot be easily assimilated into a single identity.

It is only when the history of the Scottish nation is allowed to become more conflicted and less unified that we can begin to unpack this ambivalent relation to empire, for ‘Scotland' did not name a homogeneous people in the past any more than it does today. The paradox is that Scotland was at once a colonised and colonising power.

Historically, it was less Scotland as such than the Highlands that were subjected to the destruction and oppression of colonial rule. The agents of this tyranny were not just the English, for it was the lowland Scots who most hated the highlanders. In 1787, for example, the Scottish historian John Pinkerton declared ‘the Celts to be mere radical savages, not yet advanced even to a state of barbarism'.

It is in fact when we consider the brutal genocidal treatment meted out to the highlanders and the ensuing erasure of Gaelic culture in the Highland Clearances that Scotland becomes most typically a colonised country. The indigenous population of the highlands was effectively forced to emigrate or exterminated, to use a word freely used in the 19th century to describe the removal of inconvenient native populations, its Gaelic language and culture, including the clan system, deliberately erased on political grounds.

This kind of treatment of local cultures and their languages was a typical strategy of colonial rule, similar to the fates that were being meted out to the native Americans of north and south America.

The fact that beyond the decimations following Culloden, the Highland Clearances were largely effected by Highland chiefs and Scottish landlords does not change the analysis - after all, African slaves were also sold off by their own chiefs.

The attempt to retrieve the remains of Gaelic culture, a struggle that continues today, is, like the continuing desolation of the empty highlands themselves, a marker of Scotland's brutal history of subjection to colonial rule.

The examples of Ireland and Wales, particularly the fact that the Irish language continues to dwindle while Welsh is more widely spoken than at any time in history, cautions us that independence can make that process of cultural restoration more difficult.

That is no reason, however, for the Scots not to continue their determination to achieve independence and become, at last, a postcolonial nation. l Robert JC Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, and was formerly Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University. He is part of the British Council lecture series at the Edinburgh International Festival. www.eif.co.uk/explorations.