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By Root 1225 0

up the wealth confiscated by a vindictive government in London. In Sir Walter Scott’s words, India became Scotland’s ‘corn chest … where we poor gentry must send our youngest sons as we send our black cattle to the south’. For educated but indigent Scots, the empire was a blessing, and in the last quarter of the eighteenth century no one did more to promote their interests than the Edinburgh-born Tory minister and ‘uncrowned king of Scotland’ Henry Dundas. In Gillray’s famous cartoon he stands, kilted, with one foot in London and the other in India, as fleets of merchant ships pass between his legs. Three of his brothers made the journey to the subcontinent, and two of them never returned. But India was much more than a family business: so great was Dundas’s more general patronage that the wit Sydney Smith observed that ‘as long as he is in office, the Scotch may beget younger sons with the most perfect impunity. He sends them by loads to the East Indies and all over the world.’

A pattern had been set. In the two centuries following the Union, Scotland provided governors, governors general, residents, district commissioners and agents. In the wildernesses of northern Canada the Hudson’s Bay Company was represented by Orcadians. Kilted Highlanders were glorified for their roles in the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War. Tropical newspaper offices were presided over by men with soft Highland accents. Lowland doctors treated tropical sicknesses. Scots built enormous trading companies, created botanical gardens, commanded merchant vessels. There were Scottish farmers, shopkeepers, lawyers and teachers everywhere. ‘We want more Scots. Give us Scots. Give us the whole population of Glasgow,’ screamed the mayor of Sandhurst, South Australia. Glasgow itself was soon calling itself ‘The Second City of the Empire’, the Clyde was an imperial artery, and when a Glasgow company met the military’s request for the world’s first instant coffee (Camp Coffee – it had a large dose of chicory mixed in) its label showed a Sikh bearer waiting on a kilted Gordon Highlander. David Livingstone was a Scotsman and there were many, many more where he came from. Scottish engineers built roads and railways, bridges and barracks, everywhere.* There were Highland Games in Alberta and Burns Nights in Singapore. ‘Thank God we’re all Scots here,’ remarked Sir George Mackenzie, managing director of the Imperial British East Africa Company. Let the Edinburgh-born doctor Leander Starr Jameson, the reckless leader of the Boer War shambles that was the Jameson Raid, be the standard bearer for these empire-builders. He was the inspiration for Kipling’s ‘If’. A century on, it is still regularly voted the nation’s favourite poem.

While Britain was making an empire, an empire was making Britain.

Chapter Three

‘Tribute from the Red Barbarians’

By the late eighteenth century Britain was looking like a real world power. The American colonies might have been lost, but a sprightly arrogance had taken root – as the playwright Oliver Goldsmith had put it, the country ‘is stronger, fighting by herself and for herself than if half Europe were her allies’. Britain had the strongest navy afloat and some of the world’s most brilliant scientists.* The new nation was fast mechanizing the manufacturing that could transform raw materials from abroad into finished products, and was well embarked upon the urbanization that would make it the first country in which the majority of citizens lived in towns and cities. Unlike many continental European countries, its politics were reasonably settled, while France was swept by revolution and then by tyranny, from which emerged a brilliant despot who styled himself ‘emperor’. With the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 Britain could turn its attention away from the continent again and look to the rest of the world. Within four years Stamford Raffles had founded Singapore, within ten years the British had invaded Burma, within twenty years there were colonies in Western Australia and the Falkland Islands, within thirty more colonies