Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow IF you are visiting Glasgow, you will almost certainly want to spend some time in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in the West End. If you do, you may well be struck by a large-scale double portrait of Robert Nutter Campbell and his wife, Margaret Montgomery.
It shows them at their Peebleshire estate of Kailzie around 1805. Campbell was busy at that time extending his property, which was set in extensive parkland overlooking the Tweed valley, including a new mansion house and three lodges.
So, where did Campbell get the money for this estate? Well, some of the wealth he had inherited from his father, who owned slave plantations in the Caribbean, but like father, like son, Robert had a slave plantation of his own, the Carriere estate on the east coast of Grenada. And thanks to the curator of archaeology at Glasgow museums, we don’t only know this, we can learn a bit about the 232 slaves that Campbell owned, aged from 70 to two, on whose unpaid labour he and his family grew rich. More recently, there has been a growing understanding by the Scottish left of the role and the extent to which Scottish participation in the slave trade meant that Scotland was more coloniser than colonised. In fact, while still an independent state, James VI/I had given Scotland a colony in the north of Ireland as part of his strategy for “civilising” the Irish. As the Scottish historians Mullen and Gibbs write: “Rather than an ‘internal colony,’ Scotland’s invitation to the core meant imperialism played a proportionately greater effect on national development compared with England, whose empire Scots infiltrated.“ In 40 years, the empirical evidence of Scots as colonisers has rendered the narrative of colonised Scotland obsolete in historiographical terms.”
Perhaps in historiographical terms, but not, it would seem, in political terms. Last month, an organisation called Liberation Scotland, which claims a membership of around 17,000, in the words of its press release: “submitted an advance notice of petition for the formal recognition of Scotland as a Non-Self-Governing Territory under the UN decolonisation framework, in accordance with the principles enshrined in UN general assembly resolutions … of the UN charter.” The 1707 Act of Union, generally seen as an agreement, however unbalanced (more of that later) between two sovereign countries, is presented by Liberation Scotland as an English colonial conquest by other means: “the historical incorporation of Scotland into the United Kingdom in 1707 … was never an expression of self-determination, but a process marked by political coercion, by the threats of economic sanctions and military invasion and by bribery.”
There is no doubt that Scotland was the weaker partner in the 1707 Union negotiations; it was still suffering from the effects of the “ill years” of the 1690s, a period of bad harvests and famine in Scotland and the economic turmoil brought about by the collapse of the Darien Scheme, a failed attempt by Scots to up their own colony in Panama. It was abandoned in 1700. Not to mention England’s refusal to allow Scotland to trade with English colonies in the Caribbean and India, as well as English naval power denying Scottish trade with France, Spain and the Netherlands. However, despite exposing Scotland’s underdeveloped economy to the blast of competition from its more developed neighbour, the Act of Union allowed Scottish entry to the English market and all the English colonies’ markets, customs-free, and it gave Scottish merchant ships the protection of the Royal Navy. According to Tom Devine’s definitive history, The Scottish Nation: “Scotland had not been converted into a colonial appendage of the English economic system by the 1730s … England sought union for reasons of political and military security and had no economic ambitions north of the border.” Specifically, as already noted, the Union allowed members of the Scottish merchant capitalist class, on the back of England’s imperial project, to get rich on the labour of slaves and increased trade in textiles, sugar and tobacco, generating the wealth which ultimately helped fund the industrial revolution.
It is difficult to know to what extent the ideas of Liberation Scotland might permeate the wider independence movement in Scotland, but in so far as they do, it is retrograde development, because it feeds the argument that the dynamic of Scottish history after the Union was not the development of a vibrant capitalism and an increasingly organised and sometimes militant proletariat in Scotland. Instead, we are being invited to believe that the consequences of colonialism abroad and, for example, the brutal clearances at home, were not the actions of Scottish capitalists and landowners seeking to maximise profit, but rather the result of decisions by a London elite extracting value from its colonial conquests. In the formulation of Mullen, in relation to the slave trade, it allows the defence of: “it wisnae us.”
There are reasons why this position, at this time, might get some traction. The left of the independence movement has failed to rebuild the largely young, enthusiastic and progressive platform for independence that emerged during the 2014 referendum campaign, led by leftists much more inclined to Mullen’s interpretation. The vacuum created by the left’s absence may give space to a position that is not troubled by the complications of understanding Scotland as a class-based society historically embedded in British imperialism. Liberation Scotland may also benefit from the utter failure of the British and Scottish Labour Party in relation to political and economic democracy in Scotland. While Scotland’s right to self-determination is recognised, a transparent, constitutional way through which this might be exercised has not been forthcoming from Labour. The obvious way of resolving this would be to give the power to call a referendum to the Scottish Parliament, and further, that any such referendum should recognise that there has always been and remains a tradition in Scotland that values the class solidarity afforded by the Union, as long as that does not deny the Scottish Parliament the powers to intervene effectively in the Scottish economy.
That could be done by having those additional powers as an option in any future referendum, as well as the option of independence and the status quo. This debate will be given extensive coverage in Keep Left: The Red Paper 2025, which will be launched at the STUC this month. The book concludes with an essay by John Foster on the nature of the Scottish working class — a powerful antidote to those who would prefer that class conflict was not a driver of Scottish history.
Keep Left: Red Paper on Scotland 2025 is available from Luath Press (luath.co.uk).
This article first appeared in the Morning Star on Tuesday 29th April 2025
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