How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  I

  Part of their success was due to the fact that most Scottish emigrants, even the poorest, had more skills and education than their other European counterparts. This broad-based “brain drain” was bad news for Scotland over the long haul, but good news for the rest of the world. People wanted Scottish immigrants in their country, as temporary or permanent “guest workers,” whether in Australia or Argentina or the United States.

  Also, this Scottish restlessness was nothing new. Scots had crisscrossed Scotland and Europe for centuries, looking for work and opportunity. They supplied the crucial manpower for England’s first overseas empire, as well: first as settlers in Northern Ireland during the reign of James I, and then as soldiers in His Majesty’s army.

  The very first Highland “Watch,” or armed patrol, was raised in 1667 under Charles II. However, the Jacobite wars led the Crown to lose faith in the loyalty of its Scottish contingents, and they were disbanded. After the Fifteen clans loyal to the Stuarts raised a levy of troops to prowl the glens to suppress the remaining rebels. General Wade issued a dark-blue-and-green tartan for these companies of Highlanders, which gave them their name, the “Black Watch.”

  The 42nd Highland Regiment, as the Black Watch was officially known, inspired imitators. Between 1740 and 1815, eighty-six Highland regiments were officially raised, many drawing their recruits and officers from a single clan. Some, like Munro’s regiment and the Royal Scots Fusiliers, fought at Culloden against the Jacobite clans; others, like Fraser’s Highlanders (the old 78th and 71st Regiments) and Keith’s and Campbell’s Highlanders, served with distinction in George II’s wars in North America and Europe. Later they fought loyally against the American colonists and Napoleon. By 1800 they were the backbone of the British army.

  Recruiting volunteers was fairly easy. In the early years the official ban against all weapons and wearing of the tartan at home induced even chiefs’ sons and tacksmen to sign up as common soldiers. Chieftains ordered their clansmen to enlist in exchange for bounty, or as a matter of pride. The Duchess of Gordon raised her clansmen for the Gordon Highlanders in 1794 by touring the Huntly lands in regimental jacket and bonnet, and offering every new recruit a golden guinea and a kiss.31 Of the 2,200 men in Lord MacLeod’s Highlanders (the 73rd Regiment), almost three-quarters came from MacLeod’s own clan area. Many of their fathers had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie—just as MacLeod himself had done, until George III issued him a pardon and brought him home to raise his regiment.

  Sadly, the Highland Clearances solved any remaining difficulties about finding recruits. A national tragedy became the individual’s opportunity, as young men driven off their land found a new life and a future for themselves in His Majesty’s pay. Besides, by serving in a Highland regiment, they managed to preserve a lifestyle, with kilts, swords, bonnets, and bagpipes, that was quickly dying out in their native land: a world of martial valor, loyalty, and personal honor. Scottish soldiers were famous for their bravery under fire, as well as for their excellent discipline. But they were more than just cannon fodder. They did not hesitate to mutiny at what they considered slights against their honor—entire regiments did so in the 1790s.

  In 1804, when the British government contemplated doing away with the kilt and issuing standard uniforms to their Scottish troops, there was a massive uproar. An exasperated Colonel Alan Cameron of the 79th Camerons passionately defended the féileadh-beag and its

  free congenial circulation of pure wholesome air (as an exhilarating native bracer) which has hitherto so peculiarly benefitted the Highlander for activity, and all the other necessary qualities of a soldier, whether for hardship upon scanty fare, readiness in accoutring, or making forced marches & c., beside the exclusive advantage, when halted, of drenching his kilt & c., in the next brook, as well as washing his limbs, and drying both, as it were, by constant fanning, without injury to either, but on the contrary feeling clean and comfortable. . . .

  Cameron summed up the feelings of all the Highland regiments when he concluded: “I sincerely hope His Royal Highness will never acquiesce in so painful and degrading an idea (come from whatever quarter it may) as to strip us of our native garb . . . and stu f us in breeches.” Whitehall dropped the idea.

  A private in the Camerons or the Black Watch usually sent part of his pay to his destitute family. He also kept friends and relatives in a remote glen or Hebridean isle informed about the world outside. Walter Scott’s friend David Stewart of Garth served with the 78th Highlanders (the Ross-shire Buffs) in the West Indies, Minorca and Gibraltar, Egypt, Sicily and Italy, as well as in Kent, and his soldiers with him. Army service opened a window on the world most Englishmen, let alone Highland Gaels, never knew existed. The Highland regiments were in many ways the advance parties for the later Scottish diaspora, as soldiers told their families where they could go when the sheep came and they had to choose between starvation and finding a new home.

  That is, if they lived to tell about it. Like all soldiers of that era, they suffered horribly from diseases such as typhus, smallpox, cholera, scurvy, and yellow fever, especially in tropical climates. The five-month trip to India in 1782 cost the Seaforth Highlanders 230 out of 1,100 men from scurvy—thanks largely to the obstinacy of Whitehall, since James Lind had discovered the cure almost sixty years earlier. The Gordon Highlanders reached Jamaica in June of 1819. Over the next six months, without a shot being fired, they lost ten officers, thirteen sergeants, eight drummers, and 254 other ranks. This was more than all the men the regiment had lost in battle since its formation twenty-five years earlier. It was a high price to pay for the Duchess of Gordon’s kiss.

  The Seaforths and the 74th Highland Regiment were the only regular British troops in the Duke of Wellington’s army in India in 1803, when he confronted a Maratha army ten times his size at Assaye. The 74th met the initial Indian cavalry charge head-on, and lost an incredible 459 men out of 495 effectives, a casualty rate of 92 percent. The regiment lost every officer except Quartermaster James Grant, who joined the ranks and fought on until the battle was won and the Marathas were routed. For their sacrifice, the 74th received the almost unique honor of carrying a third flag on parade, in addition to the Union Jack and the regimental colors. It would bear the Assaye Color until it ceased to be a regiment in 1881.

  Wellington’s Highland troops in India, like those that fought for him at Waterloo, faced an enemy with cannon, muskets, and ammunition much like their own. Then a series of technological changes made the British soldier a much deadlier opponent, again thanks to a pair of Scottish inventors.

  In 1776 Major Patrick Ferguson of the 71st Highlanders patented a rifle that loaded from the breech rather than the muzzle. It could fire four shots a minute, twice the rate of a muzzle-loader under the best conditions, at a target two hundred yards away—in other words, more than twice the distance. Ferguson gave it to his troops, who used it with telling effect against the Americans at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777. However, the English general Howe was furious that Ferguson had acted on his own without permission, and ordered the guns confiscated. What might have happened to the American cause if the British had realized what a secret weapon they had, or if Ferguson had not been killed at King’s Mountain in October of 1780, is anyone’s guess.

  Instead, the breech-loader would have to wait another eighty years before it came into general use. But by then another Scottish invention, almost as crucial, had enhanced the firepower of military arms. This was the percussion lock, invented in 1807 by a clergyman and chemist named Alexander Forsyth. Instead of igniting the bullet’s powder with a flint, Forsyth’s gun hammer used a minute portion of potassium chlorate to fire the weapon. The result was a gun that could shoot in any kind of weather and under any kind of conditions. A standard army flintlock usually misfired three out of ten rounds; Forsyth cut that rate to 4.5 misfires per thousand rounds. When a Scot from Philadelphia named Joshua Shaw then found a way to fit the potassium chlorate into a tiny metal
button, the percussion cap was born. A new kind of infantry warfare was born with it, in which the individual soldier could kill at twice the range almost with impunity, and massed fire meant certain death to anyone caught in it.

  Some found the prospect daunting. In 1817, a letter signed “An English Gentleman” appeared in a London magazine deploring Forsyth’s new invention:

  If, moreover, this new system were applied to the military, war would shortly become so frightful as to exceed all bounds of imagination, and future wars would threaten, within a few years, to destroy not only armies, but civilization itself. It is to be hoped, therefore, that many men of conscience, and with a reflective turn, will militate most vehemently for the suppression of this new invention.

  In fact, the percussion-lock rifle did move warfare onto a bloodier plane. Even before the advent of high explosives, or the rapid-fire breech-loader, or the brass cartridge bullet (another invention from Britain’s Woolwich Arsenal), contests between European-style armies in the Crimea and the American Civil War were already foreshadowing the slaughter of Verdun and the Somme in the next century. But the percussion lock, and its successor the breech-loader, particularly stacked the odds in colonial warfare, as relative handfuls of soldiers could now take on large numbers of Pathans or Ashantis or Zulus, and butcher them almost at will. A dangerous technological gap was opening up between Europeans and the rest of the world, which would threaten even wealthy and advanced non-Western cultures such as those of China, Persia, and India.

  India, of course, was the centerpiece of the British Empire of the nineteenth century, the imperial “crown jewel.” But it had not always been so highly regarded. In the eighteenth century the British had triumphed there, then languished. They controlled only three enclaves of territory, which had grown up around the East India Company’s trading sites at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. The company itself enjoyed a trade monopoly of the sort Adam Smith had analyzed and despised. Its greed and incompetence had helped to spark a revolution in America, provoked angry scenes in Parliament, and nearly pushed the British government into bankruptcy. In 1773 it lost the power to run India as it saw fit, but not its political clout or its economic monopoly. A half-century of official corruption and neglect of the indigenous population—which later anti-imperialists applauded as benign but which in fact sprang from a callous indifference toward the people they ruled—left the subcontinent, and British interests, in a shambles.

  Then, in 1806, the East India Company commissioned a thirty-three-year-old Scotsman named James Mill to write a history of the British presence in India. They had no idea what they were about to get for their money. Mill was a mediocre writer and something of a crank. His father had been a minister, and he was trained as one. He had been a pupil of Dugald Stewart, but left no trace at the University of Edinburgh. He had moved to London in hopes of becoming a distinguished man of letters, as so many other Scots of his generation had. Instead he constantly found himself on the brink of bankruptcy.

  Mill had never been to India, nor had he any great interest in it. He accepted the India Company’s money because he needed to support his wife and his son, John. However, driven by necessity, and haunted by the intellectual tradition he had encountered in Edinburgh, Mill produced his masterpiece, The History of British India.

  It was the first systematic attempt to apply the Scottish school’s four-stage theory to a non-European culture. Mill thought it would take him three years; in fact it took him eleven. Weighing the Hindu and Muslim cultures of India in the scale of civilization’s progress over barbarism, Mill found them woefully wanting. He dismissed India’s ancient religious traditions as “superstition”; he attacked its emperors and rajahs as small-minded tyrants who abused their subjects and grew fat and lazy on the backs of the poor. He reserved a special contempt for its laws, which he compared to those of Europe in the Dark Ages, and its caste system, which “stands a more effective barrier against the welfare of human nature than any other institution which the workings of caprice and of selfishness have ever produced.”

  Mill’s attack on India’s culture and civilization makes hard reading in today’s multiculturalist age. But his anger sprang from his liberal, even radical, sympathies (he was the friend and disciple of the founder of English radicalism, Jeremy Bentham). He wanted European-style progress to raise up the lives of the Indian peasant and urban artisan, who found themselves overtaxed and powerless, as well as denied a basic human dignity by Hinduism’s relentlessly rigid rules of caste. If India’s rulers were incapable of changing this, Mill declared, then the British had to. “A simple form of arbitrary government,” Mill wrote, “tempered by European honour and European intelligence, is the only form which is now fit for Hindustan.” He wanted the British to take command—not in order to enhance their own power and profits (the East India Company already had plenty of both), but to make India into a modern, “civilized” society.

  It was the issue of bringing progress to the Highlands all over again, but in a tropical climate. Mill had given birth to the idea of what Rudyard Kipling would call “the white man’s burden,” and the impact on British policy was swift. Mill was appointed to a post at East India House, and the book itself went into four editions. The president of the Board of Control took Mill’s arguments to heart, as did a future president, Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay detested Mill’s left-wing politics and wrote a famous essay ridiculing them in the Edinburgh Review. But Mill’s radical ideas on legal reform, which Macaulay thought unsuitable for England, he saw as perfect for India. Macaulay called The History of British India “the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since Gibbon.” He pressed hard to implement its proposed reforms, along with a national English-language school system for India—shades of Scotland’s own common parish schools.

  But a new British policy was already taking shape in India, thanks to another coterie of Scots. They were the brilliant and dedicated protégés of Lord Minto, the Edinburgh-educated governor-general who arrived in India in 1806 after the Duke of Wellington had pacified the Maratha princes. Minto himself oversaw the end of the East India Company’s monopoly over British trade in 1813. In southern India, Thomas Munro, later governor of Madras, fought to reduce the tax burden on ordinary farmers and pushed for a system of honest tax collectors (which Parliament approved in 1812) and for independent village courts (which it did not). John Campbell spent sixteen years in the remote hill country between Madras and Calcutta rescuing potential victims of ritual human sacrifice, or meriah. By the time he finished, he had saved more than fifteen hundred lives and prevented the kidnaping of thousands more.

  John Malcolm, an Eskdale native, negotiated a groundbreaking treaty with Persia, which brought peace along India’s northwestern border. Mountstuart Elphinstone became Lord Minto’s most trusted aide, and broke the power of the last Maratha robber barons. A skilled diplomat and a tough soldier, he was also a devoted classical scholar who rose every morning in the summer at four to read Sophocles before his predawn gallop across the landscape. Like all the best Scottish imperialists, Elphinstone saw Britain’s rule in India as basically temporary. He wrote to James Mackintosh, who was then Recorder in Bombay, that the Empire’s “most desirable death” would be “the improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would render it impossible for a foreign government,” including Britain, to retain power. Which is, in fact, what did happen, 140 years later.

  This was a new kind of imperialism, a liberal imperialism, which came to characterize British rule elsewhere in the world. It involved taking over and running another society for its own good—not by saving its soul through Christianity, as other European imperialisms had claimed to do, but in material terms. One could even say, in Scottish terms: better schools, better roads, more just laws, more prosperous towns and cities, more money in ordinary people’s pockets and more food on their tables. Governor-General George Bentinck even framed it with a nod to Francis Hutcheson: “England’s
greatness is founded on Indian happiness.” And for all its faults and shortcomings and hypocrisies, this liberal imperialism did manage to transform India into a more humane, orderly, and modern society. One could even say a freer society, except, of course, in the “narrow” political sense.

  Or at least James Mill and others saw it as narrow. Mill’s teacher Dugald Stewart had repeatedly emphasized to students that how a government came into being—whether by democratic or representative means, or by hereditary rule or even by conquest—mattered less than what the government did when it got there. As long as it promoted progress and protected the rights of the individual and property; as long as it kept pace with social and economic change and expanded opportunities for everyone, then it was good government, no matter who was in charge. If it did not, then it was a failure, no matter how many people voted for it.

  In 1707 Scotland had surrendered her political sovereignty and allowed herself to be run by a government five hundred miles away. The results had been spectacularly successful, particularly for Scotland’s urban middle class. Why not the Indians? Why not other peoples waiting to be brought up from barbarism and superstition into the bright glare of modernity?

  James Mill made this quasi-paternalist view the cornerstone of British colonial policy. Eventually it affected politics in Britain as well. The later Scottish school of Dugald Stewart had reached a startling conclusion, which also contained a paradox: politics as an expression of “the will of the people” mattered less than previous thinkers had imagined. On the one hand, self-government was the fruit of civilized advancement and a worthy goal for any people—including Indians. On the other, the general welfare of a modern, complex society profited most from applying “the science of legislation,” in Dugald Stewart’s phrase, which increasingly meant rule by experts and bureaucrats.

  A fundamental rift was beginning to surface in the modern political imagination, with intelligent Scots aligned on both sides. The last generation of the Scottish Enlightenment became convinced that the only politics a modern society requires is strong effective government. The growth of the civil service and bureaucracy in nineteenth-century Britain, the beginnings of the welfare state in the twentieth—all were confident expressions of government’s ability to manage and anticipate the massive social changes modern society creates, so that people can get on with their lives. But this confidence also blinded liberals to the emotional force and appeal of nationalism, which, by contrast, old-fashioned Tories such as Sir Walter Scott clearly understood. It blinded William Gladstone, son of the middle-class Scottish diaspora, who destroyed the Liberal Party when his plan for Home Rule for Ireland provoked massive resistance not only from the British and Ulster Protestants, but from the Irish themselves. It blinded future British governments when the passion for independence struck other parts of the empire: in Afrikaaner South Africa in the 1890s; in India in the 1920s; and eventually, at the tail end of the twentieth century, in Scotland herself.