How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  Of course, all this lay far in the future when Charles James Napier arrived in 1841 to take over as governor of Sind. That part of India, in what is now Pakistan, was still a dangerous and disorderly frontier, with constant wars between the local rulers and Sikh warrior bands, and between Muslims and Hindus. Napier was there to straighten it out. His father, George Napier, had been born in Edinburgh and tutored by David Hume; some of Hume’s cool, cynical view of human nature, and that of his mentor, Lord Kames, seems to have rubbed off on Charles as well. The family lived in Ireland, where his father was quartermaster of a British regiment when the Irish Revolt of 1798 broke out. Major Napier barricaded his house, armed his five sons with muskets, and held the place as a virtual fort until help arrived.

  Soldiering was in Charles Napier’s blood. As Jan Morris has said, “his cousins, forebears, and descendants commanded armies, ships, garrisons, or colonies from one end of the empire to the other.” He joined the army at age twelve, and saw action in Spain under Wellington. At the battle of La Coruña he was wounded five times, including a saber cut across the head and a bayonet in the back; at Busaco he took a bullet through the face. All this did nothing to quell Napier’s thirst for excitement, but did build in him a contempt for inessentials, such as keeping up appearances, or what we call Victorian hypocrisy. His formula for empire-building was “a good thrashing first and great kindness afterwards.” This is what he proceeded to do in Sind.

  Napier was a political radical like James Mill, with an intense sympathy for oppressed people, whether in Britain (he supported the working-class Chartists) or in India. “How feeble is a system of iniquity!” he wrote as he watched the local rulers at work. “How weak is injustice!” The remark reminds us of the sober truth that many of the traditional regimes the British toppled, both in India and elsewhere, had spent centuries making their subjects wretchedly unhappy. When their fate hung in the balance, most of their populations would refuse to lift a finger to save them. For native peoples, the British might not be their first choice. But, in many cases, thanks to Scots like Napier, they were better than what they had.

  Napier was still trying to protect the territory from marauding Sikhs when the governor-general decided to annex the entire province. It was the single biggest expansion of British rule in India in a generation, and it was hugely unpopular in Britain. Napier knew the annexation of Sind had no legal rationale, but approved of it anyway. It was, he wrote, “a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality.” As governor, Napier instituted all the reforms the old rulers never did or could. He lowered taxes, created the port of Karachi, encouraged steam navigation on the Indus River, created a police force to keep order, and proposed irrigation schemes to allow local farmers to expand their fields and crops. He changed life in Sind in other ways, as well. When he banned the Hindu practice of suttee, of burning a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, the local Brahmin priests protested that this was interfering with an important national custom. “My nation also has a custom,” Napier replied. “When men burn women alive, we hang them. Let us all act according to national custom.”

  Napier foretold the best of the later British Raj, with his stern but generous paternalism, which combined the rule of law with humanitarian principles—when it was feasible. The Raj system itself came into being under a Scottish governor—General James Dalhousie, Lord Ramsey. In his eight years as de facto ruler of India, from 1848 to 1856, he gave the subcontinent the trappings of a modern society. He built its first railroads, strung thousands of miles of telegraph wire, and created a national postal service. Schools, roads, and irrigation projects flourished under his tenure, while he also expanded British control over lower Burma, Oudh, and several smaller principalities. In each he abolished suttee and thuggee, or the ritual murder cult, as well as the last remains of human sacrifice.

  Dalhousie also pushed for what he called a “social revolution” in the Indian attitude toward women. This marked a new departure for Scots. Scottish society had always been highly patriarchal; the Scottish Enlightenment was an almost exclusively male enterprise. But the degraded status of Indian women, like that of Chinese women, shocked everyone who had contact with it. “The degradation of their women has been adhered to by Hindus and Mohammadans more tenaciously than other customs,” Dalhousie wrote, “and the change will do more towards civilising the body of society than anything else could effect.” He wrote laws banning child marriage, polygamy, and the practice of killing unwanted female children. He created the first schools for girls, arguing that nothing was “likely to lead to more important and beneficial consequences than the introduction of education for their female children.” By the time he left India in 1856, Dalhousie had made more changes in Indian society than it had seen in centuries—more, in fact, than it could stomach.

  Native resentment against Dalhousie’s self-confident paternalism and the sweeping changes he implemented exploded in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A Scot’s progressive reforms had ignited the revolt; two Scottish soldiers, Generals Colin Campbell and Hugh Rose, stamped it out. The mutiny, which convulsed the entire subcontinent for two years, marked a watershed in Anglo-Indian relations and destroyed whatever independence was left to its native rulers. But it also demonstrated the dual nature of the new British Empire: when its high-minded reforms were blocked or threatened, it would not hesitate to use brute military force to get its way. And Scots were the mainstays of both.

  India’s role within the Empire had changed also. It was now crucial to British policy because of one crop: opium. Opium was the single commodity the British could trade in bulk to the other great empire to the east, China. There was only one problem: opium was illegal in China.

  No European who had any dealings with imperial China had the slightest sympathy or respect for its anti-opium policy. European and British merchants knew many of the imperial officials were opium addicts themselves, who turned a blind eye to the illegal trade in exchange for a cut of the profits. They knew, too, that the same officials also unmercifully squeezed the Chinese hongs or merchants, who were officially licensed to trade with “the round-eyed devils.” This kept profits low on all legal exports from China, such as porcelain, silk, and, most important of all, tea. Most British traders saw smuggling Indian opium as a fitting revenge on a government that made doing business in China a misery. But two men, and two only, saw the true potential of the opium market in China, and had the skill and determination to do something about it.

  James Matheson came from the Sutherland branch of the Matheson clan, which dominated the lands in the western Highlands around Loch Alsh. He was working for a Scottish trading firm in Calcutta when he met William Jardine, a shrewd, hardheaded32 Lowlander and former Royal Navy surgeon who had become involved in trade as well. Together they realized the place to make money was in opium; they became partners in 1827, and within a decade Jardine Matheson and Company was the dominant force in the illegal China trade.

  Their skill and ingenuity in exploiting the immense Chinese drug market reflected the hard side of the Scottish character. Matheson and Jardine knew Britain had no drug problem, except for a few eccentric English intellectuals such as Samuel Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey; neither did India, which had been growing the stuff for thousands of years. If the Chinese government could not control their own people and their seemingly insatiable appetite for it (one estimate put the number of Chinese opium addicts at nearly 1 percent of the total population, perhaps as many as two million persons), Jardine and Matheson believed, that was their lookout. They also grasped that the imperial system was on its last legs. Once China had been a model of civilized commercial society to Scottish scholars such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Now, to Britons trained to look with James Mill’s disdainful eye, it looked corrupt, decadent, and barbaric. The Chinese Empire was dying. Jardine and Matheson intended to be in on the kill.

  Besides, smuggling was a long-standing Scottish tradition. The Jardine-Matheson cartel simply raised it
to a new sophisticated level. They sailed their fast clipper ships into Whampoa harbor under the eyes of the Chinese authorities and smaller boats up the rivers to China’s principal cities. Jardine also brought in a 115-ton steamer, which he named—naturally—the Jardine, to sail the Pearl River between Canton and Macao. On its first voyage the Chinese opened fire on it and forced it to reverse course. Jardine was furious. Earlier he had warned the British government that the conflicts over the opium trade could lead to full-scale war unless it persuaded the Chinese to give way. “Nor indeed should our valuable commerce and revenue both in India and Great Britain be permitted to remain subject to a caprice. . . .” The outcome of such a war, he wrote, “could not be doubted.” In other words, total defeat of the imperial government and the final opening of China to the West.

  The First Opium War, as it was called, was the premeditated project of three men: William Jardine, British foreign minister Lord Palmerston, and the second Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty.33 Together they cooked up the war to save the opium trade and make Britain the arbiter of political fortunes in China. Once again the technological gap between West and non-West came to the rescue, this time in the form of a steam-powered iron gunboat called the Nemesis.

  The Scottish shipbuilder John Laird constructed her in his yards at Liverpool. She was 184 feet long and powered by two sixty-horsepower engines. She carried two large thirty-two-pound cannon and five sixpounders, and a Congreve rocket launcher. Laird had also divided her hull into watertight compartments, to prevent any waterline damage from sinking her. The Nemesis was a formidable fighting machine, the ancestor not only of ironclads such as the Monitor, but of the later modern cruisers and battleships of the Royal Navy.

  The Nemesis left Portsmouth on March 28, 1840. It was the first iron ship to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. When it reached Macao in November, it was the most powerful warship in the China Sea. Twice the size of ordinary Chinese war junks, it turned their wooden hulls and masts to matchsticks when it turned its guns on them. In addition, the gunboat had a draft of only six feet, so that it could sail up any navigable river to wreak havoc on the hapless Chinese. In a single afternoon’s battle up the Whampoa, the Nemesis took out nine war junks, five forts, one artillery battery, and two military supply posts. Its captain wrote exultingly to John Laird: “It is with great pleasure I inform you that your vessel is as much admired by our own countrymen as she is dreaded by the Chinese.” The British commander in charge of the operation wrote that it proved “that the British flag can be displayed throughout their inner waters wherever and whenever it is thought proper by us, against any defence or mode [the Chinese] may adopt to prevent it.”

  By the next year the Nemesis had been joined by other steamships and gunboats, including her sister, the 510-ton Phlegethon. Together they pounded the imperial Chinese forces into submission. The Chinese government signed a peace treaty at Nanking in August 1842, finally opening up the opium trade and other commercial exchanges with Britain. Jardine became the tai-pan of the new colony he had founded, called Hong Kong. Britain had fought the first major colonial war in East Asia and won. Other European powers would follow, but Great Britain was now the dominant political power in the region—thanks to John Laird and the Scottish drug lords.34

  II

  Some territories came under British rule through conquest, others through settlement. Canada and Australia began as integral and supportive parts of the empire; they also remained the most loyal after they gained their independence as dominions. Not coincidentially, they were also where Scots were the dominant influence.

  Scotsmen had been involved in the making of Canada from its very beginnings. They had settled Nova Scotia for Scotland; later, they spread to the other Maritime Provinces as well, whose wild and desolate rocky shores reminded them of home (which, geologically speaking, made sense). Newfoundland served as a way station for tobacco merchant smugglers operating between Virginia and Scotland in the days before the Union. At that time Canada belonged to the French. Then, in 1759, General Wolfe and the Fraser Highlanders took the Heights of Abraham overlooking the city of Quebec, and Quebec Province, and with it the key to French Canada, fell to Great Britain.35 Wolfe’s second-in-command, General James Murray, was a Scot who became its first British governor.

  Canada’s main value to Europeans was its fur trade, and within a few years the Scots dominated that as well. The best traders and trappers tended to come from Scotland’s northern islands the Orkneys. The Orcadians, as they were called, enjoyed many advantages over their English counterparts. Canada’s bitterly frigid climate, the deep isolation of months in icebound inlets and rivers, and the ceaseless work in cold and wet posed no hardship for them. The standard joke was that the Orkneymen joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in order to get warm. One of the company’s factors admitted, “The Orkneymen are the quietest servants and the best adapted for this country than can be procured.” Another, on a trip in 1779, said, “A set of the best men I ever saw together, as they are obliging, hardy, good canoe men.” They earned the respect of the Native Americans as well. Yet Orcadians were also notorious for their secretiveness, their reluctance to betray emotion, and their keenness to enrich themselves. One English officer asked that he be recalled to England “if any person from the Orkney Isles be placed over me.” Their finest tribute comes from the American historian Bernard de Voto, who said the Canada Orkneymen “pulled the wilderness round them like a cloak, and wore its beauty like a crest.”

  They and their Highland cousins virtually took over the Hudson’s Bay Company, so that by the turn of the eighteenth century four out of five employees were Scots. “The country is overrun with Scotchmen,” an English trader complained.

  Then, in 1782, another Scot, Simon MacTavish, created the Northwest Company, operating out of Montreal. MacTavish’s employees trapped beaver, otter, and seal, or hired those who did, up and down Quebec and Ontario, and built settlements west into the Red River valley. One of them, a twenty-five-year-old trapper from the Isle of Lewis named Alexander MacKenzie, set up a fur-trading post with his cousin on Lake Athabasca, in what is now Alberta. A large river flowed out of Athabasca to the north at Fort Chipewyan, near their log-cabin post. MacKenzie decided to see where it went. In 1789, the year Parisians besieged the Bastille and George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States, the trapper set out on a three-thousand-mile trek up what is now the Mackenzie River, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Four years later MacKenzie found a passage through the Canadian Rockies and, on July 22, 1793, crossed what is now British Columbia to find himself facing the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark usually get the credit for first crossing the North American continent to the Pacific. In fact, that honor belongs to Alexander MacKenzie, who did it ten years earlier.

  In 1821 the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company merged, forming the largest corporate landholder in the world—more than 3 million square miles, from the American border to the Arctic Circle. Its Scottish president, George Simpson, governed ten times more territory than had the Roman emperors. Simpson was a West Highlander, with a strong sense of his own dignity and command. An eyewitness remembered watching him on the move:

  When he went out of doors he wore a black beaver hat worth forty shillings. When traveling in a canoe or boat . . . he still wore his beaver hat, but it was protected by an oiled silk cover and over his black frock coat he wore a long cloak made of Royal Stuart tartan lined with scarlet or blue bath coating.

  Simpson also traveled with his own bagpiper, who would play long pibrochs for his master as they canoed across an icy transparent lake to the next trading post or Indian village.

  Simpson was also a master of handling men, and the company’s Native American allies. He stopped the rum trade with local Indian tribes, and resorted to legitimate exchange to get his beaver pelts. By contrast to the American frontier, the Canadian version involved no violent confrontations with native peoples
, no massacres or reprisals. Instead it witnessed one hundred years of virtually unbroken peace and order. Simpson’s active and evenhanded stewardship of the Hudson Bay lands formed the basic core of what would become modern Canada.

  Scots arrived as settlers, as well. Hundreds of Loyalist refugees from the Mohawk Valley in New York moved into eastern Ontario, in what is now Glengarry. They were soon joined by hundreds of Highland cousins, fleeing the Clearances. Today the land is flat, a checkerboard of fertile cornfields and grain silos. Then it was almost entirely forest, which the hardy Highlanders cut down and shipped to Quebec. Many stayed with the lumber business and followed it into northern Ontario, down to Michigan and Minnesota, and across to British Columbia. They became the Glengarry “shantymen,” the most skilled lumberjacks in North America, artists with the ax and saw.