Darkness and Enlightenment

The doors reopened to the public on Friday and what has been achieved within met with acclaim and celebration. The stunning £46 million refurbishment of the much-loved Royal Museum in Chambers Street has restored the building to its Victorian grandeur, while adding state-of-the-art museum facilities of the 21st century. Some 16 new galleries showcase 8000 objects, most of which are on display for the first time.

There is plenty here to provide aesthetic pleasure and a good day out for all the family. But on a deeper level, this great complex in the heart of Edinburgh will give Scots and visitors alike a profound educational experience about our history, heritage, identity and culture.

Taken together, the Museum of Scotland (MoS), which opened in 1999, and its newly reborn next-door neighbour, tell us more about the Scottish nation than can be easily learned from books or lectures. Many of the objects on display are physical metaphors and symbols of our past.

The MoS tells the domestic story of Scotland from the earliest times to the present day: an educational boon to a country whose own history was for so long marginalised in our schools. Now we have its sibling, which, among a range of other superb galleries, focuses much more on the role and impact of the Scottish people outside Scotland.

The diversity of objects and territories from which these objects originated is extraordinary: there is a cotton robe from 19th-century Japan, a cup from 18th-century Ethiopia, an Aboriginal parrying shield from Australia; a fish spear made by the Inuit people of the Arctic; and a carved lantern from late 18th-century India. All these were brought back to Scotland by wandering Scottish sojourners, administrators, soldiers, missionaries, merchants and professionals, mainly during the Victorian high noon of Empire.

One object has a special resonance for the Scottish military tradition: the sword of Seringapatam. It is a ceremonial weapon of attractive allure. A gold hilt is embellished with diamonds and the scabbard is made of gold-mounted leather. When fashioned in 1800 it would have cost the considerable sum of 200 guineas (around £11,000 today).

The sword was a gift presented to a Scottish general, Sir David Baird, by his officers to commemorate his victory in 1799 over Tipu, the sultan of Mysore in India. Tipu and his father had been vigorous military opponents of British domination in their country, repulsing imperialistic endeavours and proving more than a thorn in the flesh of British forces in the sub-continent during a series of wars between 1766 and 1789.

Indeed, Baird himself had earlier been a prisoner of Tipu’s family for some years. On hearing the news of her son’s incarceration, Baird’s mother was reputed to have declared: “God help the man who’s chained up to oor Davie!”

The capture of Tipu’s fortress at Seringapatam, and the killing of the sultan, caused a sensation in Britain and did much to develop the legend of the invincible Highland regiments of the Crown, who were to the fore when the final assault on Seringapatam was launched.

Much less widely reported back home was what happened thereafter. The victorious troops ran amok in an orgy of slaughter which killed many thousands of people. This was followed by looting and pillaging throughout the city. Plundering was the order of the day and treasure of great value was carried off by British officers as well as the rank and file.

The victory itself was a crucial stage in the final imposition of British rule across the entire Indian subcontinent.

In the meantime, Tipu has become recognised in both India and Pakistan as an immortal figure, personifying heroic resistance to the Raj.

Back home, the Scots began to revel in the heroic deeds of their regiments. Seringapatam, Waterloo, the Crimea and numerous long-forgotten conflicts in distant and exotic places confirmed the growing reputation of Scottish soldiers as the valorous hard men of empire, celebrated in tartan, kilt and sporran in countless paintings, memoirs, press reports and biographies.

There was instinctive recognition of their pre-eminence throughout Britain. Not only were they recognised to be at the very cutting edge of imperial expansion, they were also much later cast in the role of the pallbearers of Empire in its death throes during the later part of the 20th century. The British Army

retreated from India and Pakistan in 1947 to the sound of the bagpipes playing Auld Lang Syne. Half a century later, in the summer of 1997, the garrison regiment in Hong Kong was the Gurkhas. But historical inevitability meant that echelons of a kilted regiment would surely arrive to take part in the formal transfer of the last remaining British colony back to Chinese rule. So it was that the band of the Black Watch took centre stage in the final ceremonials.

Many Scots exhibit a collective amnesia about the central role their forebears played in the most extensive empire the world has ever known. These people will be surprised by the cornucopia of imperial artefacts on show in the National Museum of Scotland, which certainly do not confirm the old stereotype of the Scot as victim. On the contrary, many of the objects on display are reminders of the part played by Scots regiments as the martial spearheads of empire.

They also bear witness to the exploitative conduct of many Scottish merchants in their global search for profit. And they help tell the tragic story of the conduct of some settlers from Scotland towards native peoples in Canada and Australia.

In addition, historians are only now beginning to piece together the long-forgotten evidence of deep Scottish involvement, not often directly in slave trafficking as such, but rather in the trade in sugar, tobacco and cotton from the plantations of the Caribbean and the America colonies, which could not have experienced such unprecedented expansion but for the many hundreds of thousands of chattel black slaves.

Indeed, there is now persuasive evidence that profits channelled back to Scotland from these sectors of Atlantic commerce helped to finance the first phases of Scotland’s rapid industrialisation in the 18th century, and so transform the entire nature of Scottish society.

The artefacts of the past confront the modern Scot with some unpleasant realities. A sceptical few might conclude that artefacts in Scottish museums drawn from across the globe are but the pillage of empire and should not be celebrated or preserved but left to moulder in the dustbin of history. That would be a grievous error. We can only know ourselves as a people if we face up to our past honestly, with all its warts. That function is one of the key foundations of a mature democracy.

Moreover, to view imperial Scots in wholly censorious or negative terms is as much a distortion of past realities as uncritical acceptance of the absurd ethnic chauvinism of the Burns Supper School of Scottish history.

In my new book, To The Ends Of The Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora 1750-2010, I explore the epic story of Scots émigrés, and their remarkable impact not only on such old colonial territories as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, but on nations outside the 19th-century empire, including the United States, Japan and parts of Latin America.

The intellectuals, teachers, engineers, missionaries, physicians and environmentalists ensured that Scottish ideas and traditions in higher education, medicine, philosophy, advanced technology and environmentalism became embedded in the early development of these societies.

The National Museum of Scotland itself has its roots in the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which was established in 1780 to promote the study of Scottish history and culture. It was one manifestation of the Scottish Enlightenment, which saw the flowering of many subjects from philosophy to geology, history to medicine, natural science to jurisprudence and much else.

Although the cultural dynamic in Scotland was part of the broader European Enlightenment of the 18th century, a key characteristic of the Scottish variant was that the cultural explosion was initiated within the universities, and through lectures by the nation’s leading professors, such as Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Black and William Robertson.

The five Scottish universities of the time (Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, plus King’s and Marischal Colleges in Aberdeen) were the intellectual nurseries of the young lads (normally aged 14 to 15 at entry) from the middling ranks of Scottish society.

The number of university places was probably the highest per capita of any part of Europe, which meant that few of those students could hope to have a successful career by staying at home in a small country with limited opportunities. As a consequence, many migrated across the Atlantic, taking with them the enlightened thinking of scepticism, tolerance and learning they had imbibed from their alma maters.

This exodus had major implications for colonial America. Over the century from around 1680 to 1780, some 800 college or university-educated men from Britain and Europe settled in the American colonies; one-third of them were alumni of Scottish universities. Almost all of the colonial medical profession were Scottish émigrés or Scottish-trained. Scots and Scottish-educated ministers dominated both the transatlantic presbyterian and episcopal churches.

Throughout the middle and southern colonies, teachers and tutors from Scotland were everywhere, a tradition which eventually led to the establishment of some of the first universities on American soil, including the College of William and Mary, Philadelphia (which later became the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania) and King’s College, New York (later Columbia), many of them modelled on the universities at home. Meanwhile, a Paisley minister, Rev John Witherspoon, emigrated to New Jersey to become president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). Under his influence, it became the principal seminary of statesmen in the US.

To these academic institutions, Scots brought their own philosophy of education. Their knowledge was broad-based and generalised with moral philosophy at the core, and flavoured with the new ideas of Enlightenment Scotland.

It was not surprising, therefore, that key philosophical principles, fashioned and refined in the old country, would be filtered into the political culture of the new nation, and eventually become embodied in the fundamental documents of the American Republic, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

How much does the modern Scottish nation know about all this? For those who wish to find out more, the National Museum of Scotland is a superb place to start.

Tom Devine OBE is professor of Scottish history and palaeography at Edinburgh University and director of the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies. To The Ends Of The Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750-2010, will be published on August 25 by Allen Lane. He will be discussing its themes at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 21 (www.edbookfest.co.uk)