Decolonial Consciousness 2/3: On Opening Still Yours For Scotland. The Embassy That Named Scotland Out of Existence. A Personal Awakening and the Scholarship That Will Not Be Dismissed

This is the second post in the founding trilogy of Still Yours For Scotland. The first post, "Awareness Is the Beginning of Everything", introduced the decolonial intellectual tradition and the founding purpose of this platform. This second post traces my personal and intellectual journey, which brought me to this project, as a Scot among others, examines the systematic erasure of Scotland in diplomatic and linguistic space, and presents the Scottish scholars and activists whose work has established the legal and historical foundation of Scotland's colonial analysis. The third and final post, "Scotland and the Unfinished Moment of Decolonisation", situates Scotland within the global history of decolonisation and sets out the international stakes of Scotland's liberation.

A Personal Awakening

My own decolonial awareness did not begin with politics. As an overseas Scot who spent every childhood summer in Scotland but was educated and professionally formed abroad, in France and in Asia, deep affection came long before constitutional or (anti-/de)colonial consciousness. Attachment preceded analysis. Belonging preceded any understanding of what belonging meant, legally and historically. Beyond family, my perception of Scotland was highly distorted and somewhat folkloric.

This condition is shared, I believe, by much of the Scottish diaspora. Scotland has one of the largest diasporas in the world relative to population. That scale of migration is not accidental. The Highland Clearances, one of the most systematic programs of rural dispossession in modern European history, scattered communities across the oceans. Economic restructuring that accompanied imperial integration pushed further waves of emigration. Demographic transformation and reengineering by the English colonial state continue to the present day in Scotland. The diaspora carries cultural memory but has often been separated from the sustained constitutional inquiry that would allow that memory to become politically legible. The English colonial state has done everything to cut Scotland from its powerful diaspora in as many ways as possible.

Reconnection is possible. It begins with awareness.

The shift in my own thinking began not in Scotland but in Indonesia. At Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia's leading university, where I became the first non-Asian doctoral graduate in the department of political science (and one of the first and only foreigners overall), research on Asia-Africa relations required immersion in the intellectual traditions that shaped the non-aligned world: sovereignty doctrine, dependency theory, anti-colonial transitions, and the long, difficult work of making political independence genuinely meaningful rather than merely formal. Indonesia has faced these questions at a historic cost. The truth is I decided to study in an Indonesian institution to oppose Western epistemic hegemony and arrogance, notably originating from England, which I consider to be harmful for the Global South but also for the so-called "West" itself in reality. I was not yet conscious that Scotland was an English colony. I could not have imagined how useful for my understanding of Scotland's colonial condition and its decolonisation this would be in the future and that I could apply what I had learned in Indonesia and elsewhere to support Scotland's liberation. The Scottish diaspora is an asset for Scotland, deliberatly undermined by the English colonial state.

The 1955 Asia-Africa Conference taking place in Bandung, a.k.a. the Bandung Conference, gathering 29 newly independent nations of Asia and Africa as well as dozens of liberation movements (just like Liberation Scotland) to articulate a collective vision of sovereign equality, was not a diplomatic event in any ordinary sense. Bandung was an act of collective consciousness. The 29 nations declared: we see the structure of the world and name what we see. We refuse it and want change.

Comparative method became instinctive in that intellectual environment. Colonial markers revealed themselves repeatedly across cases: external representation managed without distinct consent, racism and xenophobia, cultural oppression, linguistic suppression and subsumption, demographic engineering, economic plunder and restructuring towards metropolitan benefit, elite co-optation, narrative recoding of incorporation as voluntary union. These are not isolated grievances. They are the identifiable, recurring features of a system. The post-colonial, decolonial authors had mapped that system with precision. Once you have studied those maps, the terrain looks different wherever you travel.

My first moment of recognition concerning Scotland began with language, as it often has in colonial cases across geographies and histories.

The English Embassy That Named Scotland Out of Existence

In Jakarta, the embassy of the state formally called the United Kingdom, following international recognition, presents itself to the world as Kedutaan Besar Inggris: the English Embassy. Indeed, “Inggris” means “English” in Indonesian, originating from the Portuguese word "Inglês", meaning "English/England". This designation appears not only in Indonesia but also across several countries representing billions of people. In the very spaces where international standing is constructed, performed, and recognised, Scotland vanishes under or into England's name.

When this was raised formally, correction was declined. The English ambassador refused to change the naming. He is happy with the embassy being officially called the English embassy. I have covered this extensively on X and will probably return to this subject in a dedicated future post.

A dismissive reading might call this administrative. Decolonial analysis names exactly what this is.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, designing the colonial education system for India in 1835, was explicit about the relationship between language and power. In his Minute on Indian Education, Macaulay argued that British i.e. English policy should create an intermediary class able to assist colonial administration from within. The aim was to produce individuals who would be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”. (As pro-union, or at least not anti-union, historian T.M. Devine indicates, there were no Scots in the East India Company before the 1707 annexation). The colonial education system functioned not merely as a tool of instruction but also as a mechanism for reshaping consciousness and aligning colonised elites with imperial intellectual frameworks. Macaulay's intellectual influence extended beyond India. As Secretary at War in London and a prominent Whig thinker of the nineteenth century, he also helped consolidate the broader Anglo-British ideological project that normalised the dominance of the English language and culture across the so-called United Kingdom, contributing to the marginalisation and repression of Scotland’s own linguistic and intellectual traditions within an increasingly anglicised state framework. This legacy remains widely debated in India today. Reforms introduced under Narendra Modi, particularly through the National Education Policy 2020, seek to move beyond the colonial educational framework associated with Macaulay by strengthening Indian languages, promoting indigenous knowledge systems, and restructuring the education system, with major reforms planned for implementation by 2035. These efforts to address the intellectual legacy of colonial education offer a significant example that may also inspire future debates in other contexts, including the educational and linguistic renewal that an independent Scotland might undertake, as Ireland is currently implementing. We might recall that Sanjeev Sanyal, a prominent senior economic advisor to the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, recently declared on X that Scotland was one of the world's last remaining colonies.

The French colonial administration went so far as to classify Arabic as a “foreign language” in Algeria, illustrating how colonial regimes could attempt to render a people's own language alien within their own land. (The French "francophonie" system is also going to face its own anti-Macaulay legacy moment, mutatis mutandis, in the future, especially in Africa, but does not seem to have envisaged it yet.) The Dutch governed the East Indies through a linguistic hierarchy that placed Dutch at the apex of legitimacy. Bahasa Indonesia (the language of Indonesia) became a major part of the Indonesian independence movement, of its decolonisation and Revolusi. Ngugi wa Thiong'o did not describe the suppression of Kikuyu and Gikuyu in Kenyan colonial schools as a minor inconvenience. That suppression was an assault on the architecture of consciousness itself.

Naming prepares hierarchy. It is not innocent and conditions what is thinkable and shapes what is legally possible.

When Scotland is named out of existence in diplomatic space, something deliberate is being done: the ongoing expression of a constitutional arrangement that subordinates Scottish sovereignty within an English-named state. That practice is worth naming in return.

We will necessarily come back to linguistic issues in the future.

The Scholarship That Will Not Be Dismissed

The comparative framework applied to Scotland's condition rests on substantial scholarship that mainstream British, that is, English political discourse has consistently failed to engage seriously. Liberation Scotland can now be considered as a knowledge hub for looking into and understanding Scotland’s colonial condition.

A major force behind Liberation Scotland, Sara Salyers has undertaken serious legal analysis of the Claim of Right and its constitutional significance. The Claim of Right is not a historical curiosity or a rhetorical gesture. Constitutional doctrine asserting that sovereignty resides permanently in the Scottish people: that is what the Claim of Right represents. If that principle is legally coherent, and Salyers argues rigorously and clearly that it is, then any constitutional arrangement constraining or alienating that sovereignty without sustained, meaningful consent raises questions not merely in domestic political debate but in international law. (The Treaty of Union, which was actually annexation, is actually international law. We will come back to this too.)

A convener of the Liberation Scotland Committee, Professor Alf Baird draws extensively on the broader body of postcolonial theory and on many of its major authors, notably in his remarkable book, Doun Doun-Hauden: The Socio-Political Determinants of Scottish Independence, to examine Scotland’s condition: the cultural marginalisation, the suppression of Scots and Gaelic, the demographic restructuring, and the economic subordination of a peripheral, colonised territory to metropolitan, coloniser interests. Building on these intellectual traditions, Baird has also developed a systematic theoretical framework through which Scotland can be analysed using the concepts and analytical tools of postcolonial studies. (See also the colonial markers as researched by Liberation Scotland). His work is comparative and methodical, situating Scotland within the same intellectual tradition that has long been used to examine colonial situations across the Global South; or in Ireland and even the United States. The predictable response, that Scotland cannot be a colony because devolved institutions and parliamentary representation exist, is precisely the kind of argument long addressed within postcolonial analysis. Scholars of colonial systems have repeatedly shown that formal structures of participation are entirely compatible with colonial governance, not to say constitutive. Such institutions have frequently accompanied colonial rule, functioning less as instruments of emancipation than as mechanisms through which colonial authority is managed and legitimised. (This has perfectly been described in the recent report A/HRC/61/NGO/210 submitted to the United Nations Secretary General, the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council 61st Session, which describes Scotland's colonial condition under colonial devolution. Read the report here).

As the most prominent legal authority in Scots Law, Professor Robert Black KC has argued in detail that the 1707 Treaty and Acts of Union constituted a takeover, which can be called annexation, rather than voluntary merger and that the manner of territorial alienation engages erga omnes principles recognised in international law. Professor Black's legal contribution and demonstration are fundamental for Scotland's case as a colony and so we will also come back to that in the future.

These arguments are contested by mainstream scholarship and by the English colonial state apparatus and its collaborators; or more exactly, ignored since those who know these arguments and this evidence understand how devastating they are for the colonial position. But contestation requires genuine engagement: examining the archival evidence, applying the comparative framework, engaging the legal reasoning on its own terms. What has happened instead, in the main, is dismissal: the assertion that the comparison is inappropriate, that Scotland's experience is categorically different, that raising the question is somehow in bad faith. Such responses do not refute the scholarship. They illustrate precisely the epistemic management that Fanon described. The English colonial state has never acted in good faith, neither across territories nor across time.

Every serious decolonial movement in history has faced this response. The response has never been a sufficient answer.

What does the colonial framework actually reveal when applied to Scotland?

As we will show in future posts, Scotland fulfils all colonial criteria and shares the same colonial markers present in all colonies. Military invasion and occupation, a colonial treaty presented as a "voluntary union" forced under coercion, bribery and lies, genocide and ethnic cleansing, deportation and slavery, asset stripping and land seisure, etc. It all happened in Scotland, which can be considered, in many ways with Ireland, as the model, the matrix of all English imperialism and colonialism in the world. Imagine being a small country with a small population sharing a border with the most horrific coloniser in history and resisting for centuries until you cannot anymore and get annexed and colonised. That is the story of Scotland's colonisation by the English colonial state, which is far worse and far more complex and deep than Braveheart or Outlander only.

Military defeat at Culloden in 1746 was followed not only by pacification but by the systematic dismantling of Highland culture: the prohibition of Gaelic, the criminalisation of Highland dress, the ban on bagpipes seen as a weapon, the destruction of clan structures that had organised social life for centuries. This was not post-war administration. Cultural suppression designed to eliminate the social forms through which a distinct people reproduced their identity: that is what Culloden's aftermath represented. The Highland Clearances, unfolding across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their land to make way for economically more profitable uses, primarily sheep farming for English textile markets. Entire communities were destroyed. People were transported to the coasts, to the industrial lowlands, or onto emigrant ships as slaves, political prisoners or indentured labour. The Clearances were not a natural disaster. They were a political economy: the reorganisation of Scottish land for metropolitan, colonial benefit.

Scotland's economic integration into the English imperial system followed the pattern dependency theorists identified across the Global South: a peripheral territory whose resources, labour, and capacity are organised toward the benefit of a metropolitan centre, while institutional structures are maintained to make that arrangement appear normal, even mutually beneficial. Oil revenues from Scottish waters representing overall trillions of pounds flowing overwhelmingly to the British Treasury, the democratic deficit produced by a constitutional arrangement in which Scotland can vote consistently one way and be governed another, the gradual erosion of distinct Scottish institutions under the logic of administrative rationalisation, the consistent interception of Scotland's trade by destroying its ports and logistics, the plundering of its wealth through the colonial scheme called GERS in which Scotland's revenues go to England and then the English coloniser gives Scotland back a small proportion of them as a colonial grant while saying Scotland is poor and needs England to survive: these are not grievances invented for political purposes. They are structural features of an arrangement whose underlying logic is colonial; or textbook colonialism.

Considered individually, each element might be explained on other grounds. Together, they form the accumulation that decolonial analysis recognises. Rodney showed how individual economic decisions, each defensible in isolation, produced together a systematic underdevelopment. The same analytical move applies to Scotland.

Scotland's experience is similar to other colonies yet also unique. Colonialism is not a single template, despite shared colonial markers. Colonialism is a structure taking different forms depending on specific histories, specific geographies, and the specific relationships between coloniser and colonised. What remains consistent is the structural logic: whose sovereignty is subordinated, whose name disappears, whose resources flow where, whose narrative is treated as self-evidently true, and who decides.

The world has been lied to about Scotland.

This is the second post in the founding trilogy. The third and final post, "Scotland and the Unfinished Moment of Decolonisation", situates Scotland within the global history of decolonisation, examines Scotland's relationship to the Bandung legacy and the Non-Aligned Movement, addresses the principle of self-determination in international law, and sets out the international stakes of Scotland's constitutional restoration.

Still Yours For Scotland | decolonise.scot

Christophe Dorigné-Thomson