The Theory of Colonialism Was Written by the Colonised. Read It & You Are Reading Scotland. Fanon, Memmi, Césaire, the Latin American decolonial school, read against the Scottish case. Engaging with Liberation Scotland's Colonial Markers [Ref: SCM–CM0a]
Abstract. Liberation Scotland's compendium of colonial markers begins, before it counts a single garrison or a single cleared glen, by establishing the lens. Colonial Marker 0, Postcolonial Theory Applying to the Scottish Situation, reads the founding texts of postcolonial theory, the body of thought that analyses how colonial rule works, what it does to the colonised, and why its effects outlast the colonial empires themselves, directly against Scotland. This post is the first engaging that marker, taking one current within that thought, the francophone anticolonial writers of the Caribbean and North Africa at mid-century: Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire of Martinique, Albert Memmi of Tunisia. It does five things with them. It sets out why a marker devoted to theory has to come before any evidence at all. It reconstructs each thinker's standpoint because everything in this series depends on the fact that the theory of colonialism was written by the colonised rather than only about them. It places Scotland inside each framework, not by analogy but by structural identity, with the Scottish record set beside Ireland, Algeria, Burma, India, and territories that remain on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories today. It then goes beyond the French canon altogether, to the Latin American decolonial school with Quijano, Dussel, Mignolo, Lugones, Grosfoguel, Escobar, Walsh, whose concept of coloniality answers the question of why a colonial relationship survives every constitutional rearrangement designed to end it. It also advances the claim that Scotland does not merely satisfy these frameworks but in significant part anticipated them. Instruments these thinkers met in twentieth-century Algiers and Tunis had been assembled against Scotland in the eighteenth. The silence of the literature about Scotland is not an embarrassment to the argument but its most eloquent confirmation.
"Scotland has all the characteristics and features of a colonial entity. Its economic exploitation, its political control is outside, its culture is imposed, its language is deprived."; Professor Alf Baird, author of Doun-Hauden: The Socio-Political Determinants of Scottish Independence
Position Zero
Liberation Scotland numbered theory at zero. Ahead of the military occupation, the clearances and the transportations, the war on the languages, ahead of the reserved powers, the fiscal extraction that runs through everything after it. That ordering was not modesty about the evidence. It’s worth understanding before anything else.
Colonialism's first act against a people is not to garrison it. It’s to un-name its condition.
Long before the fort goes up, and long after it has become a visitor attraction with a car park, the essential labour of colonial rule is the removal from the colonised of the words in which their subjugation could be recognised, described, analysed and therefore fought. A people that has no term for what is being done to it does not escape the experience but undergoes the experience as something else, as its own failure. Poverty becomes improvidence. Emigration becomes wanderlust, or a national gift for adventure. Political subordination becomes the natural consequence of being small. A language becomes a failure to speak properly. Take away the analytical word and a structure imposed by others turns into a flaw in the national character. A flaw in the national character cannot be resisted politically. It can only be apologised for, which is precisely what Scotland has been doing, on and off, for three hundred years.
Steve Biko understood this well. Biko was a South African medical student who founded the Black Consciousness Movement in the late 1960s, at the point when apartheid had crushed or exiled the older liberation organisations and the country had gone quiet. His argument was that the quiet was the achievement. Apartheid's deepest work was not the pass laws or the police but the installation, inside the minds of black South Africans, of the regime's own estimate of them. Liberation therefore had to begin in consciousness or it would not begin at all. He was detained in August 1977 and beaten during interrogation in Port Elizabeth. He was driven eleven hundred kilometres to Pretoria naked in the back of a Land Rover and died of his head injuries on 12 September. He was thirty. The sentence for which he is remembered is the one this series takes as one of its foundations; the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Theory is the counter-weapon. Not an ornament to the case or a preface to the real evidence; the instrument by which private shame is converted into public analysis, which is the precondition of any political action whatsoever. Everything downstream (the submissions, the legal argument, the international campaign, the movement itself) depends on a people first knowing what has been done to it.
Edward Said, who gets his own treatment later in this marker, put the corollary in a form worth carrying through everything below; empire's most durable infrastructure is not its armies but its texts. In most colonies the armies eventually withdraw and the texts stay behind to finish the work; the map, the syllabus, the renamed street, the demoted national history, and the academic discipline that decides which nations count as colonised. Scotland is the case where nothing has withdrawn at all.
Some of the Hanoverian forts have found other uses. The change of use is its own small essay in colonial memory. Fort Augustus, raised by General Wade in 1729 and named for William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland; the commander who would order the killing of the wounded and the burning of the glens after Culloden; passed to the Benedictines in the 1870s, then to a boys' school which closed in 1993, and was bought by a property developer in 2003. It is now the Highland Club; ninety-seven luxury apartments and twelve cottages on the shore of Loch Ness, with a pool, a sauna, a snooker room, a tennis court, and a cricket pitch.
Fort George has never stopped. Begun in the immediate aftermath of Culloden, completed in 1769, designed by William Skinner under the title King's Military Engineer for “North Britain”; the erasure of a nation's name written into the job description of the man who built the fortress to hold it down; it stands today as a working army barracks, home since 2007 to the Black Watch. Closure was announced in 2016 for 2032, since discussed for 2029, which is to say that a fortress built to garrison a defeated people will have been in continuous military occupation of their country for close to two hundred and eighty years before anyone gets round to switching the lights off.
Nor is the rest of it historical. Nine P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft fly submarine-hunting missions over the North Atlantic from Lossiemouth in Moray, out of a facility built at a cost of some £360 million. The entire submarine service of the annexing state was consolidated on the Clyde by 2020. Its Vanguard boats, which carry the whole of its nuclear deterrent, are based at Faslane, twenty-five miles from Glasgow while its warheads are stored and loaded eight miles further west at Coulport, on ground to which that state holds no lawful title, against the settled and repeatedly expressed will of the people who live beside them, and beyond the reach of any vote those people are permitted to cast.
The texts are in place. The garrisons remain in place to dominate Scots as a colonised people.
It follows that a colonised people's counter-literature is not an academic supplement to its liberation but a front in the same war. A movement that assembles its evidence while neglecting the theory that makes the evidence legible has left its heaviest weapon in the armoury.
Colonial Marker 0 comes first because it has to.
A word about whose thought this is because the way it is usually credited is itself an instance of what it describes.
Anticolonial thinking is not a twentieth-century invention belonging to a handful of men. It’s as old as colonisation. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala completed his twelve-hundred-page letter to Philip III of Spain around 1615, an indigenous Andean indictment of the conquest written in Spanish and Quechua, then lost for three centuries in a Copenhagen library. The Haitian revolution produced its own theory alongside its army. José Martí wrote Nuestra América in 1891. Gandhi published Hind Swaraj in 1909; Ho Chi Minh published Le Procès de la colonisation française (French Colonisation on Trial) in Paris in 1925; W.E.B. Du Bois had named the colour line as the century's organising problem in 1903 and traced the wealth of Europe to African labour thereafter; C.L.R. James published The Black Jacobins in 1938. The Martinican writers Paulette and Jane Nardal ran the Paris salon out of which Négritude came. They were written out of its history by the men who became famous for it. Amílcar Cabral theorised national liberation while leading one and Kwame Nkrumah named neo-colonialism in 1965. Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies historians rebuilt Indian history from the archives of the colonised in the 1980s.
The academic discipline now called postcolonial studies came much later, largely in Anglo-American universities. It’s conventionally dated to Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978. It then reached backwards and canonised a small number of the anticolonial writers who had preceded it, which is why a shelf of introductory volumes will hand you the same four or five names. The canonisation is convenient, as an act of the geopolitics of knowledge. The colonial metropole selects, from an enormous and multilingual body of thought produced by colonised people across four centuries and every continent, the few figures it found teachable.
This series does not take the discipline as primary. The anticolonial thinkers are considered as primary. We treat the discipline as one late and partial arrangement of them. Fanon, Memmi, and Césaire come first here for a specific reason rather than a canonical one. Writing within a single colonial empire and within a decade of each other, they produced the sharpest available anatomy of the colonial structure with the divided country, the bond that deforms both parties, the damage colonising does to the coloniser. This is the structure that Scotland's case turns on. Later posts in this marker might go to other traditions entirely.
What the world sees when the facts are laid out
Something happens when Scotland's situation is set before people who have lived under colonial rule themselves and it happens fast enough to be worth recording as data.
Tell a Kenyan, an Algerian, an Indonesian, a Kanak from New Caledonia, an Irish person of any political tradition that a European kingdom of a thousand years' recorded existence was annexed by its neighbour after that neighbour massed troops on the border, passed an act threatening the ruin of its trade, bribed and bought its parliament, and then invaded it; that within a year the annexing power imposed its own treason law in breach of the treaty it had just signed; that the annexed nation's languages were declared by statute to be the cause of its barbarity and ordered abolished; that its people were cleared from the land and driven overseas in their hundreds of thousands, with total population loss since the annexation put at three to four million; that its parliament has never been restored at all, and that the devolved assembly seated in Edinburgh in 1999 was created by the annexing state's own legislature, holds only the powers that legislature lends it, and can be unmade by it; that its oil was extracted for half a century while a report proving the wealth was classified for thirty; that its energy is exported while its own people sit in fuel poverty; and that its foreign policy, its defence, its borders, and its seas are all still decided somewhere else; and they do not require persuading. They recognise it. Often before you have finished. Some also already knew Scotland was an English colony.
A question that often comes back: if Ireland was a colony, how was Scotland not?
Nobody seems to have ever answered it. Not once, in three centuries, has a serious argument been produced explaining why the identical instruments (invasion, plantation of an administrative class, linguistic proscription and suppression, genocide, famine, land clearance, parliamentary abolition, resource extraction, rule from Westminster, same colonial treaty) constitute colonialism when applied across the Irish Sea and constitute partnership when applied across the Tweed. The distinction has never been argued because it cannot be. It has only ever been asserted, loudly, and with institutional weight behind it. The English colonial state has no arguments. The King is naked.
The silence in the literature and what it actually proves
Scotland does not appear in the literature of colonialism. Not in Fanon, not in Memmi, not in Césaire. Not, with the single exception of Michael Hechter's euphemistically titled study of 1975 on “internal colonialism” in the “Celtic fringe”, which we call contiguous or adjacent colonialism, anywhere in the theory of colonialism at all. Where Scotland does appear in the historiography of colonialism, it mostly appears, often ambiguously, on the other side of the ledger as supposedly junior partner, co-architect, willing supplier of the empire's soldiers, administrators, engineers, surveyors, doctors, and merchants. That position has been held so long, and defended by such well-funded institutions, that to contradict it sounds to many educated Scots and academics in Western, Anglo-British universities like a category mistake.
Two answers are owed. The first is to notice what kind of fact this is.
The absence of Scotland from this literature is not evidence about Scotland. It’s evidence about how the literature came to be made in two phases, each of which excluded Scotland for a different reason.
The first phase was written by the colonised, from inside their own struggles, while those struggles were being fought. Fanon, Memmi, and Césaire wrote in French, from within the French empire, in the years it was being fought to a standstill. Cabral wrote while leading an armed movement in Guinea-Bissau. Nkrumah wrote from Ghana. Ngũgĩ from Kenya and eventually from a prison cell. Their subject was the situation each of them was living in; in Fanon's and Cabral's cases dying for. Nobody writing from inside a liberation struggle produces a catalogue of other people's.
The second phase was the academic discipline that formed later, largely in Anglo-American universities from the late 1970s, for institutional rather than circumstantial reasons. The state that annexed Scotland trained a great many of the scholars who built that field, funded the departments, published the books, examined the theses, and awarded the chairs; and set, by a thousand unremarkable decisions about what constituted a case, the boundaries of the object being studied. A discipline substantially housed inside the colonial metropole and substantially funded by it was never going to identify a colony held within the colonial metropole's own islands, wearing the metropole's name. Not through conspiracy. Through the ordinary operation of a field that takes its questions from where it sits, which is the point Walter Mignolo makes about the geopolitics of knowledge and which applies to the study of colonialism as much as to anything else it has been used to examine. I would add it’s similar, mutatis mutandis, for international law with the English colonial state working very hard for it not to be applied to Scotland as an English colony.
Had anyone in either phase gone looking, they would have found nothing. By the middle of the twentieth century the annexing state had spent two hundred and fifty years establishing in law, in diplomacy, in cartography, and in the working vocabulary of every foreign ministry on earth that Scotland was a constituent nation of a so-called united kingdom. There was no entry to consult.
No Scottish voice was contradicting it, or more exactly none had a platform from which to do so, colonisation having removed every institution through which a nation speaks to the world. The silence was never for want of struggle. Scotland fought the English state for the better part of a millennium and did not stop when the annexation was signed. There were risings in 1708, 1715, 1719, and 1745; the last of them put an army within a hundred and thirty miles of London and was answered by a campaign of killing, destruction, burning, and deliberate starvation across the Highlands that ran for decades; scholarly described as a genocidal campaign with ethnic cleansing, conducted in three phases: wholesale slaughter under Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, son of George II and commander of the government army at Culloden, whom Scots have called Butcher Cumberland ever since; selective terrorism against Jacobite districts under William Keppel, second Earl of Albemarle, the general who succeeded him as commander-in-chief in Scotland; and the deliberate destruction of crops, livestock and shelter to produce either clearance or death. In 1820 the men of the Radical War came out across the central belt for a Scottish republic; three were hanged and beheaded and nineteen transported to Australia, under an English treason law that had been imposed on Scotland in 1708 in direct breach of the Treaty's own guarantees. The line of resistance is continuous from Wallace to the present.
What was missing was never the fight. It was the microphone. When the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization began its work in 1961, no petition came from Scotland and no administering power volunteered the territory. What Scotland did produce in those exact years was the Scottish Covenant, launched in Edinburgh in October 1949 and signed by around two million people, on some reckonings more than half the adult population of the country. Read its own words. The signatories pledged themselves in all loyalty to the Crown and within the framework of the United Kingdom to secure for Scotland a parliament with adequate legislative authority in Scottish affairs. It was a request to the annexing power for an administrative concession inside the annexation. The government of the day dismissed it. Half a nation signed, and nothing happened. Nothing in it could have told a theorist in Africa that he was looking at a colony.
This is not an excuse for the literature. It’s the argument. Colonial cases become visible because the colonised make them visible. Algeria's condition entered the world's understanding because Algerians forced it there, at a cost counted in hundreds of thousands of lives. Nobody hands a people the description of its own subjugation. A case that is not made is a case that does not exist. Which is why the work Liberation Scotland is now doing at the United Nations is not commentary on the struggle. It’s the struggle itself.
Behind all of it runs a machinery this series returns to repeatedly. The annexing state has curated for three centuries the vocabulary in which its own arrangements are described abroad; a curation which reaches so far that billions of people globally are today told, in their own languages, that Scotland is England. That erasure worked on Fanon's generation exactly as it works on ours. A colony inside the colonial metropole's own archipelago, sharing its flag, its head of state, and its passport, and supplying regiments to garrison other people's countries, was not visible from Fort-de-France or Tunis. It had been built not to be seen.
The second answer is the substantive one. The frameworks these thinkers built describe Scotland anyway, with a fidelity that ought to be impossible if the standard account were true. Fanon writing out of Algiers, Memmi out of Tunis, Césaire out of Fort-de-France: three men, two colonies, an empire that was not England's, and not one of them with any reason on earth to be thinking about Scotland. Widen the frame and nothing weakens. Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Nkrumah in Ghana, Ngũgĩ in Kenya, Guha and the subaltern historians working the archives of colonial India; different empires, different continents, conquests separated by centuries, and Scotland legible in the analysis every time, mechanism by mechanism.
Either that is a coincidence of remarkable size, or these writers were describing a structure Scotland shares.
This series holds the second and holds something further. Scotland is not a late or peripheral instance of that structure. It is among the earliest and most complete with the pacification garrison built as a working system, the native elite captured through a career ladder that opened only after the annexation, the constitutional device that grants a subject people the appearance of self-rule while withholding its substance were all assembled against Scotland after 1707 and carried out from there across a colonial empire. In the last case they were brought home again once perfected abroad.
The completion of the record has fallen where it always falls in the history of decolonisation; to the colonised. Not to the metropolitan academy, which had three hundred years to notice and did not. Alf Baird's Doun-Hauden and the compendium of markers Liberation Scotland has assembled and is now placing before the international community are doing the job; hopefully the SYFS blog too.
Fanon: The Country Cut in Two
Where he was standing
Frantz Fanon is remembered as the theorist of the Algerian revolution. But Fanon was not Algerian. He was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, a French Caribbean colony whose assimilation into France had gone so far that in 1946, when Fanon was twenty-one, the island's own elected representatives successfully petitioned Paris to convert it from colony into département (an ordinary administrative division of metropolitan France, the constitutional equivalent of turning a colony into a county). He was taught at the Lycée Schoelcher by Aimé Césaire. He volunteered for the Free French forces during the war; discovering, in the uniform of the country he was defending, precisely where a black Martinican stood in its order of precedence. He trained as a psychiatrist at Lyon. He went to Algeria in 1953 to run a ward at the Blida-Joinville hospital, treating both tortured Algerians and the French policemen who had tortured them, resigned in 1956 in a letter that remains among the great documents of colonial refusal, and joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Algeria’s liberation movement. He died in 1961, thirty-six years old, weeks after Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) was published. (Jean-Claude Barny’s film Fanon released in 2024 is highly recommended.)
The trajectory is the argument. Fanon arrived at his theory of colonialism by carrying the knowledge of one colonised people into the revolution of another. He recognised in Algeria a structure he already knew from home. He could recognise it precisely because he had grown up inside a version of it that called itself something else. A colony so thoroughly assimilated that it had voted to become a province of its coloniser. That was the political education which let him see through France's mission civilisatrice (the "civilising mission", the doctrine by which France justified conquest as a gift of enlightenment to the conquered).
Fanon is the theorist best equipped by experience to have understood Scotland. The resemblance between Martinique's départementalisation and Scotland's incorporation is not incidental. Both are cases of a colonised people absorbed under the coloniser's own constitutional roof, told the absorption was promotion, and then left with every mechanism of subordination running beneath a new administrative name.
The framework
Fanon's colonial world is a world cut in two. A compartmentalised country, divided into a governing zone and a governed one, held apart by a line that is naturalised into geography but rests finally on force. The division is spatial, but it’s not only spatial. It’s economic, in that the prosperity of one sector is the extraction of the other; and it’s epistemic, in that each sector is taught a different account of why the division exists. It’s juridical too, in that the two sectors live under different rules. It’s psychological since the governed sector is brought to experience the whole arrangement as a fact of nature rather than a fact of power.
Beneath every colonial vocabulary of partnership, union, tutelage, and civilisation, Fanon insisted, lies one substrate. Colonialism is not a reasoning entity that can be persuaded. It’s, in his phrase, "violence in its natural state", which yields only when confronted with a greater force. This is his least comfortable claim. But it’s analytically useful, identifying what colonial language is for. The vocabulary of partnership does not compete with the vocabulary of force as a rival description. It represents an instrument of the same relationship, laid over the coercion that founded it and maintains it.
Scotland inside it
The compartment is there. What has to be given up is the expectation that it will look exactly like the casbah; the old Arab quarter of Algiers, walled and visibly separate from the European city below it; or Apartheid.
Start with the ground itself. Scotland has the most concentrated pattern of private land ownership in Europe: a few hundred owners hold a very large share of the private rural land, and much of the Highland estate is held by proprietors who neither live in Scotland nor answer to anyone in it. This is the settled residue of the process Colonial Marker 2 (Ethnic Cleansing, Displacement, Settler Replacement) documents with a native population removed and a landholding class installed above it. The compartment begins as a line drawn through the title deeds of an entire country.
Now the people. Liberation Scotland's evidence, and Baird's demographic determinant, record the same thing from two directions. Scotland has lost, by most estimates, between three and four million people since the annexation, proportionally the largest sustained outflow in western Europe from a country of its size, while the inward flow has been dominated overwhelmingly by one neighbouring country and concentrated at the managerial and professional end. Set those two movements beside each other and what you have is not migration in the ordinary European sense but replacement, running for three centuries. It produces exactly the two-sector society Fanon describes.
But it does not stay in the deeds. Anyone who has lived in Scotland knows where it runs on the ground.
In the Highlands and Islands, it runs through housing. Incoming settlement has concentrated heavily at the proprietorial and professional end. In exactly the districts where Gaelic still lives, it has arrived alongside second homes and short-term holiday letting on a scale that has taken ordinary housing out of reach of the people born there. The mechanism is a price. A young Gaelic speaker on an island wage cannot compete for a house against a retirement buyer or a letting yield from elsewhere; so the community that carries the language empties by arithmetic rather than by edict, which is the Clearances conducted by other means. Colonial Marker 2 will take the continuity seriously. Whole villages now hold a resident population outnumbered in season by visitors, with the shop, the school roll, and the ceilidh going the way the housing went. Balmoral and Birkhall were acquired through colonial theft by the German-English royal family since they were assembled in the aftermath of clearance conducted under English colonial control, on land emptied of its people.
In the cities it runs through schooling and speech. Edinburgh has by a distance the highest concentration of private education in Scotland, the council's own estimate is around fifteen per cent of pupils, and the figure is often reported higher, producing entire quarters of the capital in which the professional class lives beside itself, educates its children apart, and speaks a register that is not the register of the city around it. From there the line runs into the bench, the boardroom, the broadcast studio, and the senior common room. The vowels are the visa.
Here is the point that makes this Fanon's compartment rather than mere snobbery or mere resentment of incomers. The line is not ethnic, and the governing side of it is full of colonised yet collaborating Scots. It contains the anglicised professional stratum Memmi anatomised; people born in Scotland who have shed the language, adopted the colonial metropolitan estimate of their own country, and undertaken, usually without ever putting it into words, never to raise the constitutional question in serious company. Some of the most reliable enforcement of Scottish smallness is done by Scots, and it is often done sincerely, because the enforcement has been internalised as good judgement. Colonialism is a sickness of the mind before it is anything else. Its final stage is not a wall guarded from outside but a native population that has learned to guard the wall itself.
That is why the Scottish compartment has outlasted every colonial partition built of stone. A wall must be manned. A turnstile mans itself; the toll it takes being your own culture and your nation.
Then the sorting mechanism, which in Scotland is the voice. This is where Fanon's compartment becomes most exact and most invisible. A Scot's accent places them within seconds, and the vocabulary places them faster still. The placement determines access.
The sorting is not only a matter of how Scottish-accented English sounds. It runs on Scots itself; a distinct language with its own history, grammar, and literature, in which a great many Scots still think, argue, joke, and count. It actually runs on the whole continuum along which most Scots actually live, shifting between Scots and English within a conversation and frequently within a sentence. That shifting is bilingual competence. It is received as failure. A Catalan moving between Catalan and Castilian is credited with two languages; a Scot moving between Scots and English is corrected. The words are marked wrong rather than foreign; the grammar sloppy rather than other. The child who says ken or bairn or the morn learns early which of their tongues is allowed past the classroom door. Speak Scots and you are marked as uneducated. Speak the colonial metropolitan register and you are marked as arrived. Mix them, as very nearly everyone does, and you are marked as someone who has failed to master either.
Bourdieu called this the marché linguistique (linguistic market). A state produces a "legitimate language". Every other variety is devalued against it. The speakers of the devalued varieties then police themselves, hearing their own tongue as error. He called the result violence symbolique (symbolic violence); domination that works through the complicity of the dominated, since it is never recognised as violence at all.
Then the extraction, which is where the two sectors are finally weighed. This series documents it in full under Colonial Marker 5 (Colonial Exploitation), so one figure will stand for the argument here. Since the early 1970s the hydrocarbons of the Scottish continental shelf have been extracted, taxed, and spent by a Treasury in another country. Norway, drawing on the same sea, holds a sovereign wealth fund now standing well above two trillion US dollars; over four hundred thousand dollars for every Norwegian citizen. Scotland's equivalent fund holds nothing because Scotland has no fund. The contemporary annual extraction, taking energy, whisky, trade interception, fisheries, and the rest together, stands at upward of one hundred and fifty billion pounds a year. Across the full arc since the annexation, the cumulative transfer is measured in trillions. A serious sovereign accounting of it remains to be built, which is itself a fact about who has been permitted to do the accounting.
That is Fanon's division too. One sector whose accumulation is the other's depletion, so thoroughly naturalised that Scots themselves have been taught to read it as economic geography rather than as a political arrangement with a date and a beneficiary.
The force appears beneath the vocabulary. Scotland's incorporation has been narrated for three centuries as voluntary union, as the willing marriage of two crowns. Fanon's insight is that the narration is part of the machinery. The colonial Treaty was procured through the economic coercion of the Alien Act of 1705, through English regiments moved to the border, through a fleet in the Firth of Forth, and through the documented purchase and bribery of members of the Scottish Parliament; a combination which, as Professor Robert Black KC established before the United Nations in Geneva in September 2025, vitiates the consent that treaty validity requires and renders the instrument void ab initio (void from the outset, of no legal effect at any point). Within a year the annexing state imposed English treason law on Scotland in direct breach of the treaty's own guarantees. The arrangement has been held ever since by a constitutional architecture that reserves to the metropole (the imperial centre, the home country from which a colony is ruled) every instrument through which the governed sector might leave, and by a doctrine under which the colonised may vote for their freedom without thereby obtaining it.
The vocabulary of partnership is the disguise. The base is force, and always was.
The objection that has to be answered and the evidence that ends it
Here comes the objection. Fanon wrote of a settler colony where the compartments were sorted by race. Scots are white Europeans indistinguishable from the English. Doesn't the framework simply fail to reach?
It does not. The reason is a matter of French colonial law. It’s one of the most useful facts available to any colonised people arguing its case.
On 24 October 1870 the French Government of National Defence issued the Décret Crémieux, which conferred full French citizenship, at a stroke and without application, on the indigenous Jews of the three Algerian départements; some thirty-five thousand people. The Muslim population of Algeria, roughly three million, remained sujets français; French subjects, not French citizens, nationals of a state in which they had no political rights. Both populations were indigenous North Africans. Both had lived in the same towns for centuries. Neither was phenotypically distinguishable from the other by any test the French state possessed or attempted. The line that separated citizen from subject was not drawn in skin but in religion and in law.
It gets sharper. A Muslim Algerian could apply for citizenship but only by renouncing the jurisdiction of Islamic personal-status law and accepting the French civil code in its place. For a Muslim that renunciation amounted to apostasy, which is why, across more than a century of French rule, only a handful ever took it. Then in 1881 the French parliament ratified the Code de l'Indigénat (the "native code"), a separate punitive legal regime applying to Muslims alone. The courts subsequently developed the category of "Muslim origin" precisely so that conversion could not release anyone from it. Having invented a religious line, the colonial state then made it hereditary and unescapable, which is to say it manufactured a race where none had existed.
Read that sequence carefully, because it disposes of the objection entirely. In the paradigm case of colonial compartmentalisation, in the very colony Fanon was writing about, the compartments were sorted by law, by religion, by language, and by descent. Where a route across existed at all, its toll was the surrender of one's own legal and cultural identity. Race was the instrument used in Algeria. It was never the definition of what a compartment is.
Which means that the Scottish question is not "are Scots a separate race?"; a question the colonial account poses in order to have it answered no. The question is: does a line exist, drawn by the dominating power, which allocates political authority, economic advantage, and social standing to one group and withholds them from another, and which the subordinated may cross only by abandoning what makes them themselves?
Scotland's answer is on the statute book. The chronology repays care.
In 1616 the Privy Council of Scotland ordained a school in every parish so that the "Irishe language", Gaelic, "may be abolisheit and removeit", having first declared it a chief cause of the "barbaritie and incivilitie" of the Isles (Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, act of 10 December 1616). A further act that year provided that no heir of a Gaelic chief might inherit unless he could read, write, and speak English. Parliament ratified the schools act seventeen years later, in 1633, which puts it beyond any suggestion that it was a passing administrative whim.
These were acts of Scotland's own institutions, ninety-one years before the annexation. This post does not pretend otherwise. Scotland in 1616 was a sovereign kingdom but since 1603 a kingdom without a resident government. James VI had taken the English throne, moved to London, styled himself King of “Great Britain”, and governed Scotland, in his own phrase, by his pen.
It is worth being exact about how that court came to be in London, because the phrase union of the crowns suggests an accident of descent joining two equal kingdoms.
England had been attempting the dynastic absorption of Scotland for three centuries. In 1290 Edward I arranged the marriage of his heir to Margaret, Maid of Norway, the child Queen of Scots. She died in Orkney on the voyage from Norway and the plan died with her. In the 1540s, Henry VIII demanded the infant Mary, Queen of Scots for his son. When the Scots refused he sent armies north to burn Edinburgh and the Border abbeys; the campaign Scots have called the Rough Wooing ever since. Marriage or conquest; the same objective, pursued by whichever instrument was to hand.
The third attempt succeeded because it was bought. From 1586, under the Treaty of Berwick, Elizabeth paid James VI an English pension, £58,500 sterling over sixteen years, disbursed through London and withheld or delayed whenever leverage was wanted. Her ambassador in Edinburgh had set out the reasoning six years earlier with a candour no colonial administrator would risk today. English money in Scotland was best bestowed on the King alone, binding his nobility to the Queen through him, so that little matter of importance might be done without her highness's privity; without England's knowledge. From May 1601, James negotiated the succession in secret with Robert Cecil, in correspondence concealed from Elizabeth herself.
By the time he rode south in 1603, the King of Scots had spent seventeen years on an English retainer. His court poets had already begun anglicising their written language in anticipation of the move. He then styled himself King of “Great Britain”, returned to Scotland once in twenty-two years; administering it by post.
What Edward I could not take by conquest and Henry VIII could not take by fire, England obtained by purchase and inheritance. The test of who absorbed whom is simply which direction the court travelled.
The Council legislated in Edinburgh; the direction came from a court in the larger kingdom. It came as part of one archipelagic programme, since that same crown was then planting Ulster. The Statutes of Iona belong in exactly that frame. A single Jacobean project for the reordering of Gaelic society aimed at the Highlands and Ireland together. Ireland was planted. The Highlands were assimilated instead.
1616 does not show England fully colonising Scotland yet. It shows the instrument being manufactured in this archipelago, against a Gaelic-speaking people, by a crown already colonising across the water, generations before anything comparable reached Bengal or the Maghreb. What the annexation did was inherit that instrument, keep it running, and widen the target; beyond Gaelic to Scots, from speech to dress and music in 1746, into a compulsory school system in 1872 that made no provision for Gaelic at all.
Set the French requirement that a Muslim renounce his own law to become a citizen beside a Scottish requirement that a chief's heir renounce his own tongue to inherit his land. It’s the same structure, and Scotland's is the older one.
Ireland settles the remainder of the argument. No serious scholar now disputes Ireland's colonial status. Nobody has ever suggested that Irish whiteness spared Ireland the plantation, the Penal Laws, the tally stick around a schoolchild's neck, or a famine administered on doctrine. The confessional line did in Ireland exactly what the religious line did in Algeria and what the linguistic and constitutional line does in Scotland. The hostility directed at Scots as Scots; the contempt for the speech, the caricature of the character, the framing of a national aspiration as either pathology or foreign manipulation; I have placed before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination under the name Scotophobia. It performs the identical sorting function. Racism requires a mark, not necessarily a colour, and any mark will serve.
The point that must not be lost
One thing separates Scotland from many former or remaining colonies, which runs in Scotland's favour.
Those territories were often colonised as territories. Scotland was annexed as a state. It was a kingdom of a thousand years' recorded existence, with its own crown, parliament, legal system, church, coinage, universities, diplomatic corps, and treaties; recognised as such by the powers and authorities of its age, and defended successfully against invasion for four centuries before the annexation finally succeeded by other means. What is claimed here is not the creation of a new state from a colonial territory. It’s the resumption of an existing one whose sovereignty was suspended by an instrument void from the beginning and whose crown was never lawfully extinguished.
That distinction is the difference between a moral claim and a legal one.
Memmi: The Bond That Deforms Both Parties
Where he was standing
Albert Memmi wrote from a position of such layered marginality that it worked as an analytical instrument.
Born in Tunis in 1920, into a poor Tunisian Jewish family in the Jewish quarter of a French protectorate; his mother a speaker of Judeo-Arabic; educated in French schools at the Lycée Carnot, then at the University of Algiers, then the Sorbonne. He described himself afterwards as a native in a colonised country, a Jew in an antisemitic world, an African in a world Europe had won. He belonged fully to none of the categories the colonial order recognised, so he could see the order itself; not from the coloniser's position, not quite from the position of the colonised majority, but from the seam between them, which is where machinery is visible.
Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur appeared in 1957 with a preface by Sartre, in the same few years that gave us Césaire's Discours and Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs. Memmi's contribution is structural rather than revolutionary. Where Fanon anatomises rupture, Memmi anatomises the steady state; the relationship as it functions on an ordinary Tuesday, in the absence of any crisis at all.
The framework
His subject is neither party alone but the bond between them. The central finding is that the relationship constitutes both; an "implacable dependence" which, across generations, moulds the characters of coloniser and colonised alike and dictates the conduct of each. Neither is free inside it. The coloniser becomes the person his privilege requires. The colonised becomes the person his subordination requires. The relationship doesn’t dissolve when the conquest completes but hardens. Memmi's colonial world is one of mutual petrification, both parties progressively immobilised in the roles the structure assigns them.
From this comes the figure that has proved most fertile of all; the colonised who mimics the coloniser. The native bourgeoisie buys its standing by taking on the coloniser's language, manners, values, and the coloniser's contempt for the people it came from. This is not a moral failing in particular individuals. It’s a position, which colonialism creates and then staffs, because indirect rule requires intermediaries bound to the colonial centre. Assimilation is bought with self-denial, compounded across generations, sets into something much closer to self-contempt.
Scotland inside it
Memmi's account of the bond explains the one card Anglo-British unionism plays as though it were unanswerable; the sheer depth of Scotland's entanglement with England. Shared institutions. Intermarried families. An integrated economy. The impossibility, so the argument goes, of separating what has grown together for 319 years.
Memmi's reply is that the entanglement is not evidence against the colonial relationship. It is the colonial relationship. Dependence is what colonialism manufactures with the mutual moulding being its output, not its refutation. Every colonised society in history has been told it had become too intertwined with its coloniser to be extracted. In every case, the intertwining was the thing that had to end. The intimacy cited as proof of partnership is the signature of a colonial bond working exactly as designed.
Then the mimic elite, which in Scotland has a name Scots use about themselves without ever asking where it came from. The Scottish cringe is the reflex by which Scots pre-emptively belittle Scotland, its speech, its ambitions, its achievements and its people; usually in company, usually as a joke, usually to establish that the speaker is too sophisticated to be taken for a provincial. It’s read domestically as realism or as a national gift for self-deprecation. It’s neither. It constitutes the psychological residue of a documented historical process; assimilation purchased with self-denial over ten generations, until the self-denial no longer needs enforcing because it has become taste. Colonial Marker 7 (Shared Features of Colonized Societies) takes it up in full. The point here is that Memmi described its mechanism in Tunis before anyone in Scotland thought to give it a name.
The measurable version is the professoriate with fewer than one in ten Scottish, in the ancient universities of a nation that invented mass education in Europe. The financial version is an Edinburgh sector whose expertise is capitalised in London and whose regulatory home is elsewhere. The political version is a party that spent a generation seeking permission from the very authority whose jurisdiction is in dispute. We could evoke the media, cultural and security versions among many others.
The objection: "but the Scots ran the empire"
Now the objection that does the most work for the colonial account with the historical case that destroys it.
The objection says Scots served the English Empire in numbers wildly disproportionate to their population as administrators, soldiers, planters, surveyors, doctors, missionaries, and merchants; and a people who ran an empire cannot have been colonised by it.
Every colonial system in history recruited its intermediaries from among the colonised. Sikh and Punjabi regiments garrisoned English India. The King's African Rifles policed English Africa. Algerians served France and the évolués class administered the Belgian Congo. The Indian Civil Service was substantially staffed by Indians. Indirect rule is this arrangement and is not incidental to colonialism but the mechanism by which a small metropolitan bureaucracy governs enormous subject populations at manageable cost.
But the Indian case goes much further than that, turning the objection completely inside out.
Indians did not merely staff the Raj. In Burma, they seemed to function as co-colonisers in their own right; or at least that is how many Burmese saw it. Burma was administered as a province of India until 1937. Indian capital and Indian labour entered it under English policy in enormous volume. The Chettiar moneylenders of Madras came to hold something approaching a quarter of the cultivable land of Lower Burma by the end of the 1930s, after mass default during the Depression transferred it out of Burmese hands. Recent scholarship in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History argues the point directly. Indian elites in Burma are said to have acted as co-colonialists, controlling the majority of capital and land, using administrative power to protect that position, and borrowing racialised language from the Europeans to justify it. Burmese nationalism in the 1930s was in part anti-Indian nationalism, and to Burmese nationalists freeing Burma from India seemed at least as urgent as freeing Burma from England. The riots of 1938 came out of that.
So here is a colonised people whom another colonised people experienced as colonisers.
Yet, nobody has ever concluded from this that India was not colonised or proposed that the Raj was a partnership because Indians ran parts of it and profited elsewhere in the empire. The Indian case is the settled reference point of twentieth-century decolonisation.
The Scottish objection proves nothing at all. If it proved anything it would prove that India was never a colony either. What the participation of a colonised people in the machinery of colonial empire actually demonstrates is the completeness of the colonisation, not its absence. It shows that the coloniser succeeded in doing what colonisers set out to do; capturing a native elite, giving it a career, using it, and pointing it outward.
Three further facts finish the matter for Scotland specifically. Scots were excluded by law from the English East India Company's monopoly before 1707 and admitted only once their kingdom had been absorbed, which is the behaviour of a coloniser opening a promotion ladder to a newly acquired population, not of two nations pooling a joint enterprise. The participation was bounded by class; a collaborating minority elite prospered while the mass of Scots were cleared from the land, pressed into regiments, or driven abroad. The direction of the wealth never once varied, which is why Scotland ends three centuries of this arrangement with no fund, no central bank, no fleet, no seat, and no say.
Glasgow gets produced at this point. Glasgow proves nothing either. The city called itself the Second City of the Empire; so did Calcutta, the colonial capital of India, and so did Dublin, the capital of England's oldest colony, and Bombay and Sydney claimed it too. If second-city status established co-ownership of empire, it would establish it for Calcutta and Dublin. The title marks how completely a place was harnessed to imperial commerce. It says nothing whatever about who owned the harness.
Césaire: What Colonising Does to the Coloniser
Where he was standing
Aimé Césaire, born in 1913 at Basse-Pointe in Martinique, is the hinge of this entire genealogy.
A pupil at the Lycée Schoelcher, then a student in Paris, where he founded the review L'Étudiant noir with Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guiana, drawing on the Paris salon of the Martinican writers Paulette and Jane Nardal. Out of that circle came Négritude, the assertion, against an empire founded on its denial, that black civilisation existed and had its own genius. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) appeared in 1939. He went home, taught Frantz Fanon, was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945 and deputy in the French National Assembly, and sponsored the 1946 law converting Martinique from colony into département, believing then that equality of legal status was the surer road to equality of condition. Discours sur le colonialisme followed in 1950.
That biography contains, in miniature, the dilemma we address. A colonised intellectual who pursued his people's freedom through constitutional incorporation into the metropole, and who then spent decades writing the most ferocious indictment of colonialism in the French language. Scotland's independence movement, which has spent generations seeking liberation through the coloniser's own constitutional mechanisms and receiving devolution instead, might read Césaire's career with some care.
The framework
Discours sur le colonialisme performs a reversal Scotland needs badly.
Nearly all colonial argument, then and now, is conducted in the register of the colonised; their readiness, their capacity, their viability, their currency arrangements, their border, their deficits. Césaire turns the lens around and asks what the act of colonising does to the one who commits it. His answer that no one colonizes innocently. A civilisation that justifies colonisation, and therefore force, "is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased." Colonisation decivilises the coloniser. Each act of domination coarsens the dominating society and degrades its moral vocabulary. It installs contempt as a reflex of national character. He pressed the argument to its conclusion, tracing the fascism that devastated Europe in his own lifetime to colonial procedures brought home; the choc en retour, the boomerang of empire, which gives this whole series its structural thesis.
Scotland inside it
Apply the diagnosis to the state that annexed Scotland and has spent centuries denying that the relationship is what it is.
Consider what this series documents across the colonial markers and ask what kind of society produces it. An education system that taught Scottish children their own tongue was a failure to speak English properly and beat them for using it. The caricature of the Scot as feckless, subsidised, congenitally dependent (yet supposedly stingy!); deployed as political argument by a state that had, as its own McCrone Report established in 1974 and concealed for thirty years, precise internal knowledge that an independent Scotland would run a surplus embarrassing in its size. The treatment of a nation's oil, wind, electricity and water as a region's endowment. The automatic recasting of a colonised people's desire for freedom as either a psychological disorder or a foreign operation; an insinuation the London strategic establishment now commits to print, wondering in its flagship assessments whether Scottish self-determination might be susceptible to influence from Moscow and Beijing.
Treating this as a series of incidental unkindnesses is the standard error. In Césaire's frame it is the moral disease of a civilisation that has colonised for so long that colonising has become its reflex, which consequently cannot look at Scotland except through the eye that colonising has given it.
This is why appeals to English fairness have failed for three hundred years and will keep failing. The problem is not that the coloniser has not yet understood. It’s that the faculty required to understand has been damaged by the act of colonising. Césaire's gift to the Scottish case is that he stops the colonised from asking what is wrong with them.
The objection
The objection is that Césaire's target was the France of the mission civilisatrice, not the modern Anglo-British state and that carrying his diagnosis across a century and a Channel is rhetoric rather than analysis.
The transposition is exact; the record being what makes it exact. Césaire's claim is structural, not national. The practice of colonisation produces the pathology, in whichever society practises it. So the question is simply whether the state in question has practised colonisation on a scale sufficient to have been shaped by it. The state in question ran the largest colonial empire in recorded history, administered famine in Ireland and in Bengal on the same doctrine, operated detention camps in Kenya whose records it concealed for fifty years, and was condemned by the International Court of Justice in 2019 for a decolonisation it had never lawfully completed, in the Chagos islands.
Against Scotland specifically, the crimes are documented at length. We are documenting them further; the slaughter and the systematic burnings after Culloden, the transportations, the clearances, the statutory war on two languages, the parliament abolished and never since restored, the report suppressed, the waters redrawn one month before the devolved parliament sat, the wealth removed. There is nothing to transpose. The diagnosis lands on a state that has not stopped.
This is not a former colonial power reckoning with its past but a state still administering, at this moment, ten of the seventeen Non-Self-Governing Territories on the United Nations decolonisation list. It’s also, on the evidence assembled here, the colony from which its empire was made.
Beyond the French Canon: What the Andes Knew That Algiers Could Not
Everything above comes from one intellectual world; the French colonial empire in the mid-twentieth century, written by men who were fighting or had just fought for independence. Indispensable yet incomplete. The incompleteness matters for Scotland.
Fanon, Memmi, and Césaire wrote about colonies that were still colonies. Their horizon was the moment of liberation. What none of them could address because none of them lived to see enough of it is the question that dominates Scotland's situation. Why does a colonial relationship survive every constitutional rearrangement designed to end it?
For that, the theory had to come from somewhere else. It came from Latin America, and it arrived late, for a reason worth stating.
Why the answer came from there
Set Latin America beside Africa or Southeast Asia and the colonial period looks, at first glance, remote; a pre-modern affair belonging to the archaic values of Iberian feudalism. If colonialism is defined as the relationship by which a society is dispossessed of its sovereignty and its resources for the benefit of a foreign metropole, then the colonial history of Spanish and Portuguese America ends, a few Caribbean islands aside, in the early nineteenth century, when weakening monarchies in southern Europe and a modernising creole nationalism produced the political and juridical emancipation of the Latin American states.
Yet, the relationship did not end. The hierarchies survived independence intact with the same populations at the bottom, the same knowledge systems authorised at the top, the same lands worked for the same beneficiaries under new flags. From the late 1990s a body of critical thought formed around exactly this; the underground continuities that persisted, beneath every variety of political regime and national fiction, to work the societies of the subcontinent in depth.
The catalyst was a concept forged by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018), which we have often evoked here; colonialidad del poder, the coloniality of power. Around it gathered Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Ramón Grosfoguel, Catherine Walsh, and María Lugones, among others.
Coloniality is not colonialism
The distinction is the whole of it. It’s a useful import Scotland can make.
Colonialism is the historical movement of land-seizure that produced the modern European empires. It has dates. It ends.
Coloniality names the relations of colonial domination that emerge with the conquest of the Americas and then establish themselves progressively across the globe, imposing a planetary hierarchy of peoples according to racial, sexual, epistemic, spiritual, linguistic, and aesthetic criteria. Coloniality encompasses colonisation, of which colonisation is only one manifestation. It did not disappear with the decolonisations of the twentieth century. Propped on newer instruments (development, democratisation, multicultural governance, environmental protection), it endlessly rearranges itself, leaving untouched what sits at the heart of the colonial relation; the submission of the Souths to the symbolic order of the global North, the relegation of non-Western forms of life to non-existence, and the devastating appropriation of the natural commons.
For the decolonial thinkers there is no “post” available inside the modern capitalist world-system, for one simple reason; modernity is intrinsically colonial. Coloniality is modernity's outer lining, the face it does not show. Quijano articulated the concept in 1992, the year the five-hundredth anniversary of the "discovery" was met by mass indigenous refusal across the Americas, demonstrating that peoples subjected to centuries of forced assimilation and exclusion had retained the symbolic autonomy to mount a radical challenge to hegemonic knowledge.
Dussel pushed the genealogy back further, arguing that capitalist modernity precedes by at least a century the "modernisation" of European societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth, and begins in 1492 with the conquest of what the West would call, for want of any category to name it, the New World. America thus appears as the first historical entity of modernity, caught from the outset in an insoluble contradiction. How do you justify the "discovery" and the "newness" of a land already inhabited by other human beings? The aporia is neutralised simply and radically; by casting doubt on the humanity of the inhabitants.
Mignolo added a useful proposition for a nation in Scotland's position. There is not only a geography of thought but a geopolitics of thought. Certain socio-historical spaces, by the structural position they occupy in the world-system and by the specific problems that position generates, offer vantage points which, if what they disclose is methodically unfolded, permit the deconstruction of the centre's hegemonic claims over the production and intelligibility of the real. Decentring makes a relational intelligibility of the world possible, where thought from the centre, believing itself universal, exhausts itself inside its own perspective. The first decolonial question is therefore always: from where; from what practico-historical conditions, in Dussel's phrase; are we interrogating the world?
Quijano's framework is usually set out in three registers, which we will use:
Coloniality of power or the hierarchy of authority and labour that survives formal constitutional change.
Coloniality of knowledge or the monopoly of the metropole over what counts as knowledge, method, and evidence.
Coloniality of being or what the relationship does to the self-conception of the dominated.
To which Dussel adds transmodernity; not a return to a pre-colonial past or assimilation into the metropole's modernity, but a future built from the resources of those the modern/colonial order tried to abolish.
Canudos. Why conquest is a structure
There is an episode that carries this argument better than any definition.
In the Brazilian backlands at the end of the nineteenth century, a settlement grew at Canudos around the preacher Antônio Conselheiro; a wretched community of a few thousand mixed-race peasants and freed slaves. The young Republic destroyed it systematically with dynamite and slaughtered its inhabitants. Euclides da Cunha, who witnessed the campaign, sensed what it meant, that modern Brazil was very far from finished with its internal Others.
Follow the word that came out of it. Favela, the term Brazilian Portuguese adopted for the precarious quarters ringing its great cities, comes from Canudos. It was the name of the hill, o morro da Favela, from which the final assault on Conselheiro's encampment was launched. At the end of the war in 1897, a grateful Republic paid the ordinary soldiers who had fought it, most of them themselves the children or grandchildren of slaves, with unworkable plots on the steep slopes of the hills surrounding the great cities of the south-east. Barred from the European city and excluded from the sacred space of citizenship, these conscripts of modernity are the ancestors of the inhabitants of the favelas.
The hill above Canudos, Favela, is the name of a structural violence which, from the Conquista to the police "reconquest" operations of the present, never finishes arriving.
Conquest is not an event. It is a structure.
That formulation, reached independently in Brazil and, in the settler-colonial literature, is the sentence Scotland most needs. It’s the answer to the question that defeats every conventional analysis of the Scottish situation: if Scotland was colonised in 1707, surely it stopped being colonised at some point? No. A conquest is not a date on which something happened. It’s an arrangement that goes on happening, reproducing itself through whatever institutions are available, adapting its instruments as the centuries change the fashion in instruments.
Coloniality, applied to Scotland
Run Quijano's three registers over the Scottish record and the entire post-1999 period resolves.
Coloniality of power. In 1999 a legislature began sitting in Edinburgh, yet Scotland's colonial condition did not change. What was abolished in 1707 was the Parliament of Scotland, the sovereign legislature of a sovereign kingdom, holding its authority in its own right. That parliament has never been restored. Nothing in the Scotland Act purports to restore it. What was created in 1999 is a devolved administration, brought into being by an Act of the Westminster parliament, holding only the competence that Act lends it, unable to legislate beyond the boundary that Act draws, sitting beneath a provision stating in terms that Westminster's power to make laws for Scotland is unaffected, and abolishable by the authority that made it. It’s excluded from everything that determines Scotland's actual situation (foreign policy, defence, borders, immigration, energy, broadcasting, the constitution, the seas). Colonial Marker 4 (Colonial Administration and "Reserved Matters") documents the architecture.
Calling it the Scottish Parliament is among the most economical pieces of colonial work of the modern period. The name invites Scots to believe that what was taken in 1707 has been handed back. Nothing has been handed back. A different kind of institution stands where the old one stood, wearing its name.
Coloniality explains why devolution changed the furniture without touching the structure and why the machinery reappeared at all, since it’s the structural twin of the dyarchy imposed on colonial India by the Government of India Act 1919, a device built to grant the appearance of self-government while withholding its substance.
Coloniality of knowledge. The authorised account of Scotland's economy is produced through an accounting methodology introduced, in its own creator's leaked words, to make a powerful case against Scottish self-government, then reproduced annually as neutral statistics by institutions that describe themselves as non-partisan. The authorised account of Scotland's history is produced substantially by a professoriate less than a tenth Scottish. The authorised account of Scotland's strategic geography is produced by a London institute which cannot bring itself to write the word Scotland, calling the corridor the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom Gap when its eastern pillar is Scottish landmass. This isn’t just bias but a monopoly over the conditions of knowing, which is what coloniality of knowledge means.
Coloniality of being. The cringe. The reflex apology. The pre-emptive smallness. The conviction, held by intelligent people against the documentary evidence, that Scotland could not manage what Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Estonia, and Singapore manage. Fanon and Memmi diagnosed the mechanism while Quijano explains why it outlives every institutional reform, because it was never located in the institutions.
Transmodernity describes precisely what state resumption means for Scotland. Not a return to 1706, and not admission to the colonial metropole's modernity on the metropole's terms, but a future built from what the colonial relationship tried to abolish; the languages, the legal tradition, the communal and egalitarian strand in Scottish social thought, the constitutional principle in the Declaration of Arbroath that authority is held on the community's sufferance, and a resource endowment whose value has never once been counted for the people who own it.
And what Scotland gives back
This is not extraction in the other direction. A theory imported and applied is a theory that has been used; a theory extended is a theory that has been paid for. Scotland's case does three things to the decolonial framework.
It breaks the geography. Coloniality was developed to explain the Americas and carried to Africa and Asia. Scotland demonstrates, just like Ireland, that the same structure operates inside Europe, against a European people, conducted by a European state which is itself routinely treated as the model of constitutional propriety, which means the modern/colonial world-system was never a relationship between Europe and everywhere else. It was a relationship of colonial centres to peripheries.
It breaks the chronology. Dussel dates modernity from 1492. Scotland's annexation in 1707 is not a late provincial echo of that process but the act that constituted the state which then carried the process to a quarter of the earth. The empire that colonised was itself assembled by colonising.
It also destroys the assumption that formal statehood is the finish line. Every theory of coloniality has had to explain why independence did not deliver liberation. Scotland runs the experiment in reverse; a nation that was a functioning sovereign state for centuries, annexed by a void instrument, its crown never lawfully extinguished. Scotland is not asking to be created. It wants to resume, which makes it, in international law, a materially different and considerably stronger claim than any of the cases the theory was built on.
The Anticipation: Scotland as the Case That Came First
Everything so far establishes that Scotland fits. This section makes the harder claim.
These thinkers described instruments they met in the twentieth century. Scotland had already met them in the eighteenth. Not analogously. Identically, and earlier.
Fanon's compartment, held by force under a vocabulary of civilisation. The Highland fort network built between the 1720s and the 1760s (Ruthven, Fort Augustus, Fort William, Fort George) with a road system engineered by Wade and then Caulfeild to move artillery into a subdued interior, running to well over a thousand miles, and a garrison network that by 1746 exceeded four hundred posts across the country. That is the pacification garrison as a finished system. It precedes the cantonment architecture of English India by a century, and France's bureaux arabes, the military offices through which conquered Algeria was administered and surveilled, by considerably more. The technology Fanon met in Algeria had been prototyped on the nation whose annexation constituted the state that later exported it.
Memmi's mimic elite. The hardening of Scottish society into administrable categories after 1745; the anglicisation of the gentry; a native leadership's loyalty purchased through access to a metropolitan career ladder that had been closed by law before the annexation and opened after it. Memmi described in Tunisia a process that had been run to completion in Scotland before Tunisia was a French protectorate at all.
Césaire's choc en retour. The dyarchy of 1919, condemned by Indian nationalists as the appearance of self-government engineered to withhold its substance, retired by Indian independence; and reappearing in 1998 as the reserved-and-devolved architecture of the Scotland Act. The claim is not that a draftsman copied the 1919 Act. It is that a colonial administrative logic reproduced itself because the relationship it manages is the same relationship. A device built to grant the look of self-rule without the substance did not need copying to reappear in Scotland. It only needed the same problem to solve.
One direction of travel runs through all three; assembled or perfected against Scotland, carried outward across a colonial empire, and in the last case carried home again, refined, to the nation of its origin. No other colonised people occupies both ends of that arc so completely. It’s that double position; matrix and target, prototype and re-import; which makes Scotland not one colonial case among many but a key to the machinery as a whole.
Which brings us back to the silence. Fanon, Memmi, and Césaire never named Scotland. On the argument advanced here they were describing it throughout; describing instruments whose first workshop was a nation they had every structural reason not to see because the state that colonised it had spent centuries ensuring Scotland appeared in the world's account of empire only among the colonisers.
The theory did not miss Scotland because Scotland was not a colony. It missed Scotland because the erasure of Scotland is itself one of the colonial achievements the theory exists to describe.
What the Record Shows
Set the Scottish case beside the seventeen territories that remain on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories and something becomes difficult to unsee.
Ten of those seventeen are administered by the same state that administers Scotland. Gibraltar. The Malvinas (Falkland Islands). Bermuda. The British Virgin Islands. The Cayman Islands. Montserrat. Turks and Caicos. Anguilla. Saint Helena. Pitcairn. Several have populations smaller than a Scottish town. Pitcairn's is measured in dozens. Each is recognised by the international community as a territory whose people have not yet exercised their right of self-determination. Each generates an annual reporting obligation on the administering power under Article 73(e) of the Charter.
Scotland has 5.5 million people, one of the oldest continuous legal systems in Europe, its own established church, its own universities, hydrocarbon reserves comparable to Norway's, a renewable generating capacity several times its own consumption, one of the world's most recognised export products, and a documented sovereign existence running back beyond the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, whose recognition by the Papacy was the nearest thing that century possessed to recognition by the international community.
Scotland is not on the list.
The reason is not legal. That list is populated by nomination and administering powers do not nominate themselves. The one state which might have raised the question is the state whose interest lies in the question never being raised. The International Court of Justice settled the underlying principle in 2019, when it held in the Chagos Advisory Opinion that the decolonisation of Mauritius had never been lawfully completed, that the continued administration of the archipelago was a continuing internationally wrongful act, and, decisively, that all member states are under an obligation to cooperate with the United Nations in completing decolonisation. The General Assembly operationalised that opinion by 116 votes to 6. The administering power's consent is not required. It never was.
Which returns us to the question that always comes back around the world: if Ireland was a colony, how was Scotland not?
Fanon, Memmi, and Césaire did not answer that question, because nobody put it to them. They did something more useful. Working inside their own subjugation, drawing on a tradition of anticolonial thought far older and wider than the three of them, they sharpened the instruments with which it can now be answered, and sharpened them so well that the analysis reaches a nation none of them had reason to consider; a nation whose annexation supplied the colonial empire that colonised them with its constitutional form, its fiscal base, its manpower, and several of the techniques later used against Martinique, against Tunisia, and against Algeria.
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor, Biko said, is the mind of the oppressed. Colonial Marker 0 is where a mind takes itself back; by learning that its condition has a name, that the name was written by people who lived the same thing on the other side of the world. In Scotland's case the name had been waiting, unwritten, from the beginning.
Read Liberation Scotland's Colonial Markers documentation.
References
Baird, A. (2020). Doun-Hauden: The Socio-Political Determinants of Scottish Independence. Kindle Direct Publishing.
Baird, A. (2022). "The Socio-Political Determinants of Scottish Independence." Towson University Journal of International Affairs, 55(2).
Biko, S. (1978). I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Edited by A. Stubbs. London: Bowerdean Press.
Black, R. (2025). Presentation at the Liberation Scotland/IPLSA Conference, Palais des Nations, Geneva, 18 September 2025.
Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire: L'économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. English edition: Language and Symbolic Power, edited by J.B. Thompson, translated by G. Raymond and M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland — despatch of Robert Bowes, English ambassador in Scotland, May 1580.
Cathcart, A. (2010). "The Statutes of Iona: The Archipelagic Context." Journal of British Studies, 49(1), pp. 4–27.
Césaire, A. (1939). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Paris: Volontés.
Césaire, A. (1955). Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. [First published 1950.] English edition: Discourse on Colonialism, translated by J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972/2000.
Code de l'Indigénat (1881). French Algeria.
Da Cunha, E. (1902). Os Sertões. Rio de Janeiro. English edition: Rebellion in the Backlands, translated by S. Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.
Décret Crémieux, no. 136, 24 October 1870. Bulletin officiel, Tours, 7 November 1870.
Declaration of Arbroath (1320). Letter to Pope John XXII from the barons and freeholders of Scotland, 6 April 1320. National Records of Scotland, SP13/7.
Defoe, D. (1706). An Essay at Removing National Prejudices Against a Union with Scotland.
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Education Act 1633, c. 5, "Ratification of the act of council regarding plantation of schools." Records of the Parliaments of Scotland.
Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fanon, F. (1952). Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. English edition: Black Skin, White Masks, translated by C.L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Fanon, F. (1961). Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: François Maspero. English edition: The Wretched of the Earth, translated by C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Government of India Act 1919, 9 & 10 Geo. 5 c. 101 (UK).
Grosfoguel, R. (2007). "The Epistemic Decolonial Turn." Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp. 211–223.
Hechter, M. (1975). Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
International Court of Justice (2019). Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, Advisory Opinion. ICJ Reports 2019, p. 95.
Liberation Scotland Committee (2025). The Markers of a Colonized Nation: Scotland's Colonial Markers. Liberation Scotland.
Lugones, M. (2008). "The Coloniality of Gender." Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, Spring 2008.
Macinnes, A.I. (1996). Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788. East Linton: Tuckwell Press.
McCrone, G. (1974). The Economics of Nationalism Re-examined. Scottish Office confidential memorandum. Declassified under Freedom of Information, 2005.
Memmi, A. (1957). Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. English edition: The Colonizer and the Colonized, translated by H. Greenfeld. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965/1967; London: Profile Books, 2021.
Mignolo, W.D. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.
Privy Council of Scotland (1616). School Establishment Act, 10 December 1616.
Quijano, A. (1992). "Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad." Perú Indígena, 13(29), pp. 11–20.
Quijano, A. (2000). "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), pp. 533–580.
Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, first series, ed. J.H. Burton and D. Masson. Edinburgh: HM General Register House, 1877–1898. Act of 10 December 1616.
Said, E.W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf; London: Vintage, 1994.
Scotland Act 1998, c. 46 (UK).
Statutes of Iona (1609). In Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, first series.
Strong, J. (1909). A History of Secondary Education in Scotland. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Taylor, W. (1996). The Military Roads in Scotland. Rev. ed. Colonsay: House of Lochar.
Treaty of Berwick (1586). Berwick upon Tweed, 6 July 1586.
UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV) (1960). Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 14 December 1960.
UN General Assembly Resolution 73/295 (2019). 22 May 2019.
Walsh, C. (2007). "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge." Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp. 224–239.
Wolfe, P. (2006). "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native." Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), pp. 387–409.
Yegar, M., and Chakravarti, N.; see further the scholarship on Indian co-colonialism in Burma, including "Partners in Empire? Co-colonialism and the Rise of Anti-Indian Nationalism in Burma, 1930–1938," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 49(1), 2021.
Member discussion