Caribbean-Scottish Relations: for a Poetics of Memory

cover image for Caribbean-Scottish Relations by Carla Sassi et al. 2007 marked in Britain both the third centenary of the Union of the English and Scottish parliaments—arguably the birth of the modern British state as well as of the British Empire—and the bicentenary of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which preceded the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire by 26 years. Even though this might not be immediately evident, the two events are indeed related, if we believe with the majority of historians that the main trigger for the Union was the desire of both nations to conjoin forces rather than compete with each other in the imperial enterprise—and no doubt the most lucrative part of the enterprise was the exploitation of natural and human resources in the West Indies. Also, both commemorations were not—contrary to what is often the case—extraordinary events within a yearly national remembrance ritual, but rather an una tantum duty, performed with what seemed more a sense of external obligation than genuine participation. The history of Atlantic slavery, in fact, had been pushed to the margins of British historiography as well as of collective memory—indeed a case of 'blind memory', in Marcus Wood's phrase, of a memory that stubbornly refuses to remember.¹ No memorials in fact recollected in Britain (until 2007) the loss of human lives in the name of profit (while several commemorated the lives and deeds of abolitionists), the Queen has never offered apologies, nor has the British state considered offering even a symbolic compensation to the descendents of slaves. As for the Union, Britain is possibly the only modern state that does not commemorate publicly the date of its foundation: no public square, no Queen’s speech, no TV special programmes herald and celebrate it—if only as a rhetorical gesture. This is of course not to suggest that the two silences are in any way morally comparable, but just to highlight how they are both rooted in the political and ideological humus of the empire-building age, and thus how, being part of the same discourse, they inevitably build on each other and secretely collude.

The invisibility of the Act of Union foregrounds in fact the invisibility of the Scottish nation as a political and economic agent within the Union and within the British Empire: the notorious conflation between 'English' and 'British', subsuming Scottishness and relegating it to a provincial entity, was no doubt one of the factors that allowed Scots to underplay their role in the imperial enterprise and also to remove more quickly and more radically than their southern neighbours their own active involvement in slave trade and slave exploitation by the time such involvement had become an embarassing memory.

Issues of (in)visibility and mnemonic disconnections

An investigation of Caribbean-Scottish relations arguably represents a journey into the epicentre of Scotland's modern history. The Scots' presence in the West Indies, first as settlers or exiles from an independent nation, then as British subjects, stretched for over three centuries, beginning in the second half of the 17th century, with Oliver Cromwell's banishment of Scottish prisoners of war, it gained further importance after the Union of Parliaments of 1707 (ushered in by Scotland's failed attempt to plant a colony at Darien, on the isthmus of Panama in 1699), and lasted well into the first decades of the 20th century, when Scottish communities still lived in some of the Caribbean islands.

Not only is this a long-standing relation then, it is a deep and complex one, not to mention its importance in economic terms, and yet it has remained largely and strikingly invisible until recently. Because this invisibility is neither accidental nor recent, let alone innocent, any attempt to correct the historical distortions and silences it generated that does not also address earnestly its deeper cultural/ideological roots is doomed to produce that defective memory Wood speaks of. And of course searching for such roots means embarking upon a difficult and problematic journey into the dark recesses of Scotland's national identity. It is even more difficult and problematic insofar as Scotland is still a stateless nation where the transmission of national culture and history is only partially granted by state institutions. While historical memory has been transmitted here as elsewhere also through non-institutional channels, it is obvious that in Scotland 'national narratives' have relied less on institutional legitimisation than those of established nation-states. Furthermore the friction of Scottish national historical discourse with British centralised historiography has often generated 'mnemonic disconnections' as well as opportunities for removal and/or distortion, either in opposition or collusion with the centre. Historical memory is of course always a contested territory, as history is a construct—as the new historicists has taught us—open to endless revisions and subject to the ideological perspectives that prevail at the time of its (re)telling, as well as to the discovery of new evidence. In Scotland however such contested quality takes on a specific and possibly more complex meaning. It is indeed against the backdrop of the specificity of Scotland’s historical memory that its amnesia of its agency in the 'black holocaust' should be evaluated. This is of course no attempt to identify mitigating circumstances for what happened (there cannot be any), just an indication of the scope of the investigation required from scholars, if Scotland is truly to make amends for and offer at least symbolic reparation for its colonial past.[...]

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¹ Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America Routledge, 2000).