It is remarkable that few would dispute that Ireland was a British colony before most of it became Independent, but to point to Scotland’s highly analogous colonial position brings howls of anger.
All Empires employ the human resources of their colonies. India was conquered for the British by Indian soldiers, not by British troops. Nearly all of the major states in the Indian sub-continent were formally absorbed by Treaty, giving legal cover to the annexations.
Throughout the British Empire, as so many other Empires, the local ruling class was co-opted into British rule, often selling out the interests and sometimes the very land and homes of their peoples in return for acceptance into the Imperial elite. Frequently in the later stages of the British Empire, colonies had representative Assemblies of various kinds in which the local co-opted colonial elite could exercise limited self-government, subject to the supremacy of the Westminster parliament and of the Law Lords (precursor to the Supreme Court).
You will have grasped from the above that all of the reasons commonly trotted out that Scotland cannot be a colony – participation of the elite in the fruits of Empire, contribution to the Imperial armies, responsibility of the Scottish aristocracy for the Highland Clearances, the Treaty of Union, existence of the “Scottish Parliament” – are in fact classic markers of colonial status.
This is how colonies are managed, and Scotland is one.
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Prof Micheál Ó Siochru – Genocide? Oliver Cromwell and Ireland
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“There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence. New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.”
