Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 22-24 October 2009

Researching ancestry in New Register House, Edinburgh (© VisitScotland/ScottishViewpoint)

ONE THING must be said about the conference on Scotland’s Global Impact – it was great crack. On the first day, among the 250 people thronging the foyers and flocking into the Empire Theatre to hear the papers were many familiar faces and a buzz of excitement. The whole event attracted over 450 people.

In this warm enthusiastic atmosphere what little ice there might have been could not survive unbroken for long, certainly not after Leslie Riddoch stamped her personality on the proceedings.

In the opening speech, Bruce Crawford MSP presented apologies from First Minister Alex Salmond, who had originally been billed as filling this slot, and conveyed his best wishes for the proceedings.

“How one small nation changed the world!” That was the sub-title for the gathering, and it was in no small measure a celebration of Scottish achievement. “But it is also important to recognise we are not a nation that lives in the past but gives it due recognition,” said Bruce Crawford. “We should not and cannot rest on our laurels.”

To prove his point, he mentioned the Saltire Prize put up by the government for projects relating to renewable energy and the SNP’s own climate change legislation, deemed to be world leading. He welcomed modern immigrants and their contribution to our national life.

He referred in that mixture of pride and humility that is really a form of boasting to “That small parliament of ours”, and assured the audience that the conference would reflect on both the good and the bad in our history.

The conference brought together historians from all the airts. Lt Col Ian MacPherson MacCulloch from the Canadian Forces College in Toronto called it an “intellectual ceilidh”. We heard some weighty academic papers that demanded close listening, especially when read rather than spoken, but the rewards were worth the effort. This was all cutting-edge stuff, I heard someone say.

We had closely argued excursions into the emergence of Scotland from the Dark Ages, examinations of our contributions to European history, and several papers on aspects of the diaspora in North America and the Antipodes.

John MacKenzie, Professor of Imperial History at the University of Lancaster, established his local credentials by telling how his father had played in the Inverness Thistle team that had won the Highland Cup in 1921, and then went on to argue that Scottish emigrants took an awareness of environment with them that enabled them to do great things in the far corners of the world in a host of occupations related to the outdoors and exploration.

He also dealt with the great fault of many who write about the Scottish diaspora – the sin of slanted selectivity. It is an easy error to fall into, allowing our interest in what Scots did to lead us to ignore the activity of emigrants from other places.

Professor MacKenzie tried to measure this tendency by choosing geology and checking in the Australian Dictionary of Biography the provenance of all the rockbashers listed therein. By no means all were Scots, he found, but the Scots who were included were the pioneers.

“They punched above their weight,” he argued, and felt his hypothesis held good. The phrase “punching above our weight” recurred several times over the three days. We Scots seem to have been involved in everything out of proportion to our small population. Why this should have been the case across the globe remains a mystery. It deserves systematic investigation, and Professor Tom Devine argued for this at the end of his session.

Devine’s own contribution, “Did slavery make Scotland great?”, was uncomfortable listening for those who had not thought about this aspect of our history before.

The title was a riposte to the general sense of “Wha’s like us?” that the conference theme was inclined to evoke. His basic contention was that the involvement of Scots in the slave-based plantation economy in the West Indies, and the remittance of money home, was a key factor in our “great leap forward” in industrialization.

“The Scots past, like all other ethnic pasts, is filled with light and shade,” he said, and no serious historian could disagree with that. Scotland’s global impact has been negative as well as positive, and history should not be bent to serve current political purposes.

On the first day, Dr Philomena de Lima’s paper on contemporary immigration was also a refreshing exception to the general emphasis on the achievements of emigrants. Professor Eric Richards from Flinders University brought some welcome humour to his exploration of the long two-way relationship with Australia.

A number of “elephants” were identified as being in the room – notably emigration to England and to Ulster, but these topics had not been programmed. Ewen Cameron, Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at Edinburgh University and a native Invernessian, had the tough job of summarising the whole thing in a brief wind-up speech.

That the conference had happened has a lot to do with the new Inverness, he said. Forty years ago such an event would have been inconceivable – there was not enough forward-thinking in the Highland capital.

He reminded us that the purpose of history is not to celebrate the past. “I think we have been successful in getting away from this Clearance obsession,” he said, before asking: “Can Scotland sustain her global impact in an age of economic difficulty?”

We’ll probably need another intellectual ceilidh to explore that question, but at Eden Court last week nearly everyone was up for it and already talking about making this a regular event.

© Jim Miller, 2009

Links

• Scotland’s Global Impact Conference

• Homecoming Scotland