As loan sharks, drug smugglers, generals and plant hunters, Scots played a central role in expanding the British Empire
The history of the British empire in Asia cannot be told without the Scots. As loan sharks, drug smugglers, diplomats, generals and plant hunters, they played key roles in expanding Britain’s imperial reach. They kept the empire caffeinated via extortionate loans and opium; they smuggled the lucrative and much-coveted Camellia sinensis (tea plant) from China to India; they lent legitimacy to these efforts by planning and leading Britain’s first embassy to China; and, when this failed, they instigated war with China and looted its palaces. In the process, these Scots ensured that increasing numbers of British consumers could enjoy their daily cup of tea with the empire reaping the financial benefits, and increasingly disastrous consequences for China.....MUCH MORE
Scotland’s long tradition of migration and soldiering, its poverty and uncertain harvests, encouraged many young Scots to set sail for the East Indies. As far back as the Middle Ages, Scots were an unusually outward-looking group, travelling and settling across Europe, from the Netherlands to the Baltic. For centuries, they exported their martial expertise to Irish chiefs, English kings and European monarchs. By the 18th century, civil war and languishing family fortunes, as well as the promise of new ones, added urgency to the exodus of Scots out of north Britain. They left home very young, often as teenagers, to pursue new economic opportunities made possible by the East India Company’s conquests in India and its growing tea trade with China. But many of them, particularly the Highlanders, had few better options available to them in the aftermath of the so-called ’45. Their failed attempt to restore the Scottish Stuart line to the British throne in 1745 resulted in the devastation of local Highland communities by the British army, in addition to a long-term draconian project that restructured and assimilated the Highlands according to English economic, cultural and political norms.
The Scots’ relative poverty when compared with their southern neighbours, the resistance they faced obtaining administrative positions in London, and their experience and willingness to travel beyond the borders of the British Isles meant that Scots in Asia tended to be better educated and often better represented than their English counterparts in a range of professions across the empire, particularly the East India Company’s military. Towards the end of the 18th century, English observers commented, with a parochial dose of hyperbole, that everyone in India was either Scotch or Irish, or that you seldom saw more than five English to 20 Scotch in India; English traders complained about their clannishness, partiality to their own countrymen and national pride.
What these English observers perhaps could not see was that ‘colonisation’ of Britain’s empire by the Scots held the nascent British state together. The fragile and volatile political union of England and Scotland in 1707 was, in fact, reinforced through the efforts of several Scottish patrons in London. With the blessing of Sir Robert Walpole, regarded as Britain’s first prime minister (1721-1742), imperial gate keepers, such as John Drummond of Quarrell, placed their countrymen in various East Indies posts. Because positions in Scotland were insufficient and appointments in London were fiercely guarded by English interests, the East Indies came to serve as an important outlet for patronage and a means of securing Scottish loyalty to the British state. Many Scots got jobs with the British East India Company, as captains and mariners on its vessels, and as civil, military and medical personnel in its settlements. But no matter their particular profession or title, they leveraged these opportunities provided by the imperial machine to dabble in money ventures of their own. By the middle of the 18th century, Scottish interests in Asia had been well-established and their networks deeply entrenched. The most fortunate Scots returned to Britain as wealthy nabobs, infiltrated the directorate of the East India Company, and became some of its principal stockholders. Their successes laid the foundation upon which future generations would build.
During the second half of the 18th century, a numerically small but economically influential group of Scots flocked to China. They set up shop in the port city of Canton, modern-day Guangzhou, where they created an important financial niche for themselves. As Britain’s tea trade with China grew over the course of the 18th century, both the East India Company and the Chinese Hong merchants – tea brokers licensed to trade with foreigners in Canton – found it difficult to finance their respective ends of the tea trade. Their capital supplies (silver coin) could not keep up with the growing demand for tea. Around the same time in India, British conquests in Bengal and Madras brought a great deal of new wealth and opportunity for personal enrichment to the East India Company’s civil and military employees. Robert Clive, who helped to found Britain’s territorial empire in India during the mid-18th century, is perhaps the most infamous nabob, but there were others. With money accumulating in private British hands in India, Scots quickly got to work, tapping into their network of friends, kin and countrymen in India and Southeast Asia to move commodities and capital across the Indian Ocean.
Scottish financiers transmitted the private fortunes of their clients to England via China by depositing their money in the Company’s Canton treasury in exchange for paper bills, which could be cashed in London. The remainder they invested in usurious loans of silver to the Chinese merchants, sometimes above 20 per cent per year. On the one hand, in bringing precious silver to Canton, Scots played a critical role financing commerce between Britain and China. On the other, they created an unstable financial mechanism, which relied upon risky credit relationships. The result, unsurprisingly, was a major financial crisis in the early 1780s. Half of the Hong merchants were ruined; two of them, Yngshaw and Kewshaw, were jailed by the Chinese government and eventually deported to Xinjiang Province. Several of the Scottish brokers also went bankrupt but avoided imprisonment in both China and Britain. In an effort to encourage local authorities to assist them in recovering their money, Scottish brokers and their clients bribed two Royal Navy admirals stationed near Madras to dispatch a warship to Canton in 1779 and 1780. One broker went so far as to confiscate and occupy the warehouses and property of several Chinese merchants with a small private army of Indian soldiers. Six decades before the First Opium War, Scottish brokers and merchants flirted with war in China....
