Category: Culture

Slaver Profits in Scotland

Slaver Profits in Scotland

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

There has been a flurry of activity around a new study linking the Atlantic slave trade to the Highland clearances. 18th and 19th centuries. Fascinating stuff.

I read the Smithsonian article first. “Sure,” I thought, “we knew this already.” Or at least some of us could easily guess. If you read history, at some point you start to notice bits and pieces that aren’t being highlighted. One of those pieces is likely to be the prominence of Scots in the north Atlantic trade, and, of course, the slave trade. As soon as someone says the profits went back home, for example, to estates in Scotland, you think, “Of course. That’s exactly how it would be.”

“Between roughly 1750 and 1860, wealthy landowners forcibly evicted thousands of Scottish Highlanders in order to create large-scale sheep farms. Known today as the Highland Clearances, this era of drastic depopulation sparked the collapse of the traditional clan system and the mass migration of Scotland’s northernmost residents to other parts of the world.” McGreevy.

OK, sure. But the surprising part isn’t the connection. It’s that the connection matters today.

The research is presented as a “discussion paper on land reform” for Community Land Scotland (“We believe that we cannot create a more socially just Scotland without tackling land ownership. Half of the country’s privately owned land is held by just 432 owners and a mere 16 owners hold 10% of Scotland (Wightman 2013) – we want to see more of Scotland’s land in the hands of more of Scotland’s people“).

The real meat here is in the Bella Caledonia article. “It’s likely that somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 acres of the western and northern Highlands today are in the hands of families which have benefitted from the profits of slavery.“

Scottish Land and Estates, “a representative body for large landowners and country businesses,” brushes off the research as irrelevant: “it is a bit of a stretch to leap from a review of social history and ancient connections to slavery as being a reason why communities should own land today. (Ooo, this is getting good.)

I like the response: “Landlords consistently seek to benefit from the historical traditions and stories associated with their land and with their houses and castles. Past connections are readily, and understandably, utilized by Scottish Land and Estates to enable heritage tourism and generate a particular version of the Highlands and indeed Scotland in general. Dismissing one element of the past as irrelevant while promoting and deploying another version as key to the contemporary economic and revenue basis of many landed estates is not conducive to a fully informed and effective discussion of land, land use and community in the Highlands.“

This is an issue that should interest the American and Canadian descendants of Scots who lost their homes in the Clearances, as well as any potential heritage tourists looking forward to visiting romantic Scotland with its castles and kilts.

I’ll never look at any of it the same way.

Tomten

Tomten

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

In the novel American Gods, Neil Gaiman quotes Richard Dorson:

“One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greeek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old County: When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said ‘They’re too scared to pass the ocean, it’s too far,’ pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America.” (“A Theory for American Folklore,” American Folklore and the Historian (University of Chicago Press, 1971)

This, of course, is the premise of the novel, that the old gods did in fact come to America, for interesting reasons and with interesting consequences.

Leaving aside, for now, the problem that Mormons believe Christ did come to America, so that doesn’t work well for everyone, I also trip over the idea the fairies and nisser are “demons”. Otherworldly, yes, but surely not demons.

The piece that really stands out for me is the idea our non-human friends didn’t come with us to America. The nisser are the Norwegian equivalent of our Swedish tomten (“house elves”). I don’t know about other families but our tomte came to America in my great grandparents steamer trunk. My mother told me so. Why would he not come? That’s just silly talk.

Whites As Slaves in Colonial America

Whites As Slaves in Colonial America

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I hear more and more people pushing the idea that White indentured servants in Colonial America were the same as Black slaves.

This was one of the problems I had with Scottish Prisoners’ of War Society. The Executive Director, Teresa Rust-Hamilton supported the idea that chattel slavery wasn’t really so bad because our Scottish ancestors who came as prisoners from Dunbar and Worcester were essentially slaves in America because they were indentured servants.

The idea there is an equivalence between slaves and indentured servants is gaining popularity among racists in America. There is no support for it in the primary sources and zero support for it among academic historians.

City States in America

City States in America

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The Ancient World had city states. Sometimes they became empires. And then when the empires collapsed they sometimes became nations. (Although–the modern ethnic nation state is more or less a late European invention.)

When I was a kid, I used to imagine, particularly on car trips, that the cities around me were like ancient city states. I would spend time looking for geographic features that would make good natural, defensible boundaries. Sometimes I’d even think about crops and natural resources, but that usually got boring quickly because there just isn’t much variety in the American West, where we lived.

I could never make up my mind whether Grand Junction would be part of Denver, part of Salt Lake, or be far enough away to be its own city state, albeit smaller and weaker than the other two. Spoiler alert: I never imagined it would be part of the “Albuquerque Plateau”.

Now, I’m loving a map that draws on the same basic idea, although sadly without the romantic trappings.

This map shows a United States composed of metropolitan areas and the surrounding areas tied to them by commuting. I’m not going to embed the map here. Go see it for yourself.

Nifty eh? 

"Essentially, they used data describing more than 4 million commutes to look at how small units of place—census tracts—are connected into much larger units of place. One of the results from their algorithm is the map above, which shows how the country is divided into economically entwined regions that don’t conform to city or state boundaries. Pittsburgh’s region spills into Ohio and West Virginia; Denver’s tips over the border into Wyoming; and Oklahoma City’s reaches into Missouri and Arkansas."

I’ve spent nearly my entire life in the areas Nelson and Rae call Salt Lake City, Albuquerque Plateau, and Denver Front Range, with time here and there in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York City.

My past wasn’t so simple in reality. It’s the abstract categories that make it so. And, as I look at the the map, and see the organic rightness of it, I also think to myself I typically use different categories—sometimes east and west of the Continental Divide; other times Colorado River Basin, Great Basin, and Missouri River Basin; sometimes the Colorado Plateau, the Intermountain West and / or the Zion Curtain*.

It’s worth remembering these different schemes are just human ideas imposed on the landscape. They don’t have any reality in the landscape itself.

* Zion Curtain. A supposed cultural boundary separating Mormons, or the state of Utah, as a region dominated by Mormons, from the rest of the country. (Dictionary of American Regional English)

More Information

Updated May 24, 2020 to resolve problem with link to definition of Zion Curtain.

Myth of the frontier

Myth of the frontier

by Justin Durand ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I keep watch for pieces about the mythology of the American West.

Westerns and cowboys are the American myth, hands down. My neo-pagan friends find meaning in Norse culture, in Celtic culture, in every romanticized period of history except America.

I’m not going to embed this one because it’s so long: How Historians Killed the Western.

"The Western died in the 1970s. It went from the primary genre of Hollywood production, making almost a third of yearly movies at its peak, to a relic of a bygone era requiring revival for new productions. The Western was felled from its high-horse. What murdered it? The direct murderer does not matter, for as one Western about a mistaken murder said, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The genre was fueled by the American frontier myth, which also propelled American exceptionalism. As the historical theory behind the frontier myth crumbled in the wake of great social upheaval, especially when related to the American Indian Movement, the driver of Westerns died, resulting in the Western’s demise."

Historians notwithstanding, the generation before mine loved cowboy romanticism. Both my parents devoured Zane Grey and other cowboy novels when they were growing up, then graduated to serious history as adults. In the early 1960s my dad watched Westerns—which meant we all watched them, like it or not. I think he liked them, but also Westerns were all that were on all three networks from probably 7 to 10 pm every night. That’s when we watched TV because Dad believed in getting up precisely at 6 am every day, weekends included.

It was the way things were back then.

The way I remember it, Westerns began to give way to police and detective shows after about 1965.

It’s a truism to say fish don’t see the water around them. My chums don’t see cowboy culture because it’s all around us. Europeans see it more clearly. I’m not surprised anymore when my European cousins want to hear about their relationship to people in the Old West.