this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Scotland is one of my hobby horses.
Now you’d think that they were a poor uwu wittle baby who were conquered instead of willingly joining in order to get more of that colonial pie as they spectacularly failed at establishing their own colonies. Scottish people have deluded themselves into thinking that they went through the same thing as the Irish rather than acting as the attack dogs of the English for the last 300 years, ironically also in Ireland. Being marginally less bad than the English is no great feat.
As a Scot, it’s annoying seeing people think that we are a “colony” of the English, because they do have an assumption of Scotland and England as different nations with different cultures and (sometimes shared) histories but assume that England annexed us illiegaly. we only formed the Union with England because we fucked up in our own efforts at imperialism, which we massively failed at and fucking bankrupted us. I would say that deciding to try and join the likes of England, France, Spain, the Netherlands etc in colonialism was the single worst decision that we ever made. Although one argument could be that the 1320 deflation of Arbroath talked about the sovereignty of the people and the 1707 Union was done against the wishes of the people, but that doesn’t make Scotland a full blown “colony”. Especially if many of us still support this union and/or willing joined the English as British imperialists. In many aspects, Scotland and England are different. But in some, we’re the same.
Usually its people conflating lowlands with highlands. Lowland scots are northumbrian anglo saxons who became part of the Kingdom of Scotland and therefore identify as such, but they arent celtic (well no more than northern english). While Highland Scots are the norse-celtic "victims of english oppression" (the oppression was done by lowlands scots in accord with "true" english officials)
Also there were "catholic english" migrants in Ireland that sided with the irish and got oppressed by england as well, while the scottish settlers in the north, well acted as settlers.
Yeah, the main reason it gets me riled up is that the domestic aristocracy of Scotland, which is from the same group of people that make up and have made up the vast majority of Scottish people for centuries, are treated as foreign. It is an easy way to wash your hands of any sins, just pretend that you're part of the outgroup. It is a bit like Swedish people or Norwegians claiming they were opressed by identifying with the struggles that Sami people endure at their hand.
The same courtesy is rarely afforded the English who were also systematically cleared off land during the enclosures of the commons so it could be "better exploited" by land owners. England gets treated as a monolith despite there being many outgroups that were similarly persecuted by the state (Quakers, Romanichal, Irish Travellers, Lollards etc).