Scotland's Other Diaspora? And England's?

There is apparently an emerging, very white, mostly male, at least broadly working-class subculture of Scotophilia (as so often the way with philias, not terribly realistic, but there we are) in parts of Northern Europe. Nothing more than the British taste for Italian coffee houses in the Fifties, or for Chinese food today? Perhaps.

But there really must be Scots-descended people in parts of Northern Europe. Scotland was a member of the Hanseatic League, and, while everyone eventually came to accept that there as going to have to be a Union with somewhere, England was by no means the only suitor considered. Union with France floundered on the question of religion. Union with the Netherlands, however, very nearly happened. Links were as strong as that.

One would no more have expected anything less than a fully functioning community of Scots in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or indeed any Hanseatic port such as Hamburg, than one would expect anything less than a fully functioning Irish community in Glasgow, or Liverpool, or London.

And then there is the matter, only now coming to be systematically explored, of the Jacobite Diaspora. We need to be clear that by no means all of that Diaspora was in any sense Scots. Most Scots were not Jacobites, and far more Englishmen were than has been recognised until very recently. If the Old and Young Pretenders could have raised their armies in England, then they would certainly have done so. Cardinal York called himself “Henry IX of Great Britain and Ireland” and that, so far as he was concerned, was just that.

But there is no doubt that there was proportionately more Jacobitism in Scotland than in England (Bonnie Prince Charlie himself once said that he would “do for the Welsh Jacobites what they did for me, I will drink to their health”). Far more Jacobites went into exile from these islands than, say, Huguenots sought refuge here. They made a very significant economic contribution to France and Spain. They founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They dominated the Swedish East India and Madagascar Companies. And they did very much more besides.