The Scottish Diaspora Forum

These are the issues which will be debated in the Chamber of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, Edinburgh, on Saturday 25 July. The event is organised by the Scottish Diaspora Forum in the year of the 2009 Homecoming.

For those who want to study the Scottish diaspora in greater detail, there are two other events in the North of Scotland. Leverburgh in South Harris will host a conference on Emigration from the Outer Hebrides from 10-12 September. And Highland Homecoming in Inverness from 22-24 October will deal with Scotland’s Global Impact – “how a small nation changed the world!”

And, being Scotland, there will always be ample opportunity to sample a dram or two, to take to the floor in a ceilidh, to meet clan chiefs and parliamentarians, and to discuss ancestry with the country’s genealogists. There are almost 50 million family records at the General Register Office in Edinburgh, most of them accessible via the internet.

“Roots are important,” says Lord Steel of Aikwood, who will chair one of the Forum panels at the Parliament. “From often humble beginnings, Scots made the most remarkable contribution to education, exploration, industry and science.”

“And they did so almost everywhere,” adds Professor Tom Devine of Edinburgh University, who will give the Forum’s keynote lecture. “The most remarkable characteristic of the Scottish diaspora is just how genuinely global it is.”

In the United States, half the signatories of the Declaration of Independence – itself “modelled on the inspirational Scottish declaration of Independence of 1320”, said the Senate Resolution naming 6 April as Tartan Day – were of Scottish descent. So were 11 Presidents, half the Secretaries of Treasury, and a third of the Secretaries of State.

Surveying the contribution made by Scots to American commerce, education, law and religion, Woodrow Wilson concluded: “Every line of strength in this country is coloured with Scottish blood”.

In Canada, the first Prime Minister was John Macdonald from Glasgow. Eight men and one woman with Scottish roots have followed him to that high office. And it was largely Scots who laid down the infrastructure linking Newfoundland to British Columbia: driving the railways coast to coast, founding banks and newspapers, establishing newspapers, and planting churches.

In Australia, Major General Lachlan Macquarie from Ulva is known as the father of the nation, turning the country from a penal colony into a nation. Prime Ministers like Andrew Fisher and Sir George Reid continued the Scots democratic tradition.

And in New Zealand, the Scots who founded Dunedin – either the Gaelic name of Scotland’s capital, or the first syllables of Dundee and Edinburgh – produced a rich crop of businessmen, farmers, lawyers, ministers of religion and politicians.

The diaspora is not just limited to the Commonwealth, though. In Russia General Patrick Gordon expanded the empire of Peter the Great, and Field Marshall Barclay de Toly saw off the military threat of Napoleon. In Japan, Thomas Blake Glover from Fraserburgh helped turn the country into an industrial giant by bringing young samurai to Scottish colleges, by starting the imperial navy, and by founding the company which later was to become Mitsubishi. In China, France, Hungary, India, Italy, Poland and other countries there are monuments and statues in honour of Scots who contributed to their new homeland.

Not all the emigrants became the stuff of legend, of course. The men and women who struggled through the wastelands from Hudson’s Bay to found Winnipeg are not known today individually. The 30,000 Scots who settled in Poland in the late Middle Ages have largely merged with the local population, though their placenames remain. The descendants of missionaries planted in “Little Scotland” in the Caucasus by the Free Church may have ended up as keepers of the Botanic Gardens in St Petersburg, but the family Bible from home is still there.

Education, hard work, a belief in equality of opportunity – yes, these are common Scottish characteristics across the globe. But Scots at the Diaspora Forum will have to get used to the idea that culture transmogrifies with time.

“Tartan Day” in the United States – a heritage event now celebrated in over 30 countries – does not celebrate Scotland. It celebrates the unique history and lifestyle of Scots Americans. If purists at home do not like the idea of sporrans featuring buffaloes or the kilt being topped with a Davy Crockett hat, they will have to think again. If heritage hunters from abroad are disappointed to see the Tartan Army of football fans decked out in all its finery or pop bands playing skat on the bagpipes, they will have to understand that Scotland has moved on.

Yes, it is still a land of misty islands, Highland glens and romantic castles. But it’s also a country which these days makes its living through an amalgam of education and enterprise – through biosciences, cultural enterprise, energy (in the form of oil, gas and renewables), financial services, knowledge industries, quality food, and some of the best universities in the world.

Over the seas and across the centuries, the bonds linking the 5.1 million Scots at home and the 40 million people of Scottish descent in the diaspora remain strong. But if we are to have a future for our common past, it will need to embrace the new realities as well.

How can we cooperate more closely in the arts, business and education? How can we honour what has been achieved overseas as much as has been done at home? How, in this internet age, can we talk to each other on a more regular and ongoing basis? What do we want from the diaspora? What do they want from us?

If the Diaspora Forum begins to provide some answers to these questions, then Homecoming will not be a one-off event. It may just start to have an ongoing legacy.

Article kindly provided by The Rt Hon George Reid a former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament