Alba Gu Brath

by MSK42

To become independent in the early 1800s is to enter a world of chaos. Scotland, a land centuries old but joined to England for over a century, has done so, and at once faces the challenges of independence and imperialism in the 1800s. With its home split between Highlands and Lowlands and lands abroad being snapped up by empires, Scotland will attempt to stand the test of time.

2. 1836 - 1846

As the sun dawned over Scotland in the year 1836 Anno Domini, several things had made themselves readily apparent. One, Scotland was sharply divided between the Highlands and the Lowlands. Two, Scotland was more liberal than the United Kingdom of England and Ireland, if only by a little. Three, the "Scottish Empire" as some more jingoistic Scots called it was fairly small, and would easily be swept away by the tide of history if they didn't try to do something about it.

Queen Mary III was a constitutional monarch, her power limited by the trust that the citizens of Scotland had with a democratic government. And yet, she still had some influence in the government, and one thing that she saw as necessary was the expansion of the "Empire". Some deliberation was undertaken, and it was decided that colonies in Africa would be the best place to start. However, even after being independent for 18 years, Scotland's navy wasn't all that strong, and the United Kingdom was still watching them warily. As such, their colonial prospects were still limited.

Seeking a way around this, Scotland decided that the best way of going about it would be to purchase an existing colony. The Scots initially approached the British about purchasing land, but they were still incredibly wary of the new Kingdom. As such, Scotland turned to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, who agreed to sell Fort Orange in the region known as Ghana to Scotland, giving them the ability to begin a settlement of Africa.

Meanwhile, Scotland did have two major factors that allowed it to grow its economy: it had large deposits of coal, and it had a fair amount of farmland. The capital of Edinburgh had a decent amount of industrial development, but the true industrial heart of Scotland was Glasgow, which also became the center of shipbuilding in Scotland for its position on the River Clyde. The combination of agricultural production and industrial growth was resulting in the rapid growth of the economy of the Lowlands.

However, the Highlands were lagging considerably. Owing to their rocky terrain and mountainous geography, the Highlands were not suitable for any considerable economic growth of the kind the Lowlands were experiencing. This economic disparity only continued to grow throughout the coming decades, and highlighted an important split in Scotland: the Highlands, which were more Gaelic in their culture than the Lowlands, often felt like they were being left behind by the Lowlands. What's more, with industry growing in the Lowlands, more people were migrating from the Highlands and cities like Inverness to cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh.

To combat this, the Scottish Parliament authorized a new "emergency series of subsidies" to grow industry in the Highlands. The subsidies were mildly successful, with Inverness growing into a new center of industry, but still one that lagged far behind Lowland cities. However, it did have one resource it could utilize greatly: wool. The economy of the Highlands was based largely in sheep herding, although mining was growing. Inverness' factories were thus inevitably textile factories that used the wool to produce cloth in great amounts, turning Inverness into a center of textile production on the British Isles.

In 1840, Queen Mary III died of a heart condition, and was succeeded by her daughter as Mary IV. At this time, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom had been reigning since 1837, and in a grand gesture of friendship attended the coronation of Mary IV, later meeting with the Scottish queen personally. Both women were quite young, with Mary IV being 23 and Victoria being 21. Both women were also constitutional monarchs, but one reigned over the largest colonial Empire in the world and the other was limited to merely a small colonial Empire that held one fort in Africa, a small collection of islands in the Caribbean, and a dominion not much larger than itself in North America.

However, in 1841, an informal series of meetings between Victoria and Mary IV soon lead to an unexpected level of cooperation between Scotland and the United Kingdom over the issue of colonization. The Douglas Accords (so named because they were created in the town of Douglas on the Isle of Man) undertook a similar purpose to what the Treaty of Tordesillas had tried to do for Portugal and Spain, delineating the areas that the United Kingdom and Scotland could colonize so as not to conflict with each other. These Accords effectively split up the whole of Africa and Asia into regions marked for either Scotland or the United Kingdom, but the most notable feature was the designation of the land along the Indus River to the northwest of English India as "Scottish India".

In 1843, a new Scottish fleet began to sail to establish more colonial outposts in order to be able to reach these new areas that had been apportioned to its nation. The first place it stopped was in Fort Orange, newly renamed Fort Thistle, to reinforce the newly Scottish fort against several native groups that had tried to raid it in the last few years. After this, it established Fort Walvis in the dry plains around Walvis Bay, before moving on to the eastern coast of Africa. There, a brief skirmish with the Omani resulted in the forced cession of Zanzibar and the port of Mogadishu. By 1844, the Scottish fleet had arrived off the Indus Delta, and a negotiating party went ashore to negotiate the establishment of a protectorate over the small sultanate of Makran and the local princely state of Sindh. Makran was more or less forced to agree, but Sindh refused the treaty, believing that a treaty with the United Kingdom would be preferable. They denied the treaty, though, while unaware that the United Kingdom had been pledged to ignoring the territory, and thus were caught off-guard when the nearby British military commander denied their request for a protectorate.

Scotland used this denial of their treaty as a pretext for war, and invaded in April 1845. The war was hideously one-sided, and Scottish troops managed to overrun the nation within three months. By July 1845, the Prince was forced to accept peace. General Michael Williams, the general who oversaw the conquest of Sindh and the overthrow of its ruling family, famously sent word of his victory to Edinburgh with two words in Scots Gaelic: Pheacaich Mi - "I have sinned." With the conquest of Sindh completed, Scotland now held control over the coastline surrounding the Indus Delta. Scotland was able to formally organize the Scottish East India Company through a Royal Charter from Mary IV. Many future historians would later mark this event as the start of the main phase of Scottish Imperialism.