The Outsiders

C.A. Asbrey

Much has been written about racism and minorities in the USA and Britain, but too often, that ignores the regional differences. In the British Isles, these studies tend to be Anglo-centric, with the experience of minorities in the other nations of the British Isles being markedly different to their counterparts in England.

It’s important to understand that Scotland was made up of various groups with different languages and approaches to identity, life, the world; and how society should look. That still resonates in the country to this day. The culture is not a monolith, but overall it tends towards the progressive. The Caledonian Antisyzygy (a term coined in 1919 in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence to describe the presence of contrasting or contradictory traits within a single Scottish person, culture, or literary work) comes into play. The contrasting push and pull between faith and culture, politics, identity and class, linguistic tensions between Scotland’s three native languages and standard English – and who choose to use them, how and when; and some people determined to use their accent versus those who actively anglicise. Then there’s the historical and ongoing tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as Scottish nationalism and British unionism, all lead to a duelling polarity in Scottish society that’s run for hundreds of years. And Scotland had a history of two types of Protestantism; one progressive and forward-looking, the other insular and resistant to change. And the areas of Scotland with deep early medieval Anglo-Saxon roots tend to be more politically and culturally conservative; and historically were more ready to align culturally with an English world view and present it to Scots as a way forward. And even all that can shift and be nuanced depending on the time and place. So bear that Caledonian Antisyzygy in mind as you read through this post.

Scotland is complicated, so the way incomers were received was too.

Scotland has a long history of international connections going back to ancient times, but many of those were invasions, and certainly not voluntary. Irish invasion myths, principally recorded in the 11th-century medieval manuscript Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions), surprisingly echoes the major prehistoric population replacements revealed by modern ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis. While medieval monks heavily layered these tales with biblical allegories and fictitious lineages, the underlying oral memory accurately preserved the sequential nature of massive, transformative migrations that shaped the Irish genome. Medieval histories describe Irish Gaels (the Scoti) crossing the narrow sea from County Antrim to Argyll around 500 AD to establish the kingdom of Dál Riata. Modern DNA studies (including research from Edinburgh University and Oxford’s People of the British Isles project) show that people from western Scotland and northern Ireland are genetically almost indistinguishable. They share the same ancient Y-DNA lineages (heavily dominated by the R1b-L21 marker). Irish mythology frames these arrivals as a sequence of distinct, wave-based martial invasions (ending with the Milesians/Gaels). In contrast, genomic science shows that the core genetic blueprint of both Ireland and western Scotland was actually established thousands of years earlier during the Bronze Age and Neolithic periods via Atlantic maritime trade networks rather than sudden military takeovers. But we know that people never stopped coming. Romans, Gaels (Scoti), Vikings, Normans, and Anglo Saxons, and latterly, the Irish and Italians, all came. It’s estimated that around sixty percent of Scots have recent Irish ancestry, especially in the west and Central Belt.

The Anglo-Saxons did not launch a single, formal invasion of Scotland. Instead, Anglo-Saxon influence and settlement in what is now Scotland happened through gradual expansion, political control, and later migration over several centuries, starting in the sixth century. William the Conqueror marched an army and fleet into southern Scotland to confront King Malcolm III (Malcolm Canmore). The campaign ended at Abernethy, where Malcolm submitted, paid homage, and agreed to expel the English pretender Edgar Ætheling, resulting in the Treaty of Abernethy (1072). Normans intermarried their way to power more in Scotland than they did in England. The Battle of Largs on October 2, 1263, is widely recognised as the last major Viking military assault and battle on the Scottish mainland.

But what about smaller groups of immigrants? In 1180, the Bishop of Glasgow forbade churchmen to “ledge their benefices for money borrowed from Jews”. This was around the time of anti-Jewish riots in England and so it is possible that Jews may have arrived in Scotland as refugees, or it may refer to Jews domiciled in England, but no direct evidence of Jews in Scotland at that time exists. Julius Conradus Otto, a Jewish scholar from Vienna who converted to Christianity, was appointed as the first Chair of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the University of Edinburgh in 1641. David Brown was recorded as the first professing Jew to settle in Scotland in 1691. Early applications for trade and residence rights in Edinburgh also date to 1691. Herman Lyon, a jeweller, built a private mausoleum on Calton Hill in Edinburgh in 1795, which serves as one of the earliest known Jewish gravesites in Scotland. During the 1700s, small numbers of Jewish students, medical graduates (such as from Marischal College, Aberdeen in 1739 and the University of Glasgow in 1787), and merchant craftsmen arrived, drawn by Scotland’s more tolerant universities and trade opportunities compared to England. The first organised Jewish community and congregation in Scotland was established in Edinburgh around 1816–1817 by about 20 families. A synagogue was opened on North Richmond Street around 1820. The first congregation in Glasgow formed around 1821 in a flat on the High Street, followed by the opening of a dedicated Jewish burial ground in the Glasgow Necropolis in 1832.

Scotland is the only European country where Jewish people never faced state-sponsored anti-Jewish laws, expulsions, or pogroms. Why? One reason is their low numbers. As far as Ireland is concerned, a small number of Jewish merchants arrived around the 11th century in Ireland they were mostly expelled or absorbed after England’s Edict of Expulsion in 1290; although that never applied to the entire island of Ireland, the law made a difference. Sizeable Jewish immigration only returned in the late 19th century with refugees fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire. Many put that down to English rule. But the real answer lies in the deep sectarian hate that still contaminates certain sections of Ireland and Scotland. Put simply, the Protestants and Catholics were so busy hating one another, they forgot to hate people who were neither. That’s not to say that there was no racism or discrimination. It’s just saying that it took a different form in Scotland, and some minorities found Scotland to be more accepting than other countries because of that. It was not unheard of for Jews to be refused housing or employment, as was the same for other ethnic minorities. Slurs were also used. It’s just that things were slightly better than England, largely due to the preoccupation with religion redirecting hate elsewhere.

Unlike English universities (such as Oxford and Cambridge), which forced students to take Christian religious oaths until 1871, Scottish universities required no such oath. This made Scotland a premier destination for Jewish medical and academic students from around the world. It is worth noting that they still individually reported being targeted by certain individuals, but it didn’t amount to anywhere near the organisation and harassment against female students. There really was a hierarchy of hate.

Ireland was still working out who it was in the early twentieth century, and some of the society flirted with fascism, not just in Limerick in 1904 where Father John Creagh, a Catholic priest, delivered fiery sermons accusing Jews of usury and killing Christian children. This incited a two-year economic boycott and social ostracisation against Limerick’s small Jewish population, forcing most Jewish families to flee the city. They also largely denied entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany due to institutional anxieties over cultural assimilation. And don’t get me started on the intersection of Nazi Germany and Irish archaeology during the 1930s and World War II where key figures like Adolf Mahr and Dr. Ludwig Mühlhausen used academic, linguistic, and cultural research to advance Nazi ideological goals. Adolf Mahr was actually the Director of the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin while secretly leading the local Nazi Party organisation (Auslandsorganisation).
Mühlhausenwas a Celtic scholar who used his field studies of the Gaelic language to map the Irish coast for potential German invasion plans (Operation Green). That said, a huge amount of Irish joined the British army in WW2 and faced hardship and ostracisation on their return. And allied pilots who crashed in Ireland were often covertly released or returned to Northern Ireland, whereas downed German pilots were interned for the duration of the war. The hurt of British rule was still too recent for alliance to sit comfortably, but many felt a slant towards the allies’ ideology overall. Ireland wasn’t only so new that it was working out who her allies actually were, but there was also De-Anglicization and Cultural Ethno-Nationalism that imposed theological pillars to establish a big difference between the new state and Britain. Where there had been a rich history of black people in 18th- and 19th-century Ireland—including high-profile anti-slavery tours by Frederick Douglass, the population dwindled significantly by the time of independence. In the 1920s and 1930s, the number of Black individuals living in Ireland was exceptionally low. Those who were present were usually students at institutions like Trinity College Dublin, transient sailors, or individuals isolated in small towns. Because the state was completely focused on the internal binaries of Irish vs. British and Catholic vs. Protestant, Black people were largely absent from the political consciousness. Paradoxically, the irony of Ireland’s identity struggle was that while the state was shutting out minorities domestically, its anti-colonial revolution was actively inspiring Black nationalist movements globally. Prominent Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey was deeply fascinated by Irish nationalism. He modelled his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) headquarters in Harlem (“Liberty Hall”) after the famous Dublin headquarters of the Irish citizen army. Furthermore, when Garvey designed the red, black, and green Pan-African flag, he explicitly noted that the green was a tribute to the Irish republican struggle against British imperialism.

There’s a lot of misinformation around the term “Black Irish”, especially on social media. In the USA it became a way to mark out the poor arriving to seek refuge in their thousands from famine and was a social slur. Dark hair and brown eyes in Ireland actually stem from ancient human migration patterns, dating back to early Stone Age hunter-gatherers, and the dark colouring and olive skin (also common in parts of Cornwall, Scotland, and Wales) was unsettling for an American society obsessed with race; and in particular with any mixed race person trying to pass as white. Irish of both pale and olive complexions were unwelcome to a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority. And even more so when Catholic Germans and Italians also migrated en masse and shifted the balance of religion in society. The Know-Nothings, a precursor to the KKK, were particularly active in making life hard for them. It’s also why the term Scots-Irish was coined. That’s also specifically American. In Britain and Ireland, these people were just Irish, but Protestants. In America, it was a matter of survival to distinguish yourself from the Catholic group that was actively discriminated against.

Scotland was an outlier in that The famous Treaty of Abroath (1320) specifically states that Jews should be treated as equal. It was an early contract between a ruler and the people, establishing that a king’s power is conditional and depends on the consent of his subjects. You may have not have noticed that an English king is king of the country. A Scottish monarch is king or queen of Scots – the people, not the country. An important distinction. Their titles are tied to their subjects, not the territory, and Scottish political culture historically had a less absolute view of the monarchy than England, viewing the sovereign as head of the community of citizens rather than an owner of the territory.

And that mattered in the rights of newcomers to the land. Scots law has a long history of integrating or protecting cultural linguistic minorities, such as preserving Udal law for the Norse populations in Orkney and Shetland, but the lean towards common law as opposed to statute law meant that anyone Scotland had a protection in law due to higher levels of corroboration and the highest protection against self incrimination in the world. That meant it was harder to railroad a minority figure into a conviction; note that I said harder, not impossible as the infamous Slater case proved. I’ll deal with that in another post.

African people have been in the British Isles since Roman times, and that means they also settled in the south of Scotland as soldiers, merchants, slaves, and auxiliary workers. Rome recruited right across its empire, and there’s evidence of people from North Africa along frontiers like Hadrian’s Wall and Antonine’s Wall. Roman-period items associated with African figures or imagery, including luxury items and small bronze or lead artefacts, have been documented in regions spanning down into Strathclyde and northern England, reflecting the reach of the diverse imperial network. We have to go later to see Sub-Saharan Africans arriving in any number. James IV (1473–1513), had an African at court, ‘Petir the Moryen’ (Peter the ‘Moor’). There’s no indication that he was anything other than a high status servant as he was free to travel and was given five French crowns at the king’s request for a journey to France. An unnamed African drummer also travelled with the king in the early 1500s to provide entertainment at visits to Peblis (Peebles), Dumfreis (Dumfries), Brechin and Faulklands (Falkland). That drummer had a family and court records show a payment to the ‘More taubronaris wif and his barne’ (the African drummer’s wife and child).

Two African girls were taken from a Portuguese ship in 1506 by Scottish privateers Andrew and Robert Barton, and they were presented to James IV as gifts aged around ten. Their country of origin isn’t known, nor are their real names. They were given the names Ellen (sometimes recorded as Helen) and Margaret, and placed in Queens Margaret’s household. As Scottish law at that time did not recognise slavery, they lived as free members of the court, receiving wages, fine clothing (such as russet gowns and red petticoats), horse-riding lessons, and lavish household provisions. Ellen More played a central, famous role in King James IV’s chivalric pageants (“The Justing of the Wild Knight for the Black Lady”) held in 1507 and 1508, where she was featured as the “Black Lady” or “Black Queen of Beauty” while the king jousted to win her honour. Margaret More may have married a Scotsman named Prestoun around 1513, while Ellen More remained in royal service and is recorded in court accounts as late as July 1527. The slights they had to navigate despite their life of luxury is underscored by a comic poem by William Dunbar. Although written in the Scottish tradition of ‘flyting’, and early kind of roast, he likens her facial features to ape, toad, and cat, displaying an attitude that ‘anticipates the racism of subsequent discourse of empire’.

The Cartwright case of 1569, heard in the Star Chamber, ruled on a slave from Russia. The court ruled English law could not recognise slavery, as it was never established officially. This case influenced many later cases in both England and Scotland.

In the 1720s, it was considered the height of fashion to have a black boy in full uniform serving in a home of the Scottish upper class. Many prominent Scots were known to have had black servants, who at some time in their lives had been slaves. Most were brought to Scotland when Scottish plantation owners retired back home from the Caribbean. Some plantation owners also sent back slaves as gifts to patrons or at the request of friends. However, traditional Scots law did not have a category for chattel slavery, though some masters attempted to treat enslaved people as “perpetual servants”. There was a legal void because nobody had properly tested the concept. Some of the first freedom suits, court cases in the British Isles to challenge the legality of slavery, took place in Scotland in 1755 and 1769. The cases were Montgomery v. Sheddan (1755) and Spens v. Dalrymple (1769). Each of the slaves had been baptised in Scotland and challenged the legality of slavery. They set the precedent of legal procedure in British courts that would later lead to successful outcomes for the plaintiffs. In these cases, deaths of the plaintiff and defendant, respectively, brought an end before court decisions could reach a final conclusion.

The cases of Somerset v Stewart (1772) in England ruled that a master could not compel an enslaved person out of the country. In Scotland, Knight v. Wedderburn (1778), Wedderburn argued that Knight owed him “perpetual servitude”. The Court of Session of Scotland ruled against him, saying that chattel slavery was not recognised under the law of Scotland, and slaves could seek court protection to leave a master or avoid being forcibly removed from Scotland to be returned to slavery in the colonies.

These cases effectively ended any pretence that chattel slavery existed in England or Scotland, although Scotland did have a form of domestic unfree labor in coal mining and salt panning, where workers were legally bound to the land and sold with the pit. This historic form of serfdom was formally ended by the Colliers (Scotland) Act 1799. The Slave Trade Act 1807 banned the slave trade across the British Empire, and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished slavery completely.

However, before these cases, there were cases of enslaved people brought into the UK fleeing their masters, especially where they suspected that they were going to be returned back to the colonies. The Glasgow University database of runaway slaves in Britain acknowledges that their searchable collection of over 831 adverts of ‘owners’ seeking runaways between 1700 and 1780 in England and Scotland is by no means definitive. 764 were published in England and 67 in Scotland. There were 771 men and 60 women, the vast majority of African descent alongside small numbers of individuals from the Indian subcontinent and Indigenous Americans. There are no records as to how many were returned. The fact that they appeared in the same section as the livestock advertisements is telling. https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/

By the eighteenth century there were many thousands of people of colour in the UK; some were children of those who had worked and lived all over the empire, others were sailors, workers who had come for a new start, or who had followed employers simply to continue employment, or indentured servants. And some were most definitely slaves. There was a marked difference between the human rights of an indentured or bound servant and a slave, despite some attempts by certain politically motivated groups to conflate the two conditions, especially with Irish history, in an attempt to downplay the American slave trade. In the colonies, servants had rights against extreme cruelty, and it was murder to kill them. Slaves had no such rights. They were chattel like cattle. Running away from indentured servitude was breach of contract, and courts routinely extended the period of servitude as a punishment, as well as whipping, branding, imprisonment, or hard labor, depending on the colony and era. Once their period was over, an indentured servant was fully free with full rights. A slave absconding was loss of property and they had no rights in perpetuity. Nor did their children.

These adverts are often the only records we have of these people’s lives. They primarily fled into port areas, working-class neighbourhoods, and sympathetic local communities where they could blend in, find shelter, or escape on ship. Port areas where there were black communities made it easier to blend in and hide. There were sympathetic groups of people all over the British Isles who ran an underground railroad to help absconders escape such as the Sons of Africa in London in the late 1700s by prominent educated freed slaves and abolitionists, including Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. They collaborated directly with British abolitionists like Granville Sharp, writing to newspapers, publishing memoirs, petitioning Parliament, and actively intervening to rescue individuals from forced re-enslavement. Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787 by figures like Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce focused primarily on legislative and moral campaigns against the trade and institution of slavery, individual members like Sharp directly rescued and provided legal defense for escaped enslaved people in British courts (such as Jonathan Strong). Local Quaker Networks and Regional Societies were active all over the country.

In Scotland the Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society, led by figures like Eliza Wigham and Jane Smeal, this all-female group was one of the most radical and long-lasting abolitionist societies in Britain. They explicitly broke away from mainstream, moderate groups to demand immediate emancipation and directly funded the travel, housing, and legal escape of famous runaway slaves like Frederick Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, and William Wells Brown. The Glasgow Emancipation Society, formed in 1822 by William Smeal, this group turned Glasgow into one of the most vehement anti-slavery strongholds in the UK. They specialised in hosting fugitives on lecture tours to raise awareness, organising massive boycott campaigns against slave-grown cotton, and funding the purchase of escapees’ legal freedom. The Glasgow Ladies’ Emancipation Society worked alongside the Edinburgh branch, this group mobilised the working and middling classes of western Scotland, raising extensive financial aid to help freedmen and runaway slaves adjust to life after escaping. The “Send Back the Money” Campaign Groups, in 1846, local Scottish secular and religious networks united with Frederick Douglass to protest the newly formed Free Church of Scotland, which had accepted £3,000 in donations from slaveholders in the American South. Activists across towns like Hawick, Fenwick, and Dumbarton packed out chapels and streets, forcing immense social pressure onto church leadership. And beyond formal societies, individual ministers within the Church of Scotland and secession churches frequently baptised enslaved individuals to give them legal standing and help them resist recapture. Even working-class textile workers in areas like the Vale of Leven formed committees to protest global slavery and support fugitives, despite their own industries relying on imported cotton.

Simon Newman and Nelson Mundell of Glasgow University in their Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth Century Britain project found that some must have successfully escaped, living quietly in towns and ports amongst people happy to shelter them, although rewards made it very tempting to turn someone in. The longer they stayed undetected, the better their chances of staying free and building a new life. Some farmers were happy to find cheap and obliging labour but they were safer where they didn’t stand out from the crowd. Newman and Mundell observed through their findings that no escaped slaves made any attempt to return to the colonies from which they had been brought to Scotland, saying, “Many sought to make lives for themselves here, joining churches, marrying etc., within white Scottish and British society.”

Once the threat of slavery was removed, black people did not automatically live more prosperous or easy lives. Some like George Africanus and Cesar Picton became entrepreneurs. Mary Seacole, who is covered in another page, became celebrities. It’s worth noting that Mary had a far better survival rate in her hospital than Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, but it’s Florence who became synonymous with nursing. John Edmonston was a freed enslaved man from British Guiana who lived in Edinburgh and found employment teaching taxidermy to University of Edinburgh students, famously including a young Charles Darwin.

Mostly, black people did the same as white people with little or no social advantage; labouring, housework, factories, and joining the military. In Scotland, there was no great threat to the white workforce as the numbers were small, and remember that Scots were focused on the religious divide, so many black people reported being treated better than in England or America, but that did not mean that they faced no disadvantages at all. With 19th-century Scottish universities and Enlightenment figures such as David Hume pioneering influential theories of racial hierarchy and “scientific” racism that argued for the natural inferiority of non-white people, there was an intellectual top-down tendency for racism to now be dressed up as a pseudo-scientific case built on reason. However, being Scotland, things were never quite that simple. intellectual counter to philosophical and scientific racism was the Common Sense Philosophy tradition (or Scottish Realism), paired with evangelical theological egalitarianism and monogenist moral philosophy.

Scottish realism is Scottish Common Sense Realism is an 18th-century philosophical movement that argues human beings possess innate, self-evident principles and a direct awareness of an independent material world. James Beattie’s Essay on Truth fiercely rebuked Hume’s claims of natural Black inferiority, accusing Eurocentric intellectuals of arrogance and ignorance while highlighting highly educated non-European scholars as proof of equal human capability. And Scottish presbyterians embraced Evangelical theological egalitarianism, a vibrant yet distinct current within the nation’s broader religious landscape, characterised by a commitment to the authority of Scripture with the belief that gender does not restrict a Christian’s role in the church, home, or society. Unlike the Free Church of Scotland, The Church of Scotland has always embraced a broad theological spectrum. Its evangelical wing contains a large number of practicing egalitarians who serve comfortably alongside more liberal or traditional colleagues. The Church of Scotland voted to allow the ordination of women almost three decades before the Church of England. and decades before many other national churches. In the 19th century that meant that the church promoted a belief that economic laws, prudence, and moral principles were part of a providential design meant to promote human welfare and spiritual regeneration. They were also active in protecting the labouring classes from the erosive effects of unchecked industrialisation and capitalism, as well as creating charities that brought black people refused access to an education in America over to be educated in Scottish universities. As always, Scotland was a dichotomy with intellectuals on both sides taking opposing stances. The pro-racist side was more aligned with mainstream English and colonial views.

In my opinion many of the stereotypes of Scotland as a country without prejudice comes from a direct comparison with the USA. Frederick Douglass lived in Edinburgh and famously wanted to stay saying that he deeply admired Scotland’s social climate, writing that he was treated “not as a colour, but as a man” and experienced no racial scorn based on his complexion.”

Eugene Bullard – America’s first black combat pilot – must rate among one of the most unusual characters from Scotland’s black history. His father spoke French and instilled in Bullard a belief that it was the true land of opportunity, free of prejudice. In fact, it was much better than America, but ranked worse than Scotland by some.

Both countries faced a legacy of colonial racism, but Scotland had a lot of ordinary people who were deemed inferior to the Anglo-Saxons who placed themselves at the top of the pyramid. France didn’t, so poorer people in Scotland had a societal banding together against those who looked down on them that made it slightly different to England or much of Northern Europe. It also explains the difference in racism throughout the classes. The more anglicised Scots were, the more likely they were to be middle or upper class. And the more anglicised, the more they absorbed the idea of innate superiority over Celts and Catholics. Conversely, those feeling disadvantaged are more likely to show solidarity and support to others similarly afflicted as long as they don’t threaten their livelihoods. And minorities didn’t at that time.

Spurred by an attempt to lynch his father and his own brushes with racial hatred, Bullard stowed away on a ship and landed in Aberdeen. He was relieved to find that his biggest problem was understanding the locals saying, “the language the natives spoke was sort of like English’.” He enjoyed Scotland and found people friendly, so stayed for five months before heading for France where he joined the Foreign Legion. He was wounded at Verdun in WW1 and that stopped him from returning to the front line as a soldier, but he was offered a chance to become a pilot with the French Flying Corps and qualified as a flyer in 1917. When the US entered the war, Bullard sought a transfer to its air force. His request was ignored. He stayed in Paris after the war where he married and had three children. He was smuggled out to Spain after being badly wounded as part of the resistance in WW2. He died in 1961, a brave man and a loss to the USA.

And black people were not the only people who found that ordinary Scots welcomed them in a way that they found surprising. Susette La Fesche Tibbles (1854-1903), also called Bright Eyes, commented on being treated like a “refined, educated peer” or “sister or daughter” rather than a curiosity or a ward of the state.

Indian and East Asian people have been in Scotland since at least the eighteenth century, coming as traders, servants, and families of men returning from posts with the East India Company and later, the empire. In 1707 there are records of an Indian elephant being housed in the upstairs room of a tenement in Fishmarket close by a Dutchman Abraham Sever. The complaints of a local baker about the dung affecting his products; so it wasn’t just people making the journey. There were eighteenth-century reports of runaway servants; indentured servitude being a systematic in India under British rule. The Indian indenture system was a system of contracted labor under the British Empire that transported over 1.6 to 2 million South Asian workers to overseas colonies between 1834 and 1917. Severe economic distress, high land taxes, and recurrent famines in British-controlled India forced millions of rural workers to look for survival option, but the recruitment process was corrupt and deceptive and people found themselves trapped in a life of hardship and penury. No wonder some ran away. Historians like Hugh Tinker and organisations like the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society highlighted how planters used coercive methods reminiscent of the chattel slavery era. It’s important to understand that Indentureship not only preceded, co-existed with, and survived slavery. The practice of bonded labour was officially abolished by law in India in 1976. However, illegal forms of debt bondage and modern forced labor still persist in parts of the Asian Sub-Continent as a toxic legacy.

The workers who came to Britain were mostly sailors (Lascars) or domestic nannies (Ayahs). These ayahs were indispensable for cheap childcare on the long journey back to the UK. Before the Suez Canal was built, the trip could take up to six months, but she would have had the cheapest bunk on the ship, and certainly didn’t travel with the family in first class. On manifests they were not even recorded by name; just as the family’s name and job title (ayah). Once in Britain, she was alone and vulnerable, and often discarded once the children grew up or went off to boarding school. Many ended up homeless and destitute in a foreign country, with charities in London alone recording that in the 1850s, an estimated 100-140 travelling ayahs visited Britain each year. By 1921, the Ayahs Home was recording up to 223 women per year, signifying the incidence of abandoned ayahs. Shasta Ali has found an Ayah in Edinburgh in 1802, and further adverts in Glasgow, Aberdeenshire, Dumfries and surprisingly, even the Isle of Skye. People were either looking for an ayah or recommending their ayah’s services for passage back to India. https://scottishbpocwritersnetwork.org/lost-in-the-archives-ayahs-in-scotland/

Scotland’s universities also attracted Indians to study. The first Muslim medical students arrived at the University of Edinburgh in 1854, and in 1890: Dr Annie Wardlaw Jagannadham became the first Indian woman to qualify in medicine in Britain, graduating from Edinburgh. Fanindranath Bose (1888–1926) was an Indian sculptor who studied at the Board of Manufacturers School in Edinburgh, married a Scottish woman named Molly Ferguson, and worked extensively around the city. The Edinburgh Indian Association was founded 1883 as one of the earliest associations representing Indian students and residents in Britain. By 1931 the Indian Census recorded around 2,000 South Asian students and residents living across Scottish universities and cities.

The Chinese version of an ayah was an amah, and they had exactly the same problem as their Indian counterparts once they arrived in Britain. Sailors are also an obvious route to the UK, with many settling around the ports and large cities where they could find work. The first known Chinese person to live in Scotland is thought to be William Macao who lived in Edinburgh from 1779. He married a British woman and had children. He worked for The Board of Excise in Scotland for over 40 years as an accountant, and was also a church elder. His wife died in 1802, leaving him with three children under six. He never remarried. And he had had the distinction of being the only person to be legally deemed to be a Scotsman since the 1707 Act of Union before it was overturned. Scotland and England became one country in 1707, but part of the deal was that Scotland could keep its unique legal system, have its own jurisdiction, and laws. In 1818 an “ingenious person”, discovered a clause in the Scottish Parliament Act of 1695 that established the Bank of Scotland which stated that all foreigners (aliens) who became partners in the bank by purchasing shares would, ‘thereby become a naturalised Scotsman.’ Mr Macao then purchased stock, and to all intents and purposes, Scottish nationality, along with around 120 other people. The government in London was outraged and it was decided that Edinburgh’s court of session should decide. Mr Macao’s case was chosen as a test case to see if he really was Scottish. The Alien act of 1793 in England was designed to stop a large influx of foreigners becoming naturalised citizens. Primarily aimed at French people fleeing the revolution, amid concerns about Jacobins, agitators and spies. Lord Alloway decided on 2 January 1819 that Mr Macao was, and he was the last man legally deemed to be a Scotsman. But was he British? The British government appealed, and the verdict was overturned. Mr Macao has the unique status of being the only individual since the Act of Union to have been legally decreed a Scottish citizen as since 1707 all other citizens of Scotland have been legally designated British. He was buried in St Cuthbert’s Graveyard, Edinburgh beside his wife and their stillborn son. There’s no question that Scottish society accepted him as anything other that one of their own.

Huang Kuan (Dr. Wong Fun) (1829–1878) graduated from Edinburgh University in 1855 with an MD. Sir Boshan Wei Yuk (1849–1921) was a Hong Kong businessman, compradore, and politician. He studied at Dollar Academy in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, starting in 1869 and became a prominent member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and a key figure in regional trade and diplomacy. Chinese people came to the UK in greater numbers post WW2, but there’s an important clue as to their acceptance. There are Chinatowns all over Europe, England, USA and even Ireland has a designated area seen as an informal cultural area in Parnell Street. But there are none in Scotland despite a large community making Scotland their home (not counting a warehouse purchased in 1992 to try to emulate one artificially, and is more of a modern shopping complex and not a residential area). That’s because people felt comfortable enough to to settle and integrate without forming ghettos. Again, that does not mean they never encountered racism. It means they felt less threatened than they did in other places.

Other minorities may not have felt the need to form ghettos to feel accepted or protected, but the Irish Catholics most certainly did; and for very good reason. They were openly discriminated against in housing, employment and education. Orange marches took place down their streets until shockingly recently, in which Protestants celebrated a 17th century Catholic defeat. That in itself may sound like something easy to ignore, but the marches came with violence, rioting, wanton destruction, and abuse. Policing was not often even or fair, and if Catholics got employed by them at all they faced what was called “the stained glass ceiling” that prevented career advancement.

The infamous Glasgow Gangs of the early twentieth century grew out of the youths on both sides who banded together on both sides of the sectarian divide to protect their neighbourhoods, but all that did was the perpetuate cycle of tit-for-tat violence between the factions that still causes problems to this day. It’s a toxic cultural hangover that modern Scotland is still actively working to dismantle.

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As I keep saying, the picture is muddled and complex in Scotland. The Free Kirk, a traditional and conservative presbyterian school of thought tended to be more Highland and Islands, but they are also more Gaelic and Celtic, so were scorned as ‘erse’ by the anglicised middle classes of the Lowlands. To show you how conservative, some still view Christmas and other religious holidays as rooted in paganism, superstition, and violations of the second commandment against images. You will not find a Christmas tree in their homes or schools. The Free Kirk were supporters of slavery, accepted funding from pro-slavery movements, and clashed with other Scots protesting slavery, for instance at Frederick Douglass’ anti-slavery meetings. Some campaigned and supported the south in the American Civil War. To this day it is a matter many Scots feel they have never resolved this matter or apologised for. Scots were heavily involved in the slave trade, and in profiting from it; others were nakedly exploited and felt solidarity with them.

So it’s not as simple as Gaels feeling discriminated against (although they were), Catholics vs Protestants, upper-class vs lower-class, intellectuals vs ordinary people thing. It’s a complex mosaic of all that, and that meant that people just responded differently to outsiders than people in other countries, and that shifted like the glass in a kaleidoscope. for every individual. But it seems that response in the country of Scotland was often just a little bit more humane than outsiders found in other places, as long as you found the right place.

At least I hope so. And I hope that continues; because I am Scottish, and parts of my family were once outsiders. I will always be proud of the way they quickly became Scottish too. They stayed for a reason.

I’ve covered Scotland and Ireland a lot on this post, but what about Wales? The earliest recorded Black presence in Wales dates to the Roman period, including a 3rd-century inscription in Caerleon noting Titus Flavius Postumius Varus, an African who settled in Italy before serving in Wales. Multiple historical records document Black individuals living freely across Welsh towns and cities, such as John Ystumllyn, an 18th-century gardener kidnapped from Africa who worked on the Ystumllyn estate from 1742 to 1786, but it was the nineteenth century that saw immigrants to Wales in any significant numbers. The Irish potato famine saw people taking refuge in Wales, but at a lower rate than England and Scotland. By the 1851 census only about 1.7% to 2.5% of the population of Wales came from Ireland as opposed to Scotland at 4.8% (peaking at 6.2% in 1871) and England at 2.9%. The reason for that was simple. People went where the work was and Scotland was a manufacturing powerhouse at that point, as was England. Wales’ economy was built on mining, metal smelting, and agriculture, but the opportunities were few and the Irish also faced rampant discrimination there too. In accepting lower wages than the local Protestant and NonConformist population, and competing for scarce jobs, the scene was set for unrest such as the violent backlash in events such as the 1848 Cardiff race riot, where local mobs targeted Irish properties and residents following social tensions and the fatal stabbing of a local man, Thomas Lewis, by an Irish individual.

But Wales is marked out by the Somali population who were recruited by the British merchant fleet in the1860s, and settled in Cardiff and Newport. They worked as merchant seamen and sailors on British steamships, drawn to the thriving coal and shipping docks of South Wales, particularly Butetown (Tiger Bay) in Cardiff. By 1890 the first Somali-settled community took root in that area. Many of these men settled down with local women or traveled back and forth to visit family, and their mark is still visible in the area today. Additional Somali and Yemeni sailors arrived and remained in the UK during and after WW2, further establishing the local community and helping build institutions like the Masjid Noor El-Islam in 1947. Generations later there are around 7,000 people of Somali descent in the country, with 5,000 in Cardiff. That’s a percentage of around 1.3% of the city.

Now a settled community the original settlers faced rampant discrimination. White employers predominantly restricted Somali and other black mariners to the most hazardous, gruelling, and unpopular jobs on steamships, such as working as “stokers” or “firemen” in the suffocating heat of ship boiler rooms. They were systematically excluded from higher-paying, skilled dockside roles and officers’ positions. They were more likely to be employed on a casual basis, filling in gaps in the workforce when needed, but the first to face mass unemployment and starvation during economic downturns.

Racism from local landlords prevented Somali seamen from renting housing outside of these designated dockland areas. To cope, the community relied on self-run Somali boarding houses to secure safe accommodation onshore. Somalis and other non-white residents were heavily segregated into a square-mile coastal district of Cardiff known as Tiger Bay or Butetown. Physical infrastructure, such as a prominent railway line, served as a strict dividing line separating minority groups from the rest of the city. Demonised in the press, the growing multi-ethnic hubs, framing the influx of “native races” as a threat to Welsh society inflamed tensions and intermarriage made things worse.

By the 1870s, the massive boom in South Wales coal mining and heavy iron industries drew huge numbers of young, single male labourers to those areas, meaning that men significantly outnumbered women. in those towns. Sociologists will tell you that numerous studies show that certain problems arise when men outnumber women in society. The most obvious one is sexual violence, but male-on-male violence climbs as men compete over scarce resources. increased crime rates, risky behaviours, and interpersonal conflict all rise, and hate from the press doesn’t help matters at all. Racial tensions flared alongside economic desperation, resulting in outbreaks of violence near the docklands in 1911 and 1919. Things began to turn in the 1930s when Black dockworkers strike alongside Welsh miners, demanding safety and fair pay. There were Chinese seamen in Wales too, most arriving around 1900, and their homes and businesses were also targeted in the riots. Post WW2 they worked gruelling hours in hand-ironing laundries or opened the first wave of Chinese restaurants and takeaway shops in the country.

Due to English rule from from between 1277 and 1283 and full formal annexation Formal between 1536–1542, much of the experience of minorities echoed that of England. That’s especially true of the Jewish experience. The earliest Jewish presence in Wales came with the Romans, evidenced by a Graeco-Hebrew amulet at the in Caernarfon Segontium Roman camp, unearthed in 1821. By By the medieval era, Jews were already woven into Welsh political, economic and religious life and financial records where figures like Aaron of Lincoln lent money to Welsh bishops in the 1190s to build Bangor Cathedral. During his conquest of Wales in the 13th century, Edward I imposed heavy taxes on England’s Jewish population to help fund his military campaigns and the construction of the “iron ring” of castles that secured his rule. After defeating Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native prince of Wales, Edward expelled the Jews from his kingdom in 1290, allowing the crown to seize debts owed to Jewish lenders. Like much of the historic crimes about the Jews they were predicated on seizing their wealth, or cancelling out debts. It helps if you understand that usuary laws based on biblical law prevented Christians from charging interest, but Deuteronomy 23:20 allowed charging interest to foreigners (nokri). That meant that making Jews the moneylenders kept Christian souls clean. It also meant that chasing them out when the king owed them several billion pounds in today’s value, so he wiped out a huge debt. On top of that, Edward’s subjects secured £116,346 to pay for the expulsion; worth 46.5 Billion in GDP today, so the expulsion of the Jews netted the king more than £52bn. And kings echoed that action all over Europe for the same reason; profit. However, where these kings thought they were being clever, they exchanged short-term profit for long-term pain. In Spain, expulsion wiped out Spain’s educated commercial, medical, and administrative middle class. To fund its empire, Spain immediately had to rely on high-interest loans from foreign financiers in Genoa and Germany. Coupled with the influx of silver from the New World, the destruction of Spain’s domestic business sector triggered massive inflation and regular royal bankruptcies throughout the 16th century. In England, Italian merchant bankers such as those from Lombardy, and this area became the heart of England’s financial ecosystem, known to this day as Lombard Street. Lombard bankers were generally wealthier, operated on a larger international scale, and charged or extracted massive sums, often making them more financially powerful and costly to royal debtors than Jewish moneylenders; and as a pan-European operation with connections to the Pope, what happened to the Jews could not happen to them. Lombard houses (like the Bardi or Peruzzi later on) accumulated vast liquid riches and exported profits back to Italy.

Jewish life returned in the 18th century when David Michael, a Prussian silversmith, settled in Swansea (Abertawe) in the 1740s, establishing a home prayer space on Wind Street and a community cemetery on Town Hill by the 1770s. Jews fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe fleeing poverty and pogroms arrived between 1880 and 1914. Thriving Jewish communities formed across the South Wales coal and steel belt in towns like Merthyr Tydfil, Cardiff, Brynmawr, Pontypridd, and Aberdare, as well as northern hubs like Llandudno and Bangor. The writer and comedian David Baddiel’s great-grandfather, Barnett Baddiel was the first in the family to arrive in Wales. The family state that staying there was a mistake. He thought he’d arrived in America, and stayed in Wales. To this day David embraces his Welsh heritage.

Once more, Jews were caught up in the riots of 1911. It seems like anyone with an identifiably foreign ancestry was, which is sad. This was before the Great Depression, but long before the rich felt the bite, poor people lived with hardship and penury, and the press made it easy to blame even poorer foreigners over wealthy people squirrelling away wealth.

There were too many impressive people to mention them all, and this was a long post. My apologies if I’ve missed your amazing ancestor or hero. Rest assured that I’ll be happy to consider a post on them if you contact me

But as a Scot, I’ll end on Scotland.

I think BBC ALBA (the Scottish Gaelic channel) captured it beautifully when they interviewed Italian immigrants. One man said, “They were so proud of who they were, we felt we had to be prouder of ourselves. In becoming more Scottish we became better Italians. Scots loved us being both and we loved them back for that.”