Plantation Colonisation

Use of the derogatory noun plantation – meaning ‘a settlement in a new country or region’, that gets derided in discussions about Scotland’s political predicament, crops up from time to time usually without any specific knowledge of how it affects Scotland. Invariably used in relation to Ulster, but born out of the slave trade sugar plantations in the Caribbean colonies, it warrants intelligent explanation.

What does it means to social change, and how does it alter entire populations radically leaving them bereft of indigenous rights and equality for people in their own land?

In post-colonial terms it is population management, a device to lessen, water down, weaken an ethnic majority’s influence at the ballot box.

In the context of Scotland it refers to incomers and settlers. Unionist opponents of a free Scotland deride the word on sight, throwing back the slogan meant to instill shame in anybody speaking of plantation Scotland. They respond with the pseudo Nazi phrase ‘blood and soil nationalists’, as if no Scot ever tilled the land, lived off it in stone, stream, fruit tree, medicinal plant, bird, peat, grass land, or river. Reach for what some think is a suitable insult to shut fown discussion with a slogan that is double-edged, is a shabby attempt to control thinking. It denies Scots were driven off the land by powerful, rich London orientated landlords.

The fear of a plantation Scotland arises out of irrefutable demographics; in the past decade there has been a huge influx of settlers, in the first instance, English-born looking for cheaper houses, free education, free health services and relatively safe jobs in Scotland’s central belt. And then there are the new Romantics, searching for the ‘good life’ in remote areas, usually settling on islands and deconstructing existing communities while boasting they augment and give life to a withering community.

We are here to invigerate the area is the old colonial line about ‘saving’ the poor uneducated native who cannot fix things by their own ingenuity. Large influxes of incomers has a deleterious affect on a nation hoping to reinstate its rights. With the increase of non-Indigenous families, we Scots lose our native language, culture, traditions and a material loss of jobs and places to live.

A good example on which to base an informed discussion on plantation rights is America’s fiftieth state, Hawaii, incorporated into the USA’s constitution in 1959.

A cultural take-over

How does Hawaii fit into this scheme of a cultural take-over? Hawaii was the first U.S. possession to become a major destination for immigrants from Japan, and it was profoundly transformed by the Japanese presence. How did this happen?

In the 1880s, Hawaii was still decades away from becoming a state, and would not officially become a U.S. territory until 1900. However, much of its economy and the daily life of its residents were controlled by powerful U.S.-based businesses, many of them large fruit and sugar plantations.

Just as in Scotland since the end of the Second World War recruits non-Scots, in Hawaii business owners actively recruited Japanese immigrants, often sending agents to Japan to sign long-term contracts with young men who’d never before laid eyes on a stalk of sugar cane.

In Scotland we did similar, mostly via London, searching for people used to supervising staff, and where we regularly advertised for key institutional bosses, directors and CEOs, in unionist newspapers, such as the liberal with a small ‘l’ Guardian, the Colonial Times, and the not really Independent.

In Hawaii, the influx of Japanese workers, along with the Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and African American labourers that the plantation owners recruited, in accumulation, changed the face of Hawaii permanently. In Scotland, the influx of economic immigrants stands close to thirty thousand annually, and barring a cataclysmic weather disaster, and Act of God such as a volcanic eruption, or earthquake physically ripping Scotland asunder from England and putting off more newcomers, the demographic number into Scotland is expected to outnumber Indigenous Scots by 2050 or earlier.

Even contemplation of a fully welcomed plebiscite to reinstate autonomy, the British State’s plans to neutralise Scotland’s ability to reinstate its civil and constitutional rights will be rendered impossible to recover well before than date, and without Westminster or the hapless Gordon Brown with his DUP pals raising a bill banning referenda and dislocation from British colonial rule in perpetuity.

Hawaii’s influx was slow at first, accelerating by 1900, again, rather like Scotland’s settler inundation before 1930. In 1853, indigenous Hawaiians made up almost all of the islands’ population, bar about three percent. Thus, it’s fair to compare Hawaii’s loss of culture from 1900. By 1923, the number of Indigenous Hawaiians had dwindled to near extinction, a mere sixteen percent. Unsurpringly, the largest percentage of Hawaii’s population was Japanese. The garland of flowers draped around VIPs and visitor’s shoulders visiting the Hawaiian islands is largely the last remnants of an ancient ceremony.

Just as Orkney and parts of Edinburgh and the Borders is fast becoming Little England, populated with people who are not here to protect Scotland’s civil and constitutional rights, North England by the middle of the century, Hawaii is nowadays a mixture of Hawaiians and Japanese, and white Americans.

Wiping out Indigenous People

However, it is interesting to scrutinise Scotland’s future by looking closer at Hawaii’s experience. It helps predict what will happen to Scotland if it does not regain nationhood within this decade.

Plantation-era Hawaii was a society unlike any that could be found in the United States. The Japanese immigrant experience there was unique. The islands were governed as an oligarchy, not a democracy, and the Hawiian people and Japanese immigrants struggled to make lives for themselves in a land controlled almost exclusively by large commercial interests.

In Scotland, it is unusual to find a Scot in charge of a large institution, corporation or a big company, especially if it has branches in England or abroad, and accountable to an England-based headquarters. For example, our universities and governed by principals employed from other countries and taught by incomer lecturers. Scottish art colleges suffer the same cultural rot. How one teaches Scottish art if never having lived in Scotland able to study the topography, village societies, local history and unique quality of light on the west coast, is a mystery. Art experts often boast that they can tell a Scottish painting from and English one in an instant. That idenification is lost when outsiders do the tutoring.

Scots are usually workers, staff, or middle managers. The days of Scots, for example, running our own banks, national galleries, whisky companies and supermarkets and owning swathes of land is almost unknown. The exception is automobile franchise salesrooms, but as their title suggests, they are wholly dependent on cars made by foreign manufacturers.

The Japanese-Hawiian experience

Most Japanese immigrants to Hawaii were put to work chopping and weeding sugar cane on vast plantations, many of which were far larger than any single village in Japan. By all accounts, the workday was long, the labor exhausting, and, both on the job and off, the workers’ lives were strictly controlled by the plantation owners. There is comparison with the Scots bondagers of old, the women put to hardwork in the fields. In Hawaii, each planter had a private army of European American overseers to enforce company rules, and they imposed harsh fines, or even whippings, for such offenses as talking, smoking, or pausing to stretch in the fields. Workers shopped at company stores and lived in company housing, much of which was meager and unsanitary.

Until 1900, plantation workers were legally bound by 3-to-5-year contracts, and “deserters” could be jailed. For many Japanese immigrants, most of whom had worked their own family farms back home, the relentless toil and impersonal scale of industrial agriculture was unbearable, and thousands fled to the mainland before their contracts were up.

And what of Scots?

In the colonial era, Scots were mostly forcibly transported, a few voluntarily emigrated to avoid a life of poverty in their homeland. Some were transported as criminals. The one way around these inhuman laws was to join a regiment loyal to the English king. That way saw you get regular meals and a roof over your head when not on the march.

It does not matter how many were coerced to leave Scotland, five hundred, a thousand, two thousand, they were effectively treated as slaves if not quite chattel. Many Jacobites were also banished and transported after uprisings in 1715 and 1746. In Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Slaves and Rebels, Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton describe the fate of many of the banished. Of 1700 prisoners taken in Scotland after the 1715 uprising, more than 450 Jacobites were sent to North America and 170 to the Caribbean.

The authors note one form of ‘mercy’ was to make Jacobites sign allegiance to the King, followed by signing indentures and eventual transportation. Jacobites tended to refuse to sign the seven-year indentures offered by the British Government. Yet, in the eyes of the law, they were prisoners to be transported to the colonies under indenture, which is to say, effectively slave labour.

Hawaii plantation life

In Hawaii plantation life was also rigidly stratified by national origin, with Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino labourers paid at different rates for the same work, while all positions of authority were reserved for European Americans. Plantation owners often pitted one nationality against the other in labour disputes, and riots broke out between Japanese and Chinese workers.

As Japanese sugar workers grew in numbers and organised themselves into groups, they responded to management abuse by taking concerted action. They organized strikes in 1900, 1906, and 1909, as well as what one can describe as small hit-and-run actions, downing tools for a day, or go-slow tactics. In 1920, Japanese organizers joined with Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese labourers, and afterwards formed the Hawaii Laborers’ Association, (correct spelling) the islands’ first multi-ethnic labour union, a harbinger of interethnic solidarity to come.

The American experience

This essay describes the plantation system as it affected Hawaii, taking a side step to look at America as an instrument of British colonialism is enlightening. It is characterized by social and political inequality.

The plantation system developed in the American South as British colonists arrived in what became known as Virginia. The British incomers divided the land into large areas suitable for farming. The land on which these plantations were established was stolen through cancelled, disregarded, and deceitful treaties, or outright violence.

The plantation system came to dominate the culture of the South, and it was rife with inequity from the time it was established. In 1606, King James I formed the Virginia Company of London to establish colonies in North America, but when the British actually arrived, they faced a harsh and foreboding wilderness, and their lives became little more than a struggle for survival. (This was a similar experience to Scots trying to establish a sea trading post in Darien to ouwite England’s trading blockade dsigned to bring Scots to their knees and form a union with England.) So, to make settling the land more attractive, the Virginia Company offered any adult man with the means to travel to America 50 acres of land. Poverty-stricken Scots, moved off their land aggressively, to up the offer.

This inducement was repeated in the early twentieth century when Scots in large numbers were offered resettlement and transportation costs to Australia, subsidised by the UK government, and Scots attracted to Canada and Nova Scotia were offered a parcel of land and some money to settle in those uncharted territories. The Scots diaspora soon spread across the globe, further inflated by Scots regiments sent to keep natives in place in the British empire.

At the encouragement of the Virginia Company, many of the settlers banded together and created large settlements, called ‘Hundreds’; intended to support 100 individuals, usually men who led a household. The hundreds were run as private plantations intent on making a profit from the cultivation of crops, which the economy of the South depended upon. 

Cheap labour was the incentive. Initially, the people dragoonmed into servitude were indentured servants, mostly from Scotland and Ireland, and then England (sometimes from Africa), Indigenous people to work the land. Indentured servants were contracted to work four- to-seven-year terms without pay for passage to the colony, offered room and board. After completing the term, they were given land, clothes, and provisions.

The subservience of Indigenous People

Although Hawaii’s plantation system provided a hard life for immigrant workers, at the same time the islands were the site of unprecedented cultural autonomy for Japanese immigrants. They soon took over the running of their areas efficiently and methodically. Their culture became the culture of that area. The Hawaiians were forced out to other places or inter-married.

Whole communities in the Scottish Borders and now parts of the Highlands such as Skye and Orkney are characterised by English settlers. Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, is practically a bastion of bourgeoise settlers, few of whom voted for Scotland’s independence in the 2014 referendum. This is modern Scotland, where strict and sometimes brutal goverance from London was gradually supplanted by English incomers over time assuming head positions of institutions and army regiments. Support came in the form of a rise of private fee paying schools where sons and daughters of the wealthy were taught English traditions and culture, Scots being sidelined in study and language.

In Hawaii, Japanese immigrants were members of a majority ethnic group, and held a substantial, if often subordinate, position in the workforce. Though they had to struggle against European American owners for wages and a decent way of life, In Scotland Scots are still the majority ethnic group but that legal advantage is fast diminishing. And as we know, millions have been forced to find a living outside Scotland, a trend that has not stopped to this day, with the number of internal immigrants from England fast rising to take the place of departing Scots.

Japanese Hawaiians had some comforting compensations. Like English in Scotland with their attitudes, language, and strong association with their motherland, Japanese transplanted their traditions to their new home with confidence. Buddhist temples sprung up on every plantation, many of which also had their own resident Buddhist priest. The midsummer holiday of obon, the festival of the souls, was celebrated throughout the plantation system, and, starting in the 1880s, all work stopped on November 3 as Japanese workers cheered the birthday of Japan’s emperor.

By the 1930s, Japanese immigrants, their children, and grandchildren had set down deep roots in Hawaii. Despite the privations of plantation life and the injustices of a stratified social hierarchy, since the 1880s Japanese Hawaiians lived in a multi-ethnic society. The newspapers, schools, stores, temples, churches, and baseball teams that they founded were the legacy of a community secure of its place in their new land, a birthright that was handed down to the generations that followed. In time, the ethnic Hawaiian was outnumbered, subservient, with next to know power to cause change for the better.

In summary

There is estimated to be over one-and-half million English migrants living in Scotland, whole areas and islands Anglicized, the majority with no commitment to things Scots, a demographic that is causing alarm in a nation struggling to regain ownership of its own land and natural resources, above all, its place in the world. Unlike the Japanese in Hawaii, they did not arrive as slaves, although a large number entered as working class poor looking for a better life. They are now so ingrained in the fabric of Scots society, many feel they have a right to vote on constitutional matters.

The domination of Scotland by England, culturally, socially, and in the well-organised raid of Scotland’s natural resources for England’s benefit, is essentially the forced eradication of an ancient civilisation that once led the world in science, literary innovation, engineering and philosophy. Vive la difference has been muted to, exactly who are the Scots?

NOTES:

This is a work in progress. Plantation slavery and settlers were not exclusive to Hawiia or the Americas. They were also found in Africa and Asia and the Caribbean also based on slavery and indentured workers. However, that discussion is beyond the scope of this initial essay.

The Scot’s dimension: Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Slaves and Rebels, by Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton

Hawaiian Plantation sources: Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii; 1835-1920. US Library of Congress; Exploring the Hamakua Coast, a pictorial guide to the plantation era, by Ken Oklimoto.

American plantation sources: Southeast Native American Groups, Native Americans in Colonial America, The United States Government’s Relationship with Native Americans, Indian Removal Act, and Native American Removal from the Southeast.

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