Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination: Anglophone Writing from 1600 to 1900 by Silke Stroh (review)

The number of questions posed by Silke Stroh in the introduction to Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination leaves the reader in no doubt of the complexity of her chosen subject: 'Can Scotland and the "Celtic fringe" be considered as English colonies? Is their experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Can international postcolonial theory help us to understand the Scottish predicament? Is Scottish political and cultural nationalism similar to anticolonial resistance overseas? Or are such comparisons no more than Scottish patriotic victimology?'

At the present time, when the examination of identity, whether selfassumed or imposed from the 'outside', is inherent in Scotland, the UK and beyond, and issues relating to Scottish independence and Brexit continue apace, Stroh's book is timely. It may be a truism to state that we must understand our history if we are to be able to interpret our present and future, but this is, nevertheless, one positive result of the literary and historical criticism conducted by Stroh in relation to Gaelic Scotland. There has been an interesting vein of Gaelic and Celtic scholarship in recent years, exhibiting engagement with the issues surrounding colonialism and postcolonialism. Stroh has been part of that vanguard with her earlier publication Uneasy Subjects: Postcolonialism and Scottish Gaelic Poetry (Rodopi, 2011), while Murray Pittock first raised his head above the figurative colonial parapet in Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester University Press) in 1999. Two multi-authored essay collections followed in 2011 and 2013 respectively (Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature and Within and Without Empire: Scotland across the (Post) Colonial Borderline). In relation to this subject in a slightly different context, Michael Newton has been a significant voice, particularly as critic of various books which have attempted to co-opt Celticity for specific regions in the United States. He has also spoken out against the dangers of the so-called 'alt-right', raising the issue of white supremacists who commonly invoke Celtic heritage in their messaging, thus appropriating Gaelic for their own ends.

With Gaelic culture a seemingly ripe area of (mis-)appropriation in the twenty-first century, Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination is a much-needed addition to the academic field, filling the gap in a time period which has been more heavily studied from the Irish perspective, and showing the influence of two simultaneous developments from 1600: the emergence of the modern nation-state and the rise of overseas colonialism on Scotland's Gaelic margins. This is certainly the most comprehensive study yet of a neglected but significant period of Gaelic cultural history to be conducted through the lens of postcolonial discourse. From the outset, Stroh is keen to tackle any detractors who may be skeptical that 'the ever-expanding field of postcolonial studies undermines its own credibility by declaring its theories applicable to more and more different contexts'. She rightly points out that any comparative approach could be accused of the same thing and she calls for a balance between generalisation/comparison and specificity/difference in order that postcolonial Scottish studies can gain insights into 'international parallels and local specificities'.

The chapters are set out in chronological order, dealing with texts which demonstrate how Anglophone writers have dealt with their Gaelic subjects in a variety of ways, including civilising missions, assimilation, Romanticisation, stereotyping and, perhaps most discomforting for readers with the benefit of twenty-first-century hindsight, biologistic racial typologising. Stroh's discussion of colonial discourse works particularly well in the sections which concentrate on the close reading of specific texts, e.g. Martin Martin's A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, and A Late Voyage to St Kilda, Walter Scott's Waverley, Robert Knox's The Races of Men, Fiona Macleod's (William Sharp) Green Fire, J. MacGregor's essay 'Celts and Teutons', and L. MacBean's essay 'The Mission of the Celt'. The success of close reading in...