Scotonomics: Explaining why Scotland's economy is a colonial economy

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IT has taken me a while to feel confident about this statement: Scotland’s economy is still a colonial one.

Earlier this week, I interviewed Fadhel Kaboub, a senior adviser with PowerShift Africa and a member of the independent expert group on just transition and development. As a Tunisian living in the USA, Fadhel (below) doesn’t have any particular dog in the fight when it comes to Scotland's constitutional settlement or our economic relationship as part of the UK, so I considered his view especially insightful.

The context is important. I didn’t plan to cover Scotland’s economy at all with Fadhel. He spent a fascinating 20 minutes explaining how the "post" colonial structures still exist in Africa. After a while, it all seemed rather familiar. So, I had to tease out his view of Scotland.

William: Is it crass of me to say that I see the Scottish economy as a colonial economy, considering everything you've been discussing so far, or can you start to see those similarities?

Fadhel: Well, it's fascinating once you start looking at old colonies from more than a century ago and how the structural, sometimes even the infrastructure, the physical infrastructure of the country is still perpetuating the same colonial relationships. And one of those is usually the actual physical infrastructure for extracting natural resources, transporting and shipping them to the mainland of the colony.

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So if you tell me that Scotland today, during the colonial times, was a source of extraction of materials to go into England, but after a couple of hundred years, the Scottish economy was so transformed and became so independent that it has its own infrastructure, for example, ports to ship to the global economy on its own terms, then I'll tell you the Scottish economy is probably partially decolonised. But if you tell me that Scotland still uses the same transport to ship resources to the same destination in England, then that tells me that partly the Scottish economy is still structurally tied to colonial relationships with England.

If you tell me that Scotland has its own independent currency, with its own independent monetary policy and fiscal policy, then I tell you it's probably decolonised. But if you tell me it still uses the same colonial currency with the same more or less colonial constraints, you still have colonial structures.

If you tell me that Scotland has now independently developed its own resources for its own benefits, for its own food sovereignty, and energy sovereignty on its own terms as basic pillars of development because no country can function without food, without fuel, then I'll tell you, yes, Scotland is probably decolonised and independent.

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But if Scotland is still food-dependent, by design, and if most of its energy – and it has huge energy potential – is destined for extraction and export rather than as an input for industrialisation and development and value addition in Scotland, then I'll tell you, Scotland still probably follows the same colonial patterns that you see in many parts of the global South. So those are kind of the parameters I would look at.

William: Unfortunately, I am telling you all of those things, which is a real concern hearing that list from someone like you. That's a huge concern that we have at the moment, an economy that you could describe as still being colonial in design.

Can you also talk about this ownership? In Scotland, we've got some big energy companies and big resource extraction companies, but very few of those companies, even in financial services, are Scottish companies. If you've not got much ownership in your economy, does that point to being a colonial economy as well?

Fadhel: Yes, because that means extraction of wealth, extraction of profits. And that is not just about the ownership. Actually, it's about the control of technology. So you might look around the Scottish economy and see quite a bit of sophisticated technology around. Like who's producing this technology, who owns it, who controls access to this technology?

Is there an actual transfer of technology to Scottish companies, to Scottish know-how to build the foundation for research and development of made-in-Scotland technology that will actually have global influence?

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Then that tells you that you're still operating at the bottom of the hierarchy of the colonial structure in today's global economy. And you're still the source of extraction of wealth because you're a consumer of technology, you're a consumer of products that are made and owned by other nations or other corporations.

So it's fascinating when you look at some economies in Europe that still operate under these colonial rules, and the rules of international trade and investment architecture are designed to perpetuate this because these are rules that don't allow for transfer of technology, for example. You can only buy it or rent it from the countries that dominate this technology.

Conclusion

Before Scotland becomes independent again, we must understand more about its economy. The colonial lens may not be the most politically wise one to use; as I said, I feel slightly uncomfortable with this framing considering the truly atrocious treatment of people and land in the global south.

However, analysing our economy from this perspective allows us to highlight the extent of the change needed to disentangle ourselves from these embedded colonial structures.

Once we do this, maybe the focus shifts from “How long will it take to end Scotland’s 300 years of marriage with rUK” to one that asks, instead: “Why did we wait so long?”

Fadhel will deliver the keynote address on Sunday, March 24, at the Festival of Economics in Dundee. All sessions are available online and tickets are still available.