Were the Highlands ever colonised? And other stupid questions

This is the transcript of a talk given by Dr Gemma Smith at the conference Community, Resistance and Resilience: Celebrating 50 Years of The Making of the Crofting Community, which took place at UHI Centre for History in Dornoch on 11th and 12th June 2026. The conference gathered scholars, creative practitioners, and activists from around the world to commemorate this landmark book and Jim Hunter’s broader career.  

Can I just firstly thank the Centre for inviting me. It’s an enormous honour and privilege to be here, and I hope that the ramble that follows is to any degree worthy of the event. 

I’m going to start by apologising for my obnoxious title, a rod I made for my own back. I’ll explain that in a bit. Obviously, the thread that I’ve decided to pick from The Making of the Crofting Community is Jim’s engagement with postcolonial thought, something that’s also been very important to my own work. So I’m going to talk a bit about that, and also eventually draw on and respond to an extent to his talk from, 2006, ‘History: its Key Place in the Future of the Highlands and Islands’, in which he talked about Highland History in a more global context. 

I know that in present company I’m probably preaching to the converted, but I suppose that my obnoxious title expresses some of the frustration I’ve felt at the resistance I and undoubtedly so many others have met in more traditional academic environments, shall we say, where it seems that debate about colonialism is so often derailed with irrelevant and quite tedious arguments, straw men and false dichotomies. So, were the Highlands ever colonised? It is a stupid question isn’t it, and to be honest I’m probably not going to try to answer it. 

Instead today I’m going to share some thoughts and reflections I’ve had over the last wee while about things like decolonisation, culture, borders, and the apparently terminal decline of The West. Any of you who have heard me talk before will know that I’m fond of taking you on a wee wander – I am a great believer in the value of going to have a look at things for yourself. Well today we’ll be going for a wander much further afield than usual, to the Highlands via North West Africa, where I’ve spent almost half of the past three years. Colonialism has been somewhat of a preoccupation of mine lately, and my recent experiences have given me new perspectives on everything I’ve been studying for the past twelve years. What follows will be undoubtedly be anecdotal, meandering and tangential, but stick with me – it’ll all come together in the end. 

I study Gaelic place-names as a source for the ecological history of the north-west Highlands. We call this branch of historical linguistics onomastics, ‘name studies’, but I’m not sure I’d really call myself an onomastician – the way I use place-names is a bit different. Raasay’s Chrissie Gillies has suggested ‘cultural archaeology’. What I think is probably the most accurate term is also unfortunately the most pretentious sounding. A phrase used to describe Tim Robinson’s work in Ireland is ‘decolonial cartography’ – I know, cringe – but to be honest I suppose that best describes what it is that I am trying to do anyway.  

Place-names are a frustrating specialism to have, as whilst the few people who understand the significance of topnonyms as a source look at you as if you’re doing some kind of magic, most people’s eyes just kind of glaze over. I think – I hope – that’s starting to change. Certainly in conservation circles they have started to wake up to the potential of place-names after Roddy Maclean’s groundbreaking report for NatureScot in 2021, especially for mapping historic woodland cover, and one of the pieces of work I’ve done recently was for The James Hutton Institute, about how to interpret Gaelic tree place-names, which is not just a simple matter of picking up a map and a copy of Dwelly’s. 

We can do traditional history stuff with place-names – this map for example illustrates some of the findings of The Pilgrim’s Trail project which I did for the North West Highlands Geopark. That was a really satisfying project to do as it was very much with and for the local community, in one of the most fascinating and under-researched areas of the Highlands: the Reay Country or Dùthaich MhicAoidh, where the only historic church anyone ever talked about was Balnakiel, but we can see here from this new ecclesiastical map that by looking at the place-names evidence it was far from some godless wilderness. 

We can also map historic settlement patterns. Right down the strath starting at Loch Laxford, now the Westminster Estate, there were several significant settlements, before it was all cleared for sheep farming by the last Lords Reay. And what’s more we can identify things like Norse settlements that aren’t evidenced by any other source than the place-names. For example Pont’s early modern era map shows us a Lon Skeggabill by Loch Stack, a place now known as Lone and the site of an estate bothy, which from the name is clearly Norse, probably a -bólstaðr or ‘farm’ name. 

What I really love about place-names is that it’s a real generalist’s specialism, because by starting with the name everything about that place is relevant, you can do that real kind of deep mapping of a place until it becomes this kind of living entity in its own right.  

Glen Golly is one of them for me. I’m sure many of you know the Rob Donn song about Glen Golly, Gleann Gallaidh nan craobh, ‘Glen Golly of the trees.’ I’m not going to go into the etymology of the name of Glen Golly, it’s grammatically complex and kind of boring. It just means ‘the hidden glen’, as it’s this wee leafy crevice in the middle of miles and miles of rocky, lunar, Reay Forest mountain landscape, a real oasis. When I visited it a couple of years ago, I also discovered that it was a shieling – I found the remains of at least three huts there. So although he doesn’t say so in the song, when Rob Donn was singing about Glen Golly he was singing about the shieling. There’s also an amazing bit of Sutherland folklore about Glen Golly, about how Fearchar Lighiche, or ‘Fearchar the Healer’, obtained his magical powers of healing after being bitten by a white snake that came out of a hazel tree here. I told this story to the NTS ecologist Andrew Painting, who’s just written a book about the remnants of the Caledonian Pine Forest, and he was so fascinated he went to visit too, and he found an ancient wild pine at the end of the glen – so there’s a whole chapter about it in his book Wild Pines which I think is out later this year.

Too often, however, place-names are relegated to tokenistic, folksy community-project territory, or used as decorative add-ons to lend dubious authenticity to otherwise completely anglophone historical and archaeological projects. They’re not really treated as a serious source; much like Gaelic poetry, the Napier Commission minutes, and any other ‘bottom-up’ sources, place-names are treated at best as a supplement rather than an alternative to traditional documentary evidence such as estate records. But with what I know about place-names and how they have enabled me to read and understand the historical and natural landscape, I find it crazy that place-name surveys are not automatically included as part of any archaeological or ecological survey, the evidence that they offer as a source being so rich, and just unavailable elsewhere. 

So studying place-names allows you to look at everything really, but I think most importantly also as Keith Basso tells us in Wisdom Sits in Places, about the naming practices of the Western Apache, place-names allow you to stand in the footsteps of the ancestors when they discovered the place. They allow you a way into a whole other ontology, a different way of seeing. They are not just labels – they tell you what people noticed and valued about a place. For indigenous cultures the world over, true knowledge absolutely begins with place-names, it begins with the land itself, in our relationship with it, and that is I suppose why I study place-names.  

It’s also an inherently political subject, naming and power being so related, and rooted in decolonial and indigenous theory. This is especially true in a country with a land ownership situation like Scotland’s. 

So that brings us back to my obnoxious title. Elizabeth Ritchie emailed me at the end of January asking for a title for the funding application. Just call it ‘Were the Highlands ever colonised? And other stupid questions’ for now I said, and I’ll change it to something more sensible closer to the time. Next thing I know I’m getting sent the programme, with this obnoxious title still on it.  

By way of explanation, Elizabeth’s email had found me not just well but precisely here in January: lounging on this very sofa, under these mango trees, in a small coastal village called Abéné, in the baobab forests of Casamance, Senegal.  

Casamance is in the very south of Senegal. You have to drive across The Gambia to get there overland, or you can do as I did and board the overnight ferry from Dakar in the evening, have a surprisingly nice dinner, go to sleep in your cabin bunk, and wake up the next morning cruising inland down the Casamance river. Casamance is the separatist region of Senegal that has been involved in an often-violent struggle for independence since 1982. Armed militias made travelling there by road quite dangerous, but the situation has stabilised since a peace agreement made in early 2025, so I thought it was as good a time to visit as any. When people from Casamance are travelling to Dakar they talk about ‘going up to Senegal’, they regard it as a separate country altogether, they are different ethnic groups with different languages. There is much cultural variation there, for example while Senegal is a Muslim country – they’re about 92% Sufi in fact – in parts of Casamance native animist traditions are still strong. 

Abéné was the southernmost stop in a trip that began three months earlier. At the end of October last year, I flew to Seville, and basically then got the bus to Senegal – or to be more accurate it was eventually about 17 buses, 15 shared taxis, 4 trains, 3 ferries, and 2 tuktuks – covering about 5000km across a huge swathe of north-west Africa, zig-zagging across Morocco, travelling across the Sahara, through Mauritania, down to Senegal. So when I got the email I was at the endpoint of this kind of immersive, three-month journey through all these postcolonial landscapes, which was one of the most enlightening and educational experiences I’ve ever had, something that I will be processing for a very long time to come.  

For those of you who don’t know me, for the past few years I’ve survived by doing seasonal live-in jobs in the Highlands during the summer, to buy myself the time off in the winter to firstly finish my PhD, and then latterly just do various other things that aren’t cleaning up after tourists.  

I’ve spent most of this time living in Morocco, which has been a transformative experience as someone who didn’t have the opportunity to travel extensively when I was younger. Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned from it is that nothing in the world is really as we in The West are told it is, especially when it comes to the lies we are told about Africa and in particular ‘Muslim countries’ – as if that were even a meaningful category in any sense.  

After travelling as far south as Sidi Ifni the winter before last, the thought of carrying on to Senegal overland didn’t seem so daunting, so that’s what I did this year. I’m very interested in Sufism, especially the Baye Fall, a Senegalese Sufi brotherhood who were founded in the late 19th century on decolonial principles, and whose beliefs are based on what they call Ajaana Fall, the presumption of heaven on earth – the idea that we don’t need to wait for heaven, we are living in heaven now and we should act like it, we are all brothers and sisters and our purpose is to look after each other. But the main thing that interested me about Senegal was that it was a West African country that had, like Burkina Faso with Ibrahim Traore, apparently got the young, progressive, decolonial leader that the people wanted. 

Serious political unrest erupted in June 2023, when the then-opposition leader Ousmane Sonko was jailed by the near-dictatorial previous incumbent Macky Sall. To widespread surprise in 2024 Sonko was then elected as Prime Minister to President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, after running on a leftist, anti-establishment and pan-African agenda promising radical reform. The new government were transparent from the start that things were going to get worse before they got better, after decades of corruption had accrued astronomical debts, a spiralling cost of living and youth unemployment at a third. The new administration kicked out foreign companies and military, but that also exacerbated the economic crisis on some levels. That coalition has now collapsed in just the past few weeks, with Sonko, who the people are still firmly behind, being sacked as PM but then elected as speaker of the parliament.

This all obviously dashed my naïve outsider’s ideas about the place, as did just the experience of being there for four weeks. The capital Dakar in is a strange city: huge, half of it a building site, one of the most expensive cities in Africa, and the gap between rich and poor is staggering. Dakar’s the location of one of the WHO’s major African centres, an enormous American embassy, the offices of various NGOs and charities. Almadies, the area all the ‘expats’ live in, is full of gated apartment buildings with armed guards, American supermarkets, and restaurants with European prices. And Dakar of course was one of the epicentres of the transatlantic slave trade, it’s the most westerly point of mainland Africa, and Goree Island, which is now an open-air museum, was for many West Africans their last sight of home.  

Prior to Dakar I was in Saint Louis, the former capital of what was known as ‘French West Africa’ for 300 years, and just a haunted place. The island covered with all that crumbling old UNESCO-certified colonial architecture is undeniably beautiful, but cross over the second bridge onto the island closest to the sea and you’re in the area where the fishermen and their families live in slum housing, with the overcrowding only exacerbated by recent coastal erosion. But you can just get a taxi right through all that to the resorts at the end of the peninsula, if that’s your kind of thing… Even as a backpacker staying in a guesthouse owned by a Senegalese family in a very local neighbourhood, I felt quite inappropriate as a tourist in Saint Louis a lot of the time, and I just can’t get my head around people who go places like that for a luxury experience. And that was just the overwhelming lesson of Senegal for me, was just the way that in so many places colonialism never really ended, there is no ‘post’ about it, it never went anywhere, instead it just mutated into more socially acceptable forms.

Secondly, if you look at somewhere like Saint Louis, and somewhere like say Tetouan in the north of Morocco, the former capital of the Spanish Protectorate, there is just no comparison. They are both former colonial capitals, but the two cities could not have had a more different experience of colonialism, they’re almost at two ends of a spectrum. And what this really cemented for me is that there are myriad experiences of colonialism – there is no easy checklist we can tick off that gives us simple yes/no answers.   

What I learned about the tensions within West Africa just complicated that further. In Senegal, if they call you a Berber, it’s basically like calling you a meanie. Those Morocco/Senegal tensions that really came to the fore in this year’s AFCON final were not just about football – the Berbers, or the Amazigh as they’re now known, were deeply involved in the slave trade, they sold sub-Saharan African people into the slave trade, the Amazigh and Arabs enslaved people from Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa even before Europe got involved. But does Maghrebi people’s involvement in slavery mean that the Maghreb was never colonised? Of course it doesn’t. 

On the subject of Western Sahara – if anyone wants to hear a rant please ask me about it after, but I’ll probably sound like some rabid Moroccan nationalist, purely due to the ahistorical and hypocritical portrayal of the situation in the West. I think we can tell that the ruler-straight borders we see on the map were not the work of native nomadic peoples. To be fair it’s more Moroccan Sahara than it ever was ‘Spanish Sahara’ – prior to French and Spanish involvement this was all the Maghreb, ‘the land where the sun sets’, as opposed to the Mashriq, ‘the land where the sun rises’, i.e. the region we used to call the Middle East and are now calling West Asia. For Moroccans, reclaiming the Sahara is very much part of their ongoing decolonial struggle. Essentially the Saharan conflict has been a proxy war between Morocco and Algeria – Polisario were originally a student-led organisation, but were funded by Algeria from the start. This is a situation created by the actions of Spain and France during the Scramble for Africa, and Sahrawi people have been used as political pawns ever since. None of this is easy stuff, even in places none one would disagree were ever colonised.  

So to understand colonialism I think we need to be able to understand it as something that is amorphous, rhizomatic, almost cancerous in nature. I think one of the best descriptions of colonialism is from the Martinician writer Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, in which he says that it is easier ‘to agree on what it is not’, in his words:  

‘neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.’ 

So, according to Césaire, colonisation then is the imposition of an economy based on appetite, competition and force. 

The Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe also has I think a very useful framework for thinking about colonisation, and that is by doing so in terms of ‘the politics of space’, which is looking at history in terms of how populations have been denied space, or been excluded from it, and how they have subsequently moved or been moved around in space. 

I mean, if you really want to argue that all of this stuff has no relevance to the history of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, feel free, you know. Knock yourself out.  

And the disease of colonialism is ultimately a disease of the imagination, of the political imagination, because now we can’t imagine a way out. This is what David Graeber and David Wengrove talk about in The Dawn of Everything, that if we’re asking about the origins of inequality we’re asking the wrong question, what we need to ask is how did we get so stuck? 

I went back to university to start my undergrad in Scottish History and Celtic Studies on Monday the 22nd September, 2014. I knew fine well at the time that it was either going to be the most inspiring, or the most depressing time to start studying Scottish History. For most of 2014, I’d been working in a pub in Glasgow city centre, a place with a huge big horseshoe bar, and from about six months before the referendum, every night without fail, when you put the lights up and turned the music off, every group of folk around the bar would be debating it, it was all anyone was talking about. And I remember the night of the referendum, a lot of my pals were out celebrating already, but I didn’t really want to get ahead of things, so I stayed in. I was living on Sauchiehall Street, and I sat on my window ledge that night watching the street below, which was absolutely rammed with folk, mostly young people, out celebrating and partying, singing ‘Flower of Scotland’, driving up and down waving Saltires… It made me quite emotional, as I never thought I’d see political engagement like that in my lifetime. It was such a hopeful time.  

There were two books that were instrumental to me returning to uni to study Scottish History.. I found Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul in a bookshop in Stromness, and after reading about it there, I then went out and bought a copy of The Making of the Crofting Community. It blew me away. It was absolutely the most furious thing I’d ever read, so searingly consistent and persuasive. The fact that it was written in 1976 by a mere twentysomething was something that impressed me greatly. And much like Jim, my motivation in studying Highland History was that I found what I had read before The Making of the Crofting Community to be ‘wholly at odds’ with my own experience of the landscape, but also what its inhabitants had shared with me about their history.  

If you’d asked me back then if I could ever have seen myself leaving Scotland, I’d probably have looked affronted by the very suggestion, maybe even recited a bit of Macdiarmaid at you – ‘The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part only the little white rose of Scotland, that smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.’ But then it did break my heart. Who could have predicted then where we find ourselves now? 

Césaire says that ‘..it is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.’ I’m not sure about that. I think sometimes both rot at once. I know that some people find my writing hopeful. I find that ironic. I’m not a very hopeful person, I certainly don’t have much hope for this country, and by that I mean the UK, because like it or not we’re apparently still tethered to this sinking ship. 

I know that despite the precarity of my current lifestyle, I’ve enjoyed a great luxury by being able to leave for half the year, I have no ties here, and just coming from a place with a strong enough currency and strong enough passport that you can actually travel out of your own country puts you in a privileged 10-15% of the world’s population. I acknowledge my privilege at being able to get out, and also to have spent that time experiencing a culture that is still relatively warm, relational and cohesive. 

Every year obviously, I keep up with the online ‘discourse’ while I’m away, and I brace myself for the culture shock when I return to the UK. And every year, it just seems to me exponentially worse.  I’ve been disgusted recently to witness the rise of the far right in Scotland – another thing I perhaps naively thought I’d never see. It’s also brought home to me how much I existed in a bubble in my time in academia, how all of us who have access to these kinds of events and discussions do exist in a wee bubble. I’m sure everyone saw the footage of the fascist march in Glasgow on Tuesday night. Do not for a second think this is just a Rangers fans in the Central Belt thing. The last three summers, I’ve worked with folk from all age groups across Wester Ross, Skye, and the Cairngorms, and with notable exceptions I could count on one hand, political opinions these days seem to fall between ‘I’m just not interested in politics’ to ‘stop the small boats’ – there doesn’t seem to be much to the left of that any more, class consciousness is almost completely non-existent, and logic has been largely supplanted by emotional reasoning. 

And to me, it seems it’s heart and head: every year there seems to be a shocking decline in empathy, and just an absolute scrambling of people’s brains when it comes to their ideas about history. And I think that’s because for too long their voices have been excluded from their history, for too long Scottish and particularly Highland history has served the interests of landed power by perpetuating a colonised and colonising worldview. People can tell they are not getting the full story, they can tell there is something missing. And just now they seem willing to fill that void with absolutely anything the algorithm feeds them. And that contraction of empathy, that increasingly narcissistic culture we are seeing, well I mean narcissism arises from insecurity, one of the defining qualities of modern life, not just in the sense of material insecurity but also that kind of epistemological insecurity that people seem to be really suffering from just now.  

Achille Mbembe talks about this, the confusion today between knowledge and information. Technology has on one hand made us so unified in terms of a sense of connection, of all belonging to the same earth. But then we are also so fragmented along multiple lines – identitarian, religious, racial, etc. There are deep inequalities within and between nations, and also a desire from people for separation that only seem to be increasing. As Mbembe puts it, the vital challenges of today are planetary in nature, but planetary consciousness seems distant. He says that the challenge for critical thinking is to leave behind the provincialism and insularity that has driven the Western paradigm into a cul-de-sac, this kind of intellectual inbreeding that has got us stuck where we are now. For Mbembe, decolonisation means finding ways of thinking that take seriously our common belonging to a shared earth. This will necessitate decentring Western thought, or as he puts it ‘shifting the geography of reason.’  

Our challenge as historians is to find a way of telling stories about our past that engage and engage with people, and I think that we can only learn to do this by doing as Mbembe recommends and turning to other libraries.  

It’s important to remember I think that until we started colonising and pillaging, throughout medieval times to our closest neighbours across the Mediterranean, Europe was generally regarded as an intellectual backwater full of barbarians and religious zealots. There’s a credible argument to be had that the ‘Enlightenment’ was a result of the self-reflection that contact with Native American intellectuals prompted in European thinkers. And would the book we have come to celebrate today have been written had a spirited young historian not picked up a copy of The Wretched of the Earth sometime in the early 1970s? Maybe Jim can answer that later.  

So before we can become unstuck, we have to come to terms with not just our barbarism but also our ignorance. And if that idea makes you feel uncomfortable, you need to have a wee think about why. Because white fragility is quite something, and accountability is not the same as repair. Too often our attempts at decolonising the institution can amount to so much self-flagellation, a curiously Eurocentric kind of self-flagellation that can look a lot like the subtle reassertion of European moral superiority. True repair requires more listening, more humility. If we are serious about rekindling community, resistance and resilience, we need to look to the wisdom of people who did not sacrifice their culture at the altar of whiteness.  

Aimé Césaire said that ‘At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler.’ Looking at what’s happening in the world today, it seems we are doomed to repeat this trajectory. He also said that the salvation of Europe is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution. I’m not sure if I have much faith in that happening.  

I know I’ve been a bit of a doomer here, well I am a bit of a doomer these days – it’s just how I’ve come to see things. So in order to finish on a hopefully more optimistic note, I want to suggest one lesson from other philosophies we can maybe take away today, as a counter our Western necropolitics, is this Baye Fall and broader Sufi Islamic idea I mentioned, that of the idea of heaven on earth, that all we need is right here and that we should live as if we are already in heaven, as brothers and sisters. What are we waiting for? If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my travels, it’s that everything we want and need in this country is right in front of us, it’s right there for the taking. Our problems are in our heads, and in our hearts. And the stories we are telling about the past – or more correctly the stories that we are not telling – are fundamental to healing us. 

So, coming back to The Making of the Crofting Community. It’s a book that I have returned to again and again through my studies, not just for reference, but for inspiration and for comfort that I was on the right path. I suppose what I’ve got above all from my readings of Jim’s book over the years, is the reassurance that it’s okay to mean it, that it’s okay to have a deep personal attachment to and strongly-held opinions about your academic subject. 

The Indian spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti famously said that ‘Truth is a pathless land.’ Truth is a pathless land. And I think that History inches a step closer to truth, each time one of us strikes out on a new path, each time one of has the courage to stand up like Jim did and say: ‘that’s not how I see it.’  

Grateful to you for indulging this wander. Thanks for listening. Salam.