Scots pretty much invented Canada as well, even more than other places, going back way before the scotch in our founding drunkard Sir John Eh worked its magic ... have to read the How the Scots Invented book, see he has a chapter on Adam Smith, wonder if he gets into the french connection there, how Smith reacted to what he'd seen on the continent, and the differences between the two 'enlightenments', scots having by that time developed religiously based qualms about whacking each other's heads off, they just went out and made money, largely through sugar and tobacco at the start, Niall Ferguson has written on how sucrose nicotine and theine were what stimulated empire, it was all a major dope deal long before the opium, scots traded them all and the Glasgow tobacco lords were among those observed by Smith ... there are many BBC pieces on youtube, i think it's Simon Schama who most looks at history from commonfolk point of view, always though in relation to the notable who were the only ones noted, fact of life ... one of my 'english' lines came over with the hanoverians, served as clerks and suchlike for generations, no doubt some still in govt offices, still have large farms in county Essex, there are many connections on that side with famous names but the most fun is that with Nelson's mistress, only by marriage though and not absolutely proven, too bad
The connections are exponential, as you go back through generations, everybody has two parents, they each had two parents, it starts adding up when you get two or three hundred years into it, so given all the young men trundled off to war or run off from home for stealing sheep or getting girls in trouble or whatever, there's a good chance any two of us here are related as cousins or in-laws more closely than you'd think ... a mention on SI i made years ago led to a PM conversation in which a lady listed as contributor to a family tree book was well known to a fellow SIer on the other side of the world ... genetics is coming up with interesting stuff - icelanders have lots of irish DNA and the only irish who went there were monks, that better not get back to the pope, lol
Mistake in previous post - it wasn't Witherspoon whose slave was freed by judges, but Wedderburn ... duh - 'To err is huge, man' - was result of playing with my eight year old on first run through video, anyway it's listed here, case of Joseph Knight -
en.wikipedia.org
Speaking of common people, the history of slavery has lots of that ... hundreds of thousands of britons were taken as slaves by muslim raiders, some say millions, many if not most of them irish and up to surprisingly recent times ... practice is still going on, in the arab world |
