Checkered pasts: tartan and colonial identities in the British Atlantic, c.1745-1822 and their legacies

Abstract

Tartan is a textile instantly recognisable as a symbol of Scottish identity. 1745 and 1822 are often cited as crucial dates for the history of tartan in Scotland – the former marking the final Jacobite Rising and subsequent Act of Proscription in 1746 which prohibited the wearing of Highland dress for anyone but in military service, and the latter being the date of George IV’s visit to Edinburgh where he wore a tartan kilt and was greeted by a tartan pageant. However, this period also saw tartan entangled with the construction of multiple identities across the globe, notably coinciding with Scotland’s involvement in the building and maintaining of Britain’s vast empire. This thesis aims to address these entanglements and their legacies, examining the colonial uses of tartan within the Atlantic British empire.

In doing so, this thesis aligns with recent scholarship which has seen a turn away from tartan’s contested origins to instead consider the textile as a commercial product, and as a sartorial signifier of various identities both within and outside Scotland. However, although tartan’s links to colonialism and the British empire have been mentioned by many of these scholars, none have extensively addressed it. This thesis is therefore the first examination of tartan in an explicitly colonial context.

It argues that the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century was a key period for tartan, particularly in the Atlantic world: coinciding with the formation of Britain’s identity as a united nation and as an empire, Britain’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as British military action and trade networks across West Africa, America, and the Caribbean. The thesis is specifically framed within the geographic space of the ‘circum-Atlantic’ – a term first theorized by theatre historian Joseph Roach in his seminal 1996 book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Roach asserted here that the notion of a ‘circum-Atlantic’ world insists on the circulation and mobility of people, ideas, and things, as well as the centrality of ‘diasporic and genocidal history’ as a result of empire building.

This thesis primarily examines constructions of identity through representations of tartan in visual culture, rather than physical, material survivals of tartan clothing. These are unpacked through five roughly chronological chapters. Chapter One focuses on portraiture, considering how the 1746 Act of Proscription influenced the construction of masculine British military identity. Chapter Two addresses tartan’s role in slavery, examining the role of the textile in clothing enslaved labourers in Britain, North America, and the Caribbean. Chapter Three situates tartan within the textile markets of the British-controlled Caribbean, particularly in relation to other checked textiles such as Madras and Guinea check. Chapter Four examines how white women in Britain were impacted by the expanding British empire through fashion periodicals at the turn of the nineteenth century. Chapter Five considers the legacies of discussions in prior chapters by considering tartan’s role in contemporary art, particularly that of Black artists working in Scotland today.

Overall, this thesis aims to move away from seeing tartan solely as a marker of Scottish identity, and instead use the textile as a lens through which to examine wider networks of textile circulations in the long eighteenth century. With its ‘circum-Atlantic’ framing, the thesis contributes to scholarship considering Scotland in a global context, as well as the growing field of Atlantic textile history.