MY high school history teacher was a convinced nationalist. When a tree was planted to mark the Queen’s silver jubilee, he noted that the commemorative plaque referred – wrongly – to Elizabeth II.

Amongst discussion of the French Revolution and the Corn Laws, he taught us about boycotts and land reform, and the long, slow process by which Ireland secured its independence.

We did not learn about the Highland Clearances, the Scottish Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution. In a school founded by Free Church members immediately after the Disruption of 1843, there was no Scottish religious history beyond a mention of John Knox. This high school history was political, revolving around great men and matters of state.

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That introduction to history concentrated on the long 19th century, starting with the French Revolution, and running through to the Treaty of Versailles.

Despite its importance for the UK economy, we barely discussed India. China figured as the location of the Opium Wars. Africa mattered only as a site for the expansion of European power. We only read about West Indian slavery in the context of its abolition.

Until recently, I had never heard of the Mutapa Kingdom. In a seminar on the decolonisation of economics teaching held in November, a Zimbabwean speaker explained to us patiently that the Mutapa emerged in Southern Africa in the 16th century, that its territory had extended from what is now Eastern Angola, through Zambia and Malawi, and the Northern part of Zimbabwe, reaching the sea in Mozambique.

It had trading links with Arabia, India, and China, and was formally recognised by the Portuguese. It was only consigned to history when Europeans redrew the map of Africa at the Berlin Conferences in the 1880s.

For colonisers, this is inconvenient history. It is better to claim to have found a land inhabited by savages, whose childlike nature made it essential for Europeans to provide a form of guardianship. Faced with inconvenient facts, it may be possible to deny, then ignore, and finally forget them.

The colonisers wanted to tell stories which were consistent with their self-conception as bringers of progress and justice to the benighted regions of the world.

Decolonisation is a movement within academia, which urges us to look beyond the accepted accounts and practices, to find new ways of thinking, and which will take account of the way in which we have been shaped by complex, historically grounded, social processes.

Stephen Mullen wrote last Monday about his book, The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy. This long research project is part of the process of decolonisation in Scotland, tracing the network of associations by which wealth, built on slavery, percolated through Scottish society two centuries ago. One comment on his article denied the possibility that most Scots had benefited from plantation ownership.

My colleague, Prabir Bhattacharya, argues strongly that this view is wrong. His interest lies in explaining what is sometimes called the “Great Divergence”. Materially, British people have typically had more comfortable lives than people in Asia for at least 200 years, perhaps substantially longer.

There is history, honoured with Nobel Memorial Prizes in economics, concentrating on the development of social institutions which supported economic growth.

Deirdre McCloskey tells a fascinating story about the emergence of commercial virtues in the Dutch Golden Age, as Europeans fought each other less, and turned to trade. Joel Mokyr emphasises the role of education, enabling a constant stream of innovations. Then there is the role of coal as a source of energy, enabling the deployment of machinery in factories.

Bhattacharya concentrates instead on the financial flows between India and Britain, and then between Britain and Europe and the USA. The East India Company was able to tax the local population, using the revenue to pay low prices for goods, which were then exported to Britain.

India also provided a huge, captive market for British produce. (A quick mention of Henry Dundas here – his eventual impeachment was over his management of the East India Company while serving as a government minister.) In the 19th century, the East India Company was also intimately involved with the opium trade.

You may remember Michael Fry writing about Jardine Matheson, the trading company which smuggled opium from India to China, and silver on the return voyage. When the Chinese tried to prevent this trade, the British Government sent the Royal Navy, and the Indian Army to force it open again.

Britain benefited from a huge transfer of wealth from India, from which it funded investments across Europe and North America.

Funding coal mines, railways, and industries, the profits of empire created the physical infrastructure on which we still depend today.

In this account, Scotland was an integral part of the first global superpower.

Living standards started to increase substantially across Britain in the 1830s – the decade in which Dundee built the docks needed for the jute industry. Living conditions then were still grim for working folk but they were grimmer across the world.

We should think of ourselves as descendants of colonisers, not the passive victims of colonisation.

This suggests that England and Scotland made a utilitarian bargain. England offered Scotland a path to prosperity, which was reliant on imperial expansion. Without that, with the UK still structured around global finance, we have started to look for other partners.

Without the economic forces which held the Union together, it may well fall apart.

Robbie Mochrie is a senior lecturer in economics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh