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Shetland's German Trade – on the Verge of Colonialism?

From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, German merchants dominated the import/export trade of Shetland. It has been suggested that this was a ‘pre-colonial’ trade; no settlement or political control was involved, but the success of the trade encouraged Scots to establish ‘full colonialism’ in the eighteenth century. This paper argues that the people who succeeded in controlling the socio-economic structure in the eighteenth century through combining land-owning with fishing and trade, were native Shetlanders (though often descended from immigrants), who traded for their own profit not for the benefit of Scotland or particular inhabitants of mainland Scotland. Colonisation can in some situations be primarily economic, and settlement or governmental change are not prerequisites. But the situation in Shetland was more complex than a purely economic perspective would imply; by the time the change in the operation of trade occurred, it was about 250 years since the transfer from Norwegian to Scottish political control and the time of greatest immigration from Scotland had passed. Scotland had no more colonised Shetland by the end of the eighteenth century than at the beginning.