Scotland, the Erased Nation in the World of Harry Potter: How J.K. Rowling’s Globally Celebrated & Universally Colonial Fantasy Reproduces England’s Colonial Logic & Serves as Cultural Warfare Against Scottish Self‑Determination
1/ Colonialism succeeds most profoundly not when it conquers land but when it colonises thought. Political domination becomes self-sustaining once the colonised internalise the categories of the coloniser, once the map, the book, the mirror all reflect the same colonial design. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series offers a near-perfect cultural vessel for the reproduction of England's colonial imaginary, disguised beneath the universal idioms of magic, morality, youth & adolescence. Though its reach is global, the fantasy's ideological heart beats for England & through England. Its symbolic violence unfolds nowhere more intimately than in Scotland, whose landscapes are central, yet whose nationhood is nullified. J.K. Rowling is an English colonial operative.
To deconstruct Harry Potter through the lens of colonialism, one must begin with its spatial imaginary. Hogwarts, though nestled in the Scottish Highlands, is presented as a transhistorical citadel of British wizardry with no attachment to the land it occupies. Scotland appears as terrain without people, history without nationhood, geography without sovereignty. This representational logic mirrors the classic colonial strategy: the occupied territory is emptied of political agency, turned into an aesthetic object, & subordinated to the authority of the centre. The Highlands, long romanticised by imperial tourism, become the enchanted wilderness through which English protagonists pursue their destiny. Scotland serves the narrative as a silent host; a body without a voice.
This erasure cannot be separated from Rowling’s own political interventions. Her financial & rhetorical alignment with the Better Together campaign against Scotland's independence in 2014 did not emerge from a cultural vacuum. Rowling donated £1 million to the campaign, becoming its single largest public donor. In her official statement, she claimed that nationalism offered nothing but grievance and resentment, and described the pro-independence movement as driven by emotion rather than reason. The colonised are irrational. J.K. Rowling feels superior to the Scots. (What about her colonial British unionism, a dangerous radical trans-nationalist nationalist ideology which threatens global peace & stability and still supports Scotland's colonisation?). She said that the Union was not perfect but warned that "breaking up Britain" would introduce irreversible instability. This position replicates the archetypal colonial dichotomy: rationality belongs to the centre, while feeling & fantasy belong to the periphery. The condescension embedded in her remarks, masked in liberal civility, echoes the old language of empire where the colonised were seen as incapable of mature political judgment. Her fortune, in part constructed through the symbolic erasure of Scotland in fiction, was used to prevent its reappearance in political reality. Textbook colonialism.
