THE revitalization of Scottish history in the 1960s reawakened scholarly interest in overseas connections that had lain more or less dormant since the 1930s. As a result, eighteenth-century Scots have appeared as Virginian tobacco merchants, Jamaican planters, American scholars, African explorers and slave traders, Indian nabobs, and soldiers and doctors seemingly everywhere.1 With a few notable exceptions, however, these studies of Scots overseas have often been region-specific rather than offering a broader imperial or global perspective. This ‘Scotland and …’ approach reflects the great diversity of Scottish experiences overseas, as well as the shifting imperial foci that determined which Scots went where, with what intentions, and with what results.
Part of the difficulty with a more global perspective lies in the nature of ‘British Empire’, which remained a congeries of disparate territories rather than a unified and coherent whole. Boston, Barbados, and Bengal were all key centres of British power, but empire looked very different in each of them. By the same token, not all imperial locations were equally important at all times; nor were all territories constantly part of the Empire throughout the century. The clearest example is in North America, where the Thirteen Colonies broke away from the Empire in 1776.
This chapter suggests that despite this background of diversity and instability some Scots were able nonetheless to focus a coherent global imperial vision. Imperial Scots created global portfolios of myriad overseas enterprises and opportunities that shifted seamlessly between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ empires. By so doing, rather than ‘swinging to the east’ they facilitated the global circulation of people, resources, and capital. This global enterprise is explored through Scottish activities in the Empire.
As well as locating the Scottish experience at the heart of the Empire, this chapter notes that eighteenth-century Scots did not feel themselves confined to British imperial endeavour, but sought advantage in other European empires. This facility to work through alternative imperial traditions had its roots in long-standing personal and mercantile relationships between Scots and northern Europe and Scandinavia, and in the particular circumstances of the demise of Scotland’s own independent empire at Darien on the isthmus of Panama.2
The imperial relationship was not simply about the outward projection of Scottish people, capital, and ideas, however. Scots also brought empire home. While the profitability of empire and the extent of its impact on industrialization remains a matter of historical debate, it is now clear that eighteenth-century Scotland was influenced in many and sometimes surprising ways by overseas engagements.
The eighteenth century had an inauspicious beginning for imperial Scots. The national euphoria surrounding the Darien scheme in 1695 dissipated rapidly as the Company of Scotland breathed its last, leaving resentment and vindictiveness in its wake. Darien is sometimes regarded as the desperate denouement of independent Scottish imperial ambitions. The failure of the Caledonia colony to secure Scotland’s place as a global player appeared to rush it into Union in 1707, after which Scots redirected their efforts into a new British Empire.
This notion of 1707 as a watershed is problematic for considerations of the Empire, however. There were Scots in the Americas—not counting Darien—long before the Act of Union. Perhaps 4,500 Scots went to the Caribbean before 1707, while there were Scottish settlements in East New Jersey and Carolina by the 1680s.3 Most Scots were there with English consent, but others were involved in illegal trading, frequently with the connivance of local officials. English authorities were notably irritated by Scottish smuggling, often through the Dutch Caribbean, from and to Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York in the later 1690s. The Governor of New York noted in May 1698: ‘There has been a most licentious trade with pirates, Scotland and Curaçao.’4
Moreover, as Andrew Mackillop has pointed out, the effects of Union and, in particular, of the terms of the post-Darien ‘Equivalent’, varied dramatically across different imperial spheres. While it is perfectly credible to regard 1707 as a fillip to pre-existing Scottish ambitions in the Atlantic, the Union effectively barred large-scale Scottish imperial activity in India and the East. In this formulation, the Equivalent was a pay-off brokered by the East India Company to compensate Scotland for giving up its aspirations to an eastern empire. One important result of the closure of this British route to the east was the redirection of Scottish enterprise to companies formed in Trieste, France, Ostend, and Sweden.5
That Scots sought opportunities in the imperial domains of European powers is unsurprising. Scots, as Chapter 16 in this volume makes clear, had long-standing connections with a series of European nations that were not immediately severed following the Act of Union. Nor did they necessarily turn to them only because access to the East India Company seemed restricted. For some Scots, these seemed like perfectly natural (and perhaps preferable) routes to an eastern empire. British India therefore remained a predominantly English empire run by the United Company of Merchants of England trading to the Indies. Between 1700 and 1730, only 17 of the 547 merchants and factors (agents) in its overseas stations were Scots.6
The blockage in the East began to ease in the 1720s, largely as a result of domestic British political wrangling. Under Robert Walpole’s administration, Indian patronage became part of the political management of Scotland, orchestrated at first by the Dukes of Argyll. Through the Argethalians and their managers in Scotland, a succession of young Scots found opportunities in East India Company service in return for political and electoral loyalty at home.7 At the same time, other Scots found their way to India and beyond under the cover of foreign companies. Jacobites in particular held little hope of advancement in Hanoverian Britain, especially after 1715 and 1745, and so found alternative avenues in European concerns. And once in India, as George McGilvary notes, ‘permanent residence was usually allowed in the English company’s settlements upon desertion from a rival company’.8
If control of the British Empire in the East remained (by and large) in the hands of the East India Company until the 1780s, in the West the situation was different. There, the shipment of sugar and tobacco was controlled by private entrepreneurs, as was the increasingly lucrative trade in enslaved Africans following the end of the Royal African Company’s monopoly.9 Individual migrants could flourish provided they could make it across the Atlantic, as could merchants with the goods and means to trade.
With Union and the ending of formal institutional barriers to empire in the Atlantic after 1707, Scots moved quickly to seize their new opportunities as migrants, merchants, doctors, soldiers, slave traders, plantation owners, and, significantly, as appointed imperial officials and governors. In addition to the relative freedom of access in the Atlantic, a series of other reasons help explain why 1707 had a more immediate impact on westbound enterprise. The Americas offered a wider range of opportunities for a broader spectrum of Scots. The colonies of settlement to the north—in what are now Canada and the United States—held out at least the prospect of land and prosperity for Scots of all classes. The southern tobacco-producing states of Virginia and the Carolinas offered opportunities for Scots as merchants, factors, and clerks. And further south, in the Caribbean, there was a whole range of vacancies for predominantly young male Scots managing and profiting from the plantation system and the enslavement of Africans.
For Scots not in the Empire, though, the immediate benefits of 1707 were unclear. The promised wealth of overseas enterprise was not apparent until a generation after Union. India remained relatively inaccessible, while even the might of the Tobacco Lords was not entirely evident until about the 1740s.10
In both East and West, the Empire itself also remained insecure. The vision of Britain bestriding the world as an imperial colossus was far from established in the first half of the century, nor was it something that might reasonably have been predicted at that time. As well as European imperial rivalries around the world, powerful non-European forces in North America, India, and Africa ensured that all European empires remained contingent on their political and economic support. By the 1760s, however, a series of profound shifts at home and overseas reshaped Scotland’s relationship with empire.
The period of the Seven Years War, between 1756 (or 1754 in North America) and 1763, witnessed a transformation in the scale of the British Empire and of Scottish activity in it. Coupled with major changes at home, this period, and far more so than 1707, ought to be regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of Scotland and the Empire. The scale of this global conflict, and the resulting extension of the Empire, demanded an expansion of the armed forces.11
The East India Company army grew from three thousand regular troops in 1749 to twenty-six thousand at the end of the Seven Years War, and by 1778 it numbered sixty-seven thousand. The vast majority were sepoy troops, complemented by around four thousand European soldiers and officers. It was in the officer corps that Scots were especially prominent, with as many as one in three Europeans being Scots, compared to one in eleven among the European ranks.12
In North America and the Caribbean the threat from French and Indian forces required the stationing of British Army regulars. Scottish regiments played prominent roles in many of the major set-piece battles on American soil.13 Scots were also prominent as military commanders, in both the British Army and Navy, in the American and Caribbean theatres of war.
The real significance of high-ranking Scots in an imperial context lies in their assumption of the civilian commands in colonial territories once peace returned. Across the Empire, civilian authority was increasingly vested in the hands of military commanders. In 1763 the new governments in Quebec, East and West Florida, and the Ceded Islands were handed to four Scottish governors, all of whom had recently held military commands. These particular posts relied in part on the patronage of Lord Bute, but they also represented a general trend in British thinking about the role of military men in the civilian governance of empire.14
Officers were mobile throughout the Empire and it was common for them to serve in different parts of the Empire. The trajectory of Sir Archibald Campbell of Inverneil’s career serves to illustrate the point. Inverneil is perhaps best known as the Governor of Madras between 1786 and 1789. But he began his career in the Caribbean when he served on the captured French island of Guadeloupe under another Scottish commander, Robert Melville, during the Seven Years War, before being stationed in Bengal in 1768. He then went back to the Americas, this time at the head of a 3,500-strong expedition to Georgia during the American War, before being promoted to Lieutenant Governor then Governor of Jamaica between 1781 and 1784.15 For Scots officers military service brought a global sense of their empire.
For most regular troops and especially those drafted to serve, any overseas posting was unpopular: financial considerations, separation from families, capture, and the risk of death from disease as well as war, all acted as significant demoralizing elements.16 There is evidence that highlanders signed up for the army believing that they would not be forced to serve overseas. In January 1783, just as the American War ended, the 77th Regiment, the Athol Highlanders, were told they were going to India. They mutinied at Portsmouth, refusing to be ‘like bullocks to be sold’ to the East India Company. When it transpired that another highland regiment, the 78th Seaforths, had been sent to India and then disbanded there in 1784, rather than in Scotland, it fostered a deep distrust towards military service. By the 1790s, when recruitment drives were made across Scotland, recruiters were at pains to explain that military service would be confined to Scotland, unless England was invaded. But the experience of the Athols and Seaforths remained in the popular memory. When Lord Seaforth tried to raise a new fencible regiment in the Western Isles in spring 1793, he faced serious popular opposition. In 1797, after the introduction of the Scottish Militia Act, there was widespread civil disobedience and rumours circulated in Perthshire and Stirlingshire that recruits were to be drafted into regiments for the East and West Indies, or even to be sold into slavery.17
This general anxiety was heightened by the very real dangers of military service overseas. If death and disease were constant threats, then the risk of capture by enemy forces and the accounts of it that filtered back represented both personal trauma and the continued insecurity of the Empire. Robert Gordon, a Scottish ensign, wrote of his maltreatment after being captured by the forces of Mysore in India: ‘they tore off our clothes and behaved in a most indecent manner’. Meanwhile in North America, captivity narratives by Scots officers tended to highlight the brutality of their captors in ways that were likely to frighten further potential recruits. Accusations of cannibalism—‘While they were feasting on poor Capt Robson’s body’—intentionally marked non-Europeans as ‘savage’.18
In India, the Scottish military relationship with empire was not straightforward or a wholly successful one. The growing number of Scottish officers and troops, for example, did not always cover themselves in glory. At Pollilur in September 1780, Colonel William Baillie of Dunain and his men presided over a defeat so ignominious that Indians disparaged them and Britons feared for their empire in the East.19 In the Americas, the defeats inflicted during the early years of the Seven Years War and then in the American Revolutionary War, with the loss at Yorktown in 1781 coming hard on the heels of the reverse at Pollilur, likewise resulted in heavy casualties among the disproportionately large Scottish contingents among British forces.
To the rank and file, then, imperial endeavour was not something to be welcomed uncritically by the century’s end. But for officers, imperial service in India, North America, or the Caribbean remained attractive as long as it held out the prospect of advancement. In this sense, for them the Empire was a means to an end, and in this officers had much in common with other Scots in the expanding British Empire.
Scots had long been a mobile people who looked to overseas residence, as well as soldiering or trading, as a way of progressing. Before the eighteenth century their destinations had been predominantly European, and while these locations were not altogether abandoned, the British Empire became the principal outlet for aspiring Scots. Although emigration appears largely to have been classless, particular destinations attracted Scots of different status.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the sugar colonies of the Caribbean had become the most important parts of the British Empire. It was here, especially in Jamaica and, after 1763, Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent, and Tobago, that Scots flocked in their thousands.20 This movement of people was eclipsed by those going to North America, but the relative numbers in the Caribbean is especially striking. The planter and historian Edward Long’s belief that as many as a third of the white population in Jamaica was of Scottish descent by the 1770s is often cited; and in the southern Caribbean, the land sales after the acquisition of the Windward Islands in 1763 suggest Scottish landownership amounted to between 30 and 40 per cent. Political representation was even higher. Scots were the largest national group in the Grenada Assembly for much of the final third of the eighteenth century, while Tobago saw meetings of the assembly attended only by Scots.21
That Scots were highly visible in the local affairs of the island assemblies and councils was a reflection of their position in the white communities in the Caribbean. They were to be found as plantation owners and merchants, and their employees: clerks, bookkeepers, and overseers. The proposition that Scots were prominent in medicine is now almost axiomatic, but new research has established the prominence of Scots as attorneys (i.e. those managing estates for absentee landowners, not attorneys-at-law). In these positions, Scots held positions of great responsibility, with implications not only for the owners and their sugar output, but also for the thousands of enslaved Africans over whom they wielded enormous power.22 In securing these jobs, Scots often relied on patronage extended through family and local connections.
The nature of Caribbean slave society determined which Europeans ventured to the Caribbean. The presence of hundreds of thousands of slaves, an increasing number of whom developed artisan skills, ensured that there was little demand for white labour in the eighteenth-century West Indies. The existence of slavery, allied to an absence of cheap and available land, curtailed Caribbean opportunities for Scots of artisan, labouring, and agricultural backgrounds. This was a destination for well-capitalized Scots, or for those who were literate, numerate, and with connections to potential employers. Furthermore, the Caribbean was not regarded as a place to bring up families, nor was it a healthy place to live. As a result, the vast majority of Scottish migrants to the Caribbean were young, single, and male. It is also certain that most of them had no intention of settling permanently in the West Indies: they went to the Caribbean to make money and then return.23 The West Indies were also regarded as an important investment opportunity for Scots. This was true for the merchant class, some of whom integrated their mercantile activities with plantation ownership. The gentry and aristocracy regarded the potential revenues from the Caribbean as essential to the invigoration of their fortunes at home.
It was not until the abolition campaigns of the 1780s and 1790s that widespread concern was expressed about the nature of Caribbean fortunes. In the 1760s and 1770s, in the context of anxieties about how money was being made in India, the Caribbean had been regarded as a place where ‘genteel fortunes’ could be made.24 The landed basis of plantation profits in the Caribbean elevated the perception of West Indian wealth above that derived from ‘shaking the pagoda tree’ in India. The morality of Caribbean wealth was rarely debated, and Scots who made money from the Caribbean displayed no more remorse about the abuse of African lives than any other ethnic group.
The success of Scottish activity in the Caribbean depended (as did all others) on the regularity of the supply of labour from Africa. Its importance meant that there was money to be made in slave trading. Scottish investors, captains, merchants, surgeons, and crew all worked to make the slave trade profitable. Relatively few voyages originated from Scottish ports, and many Scottish merchants chose to base their slave-trading operations in the English ports of Liverpool, Bristol, and London. These operations were also active on the African coast, where they appeared in key slaving centres. One of the best known is Bance Island, in the mouth of the Sierra Leone River.25 If anything, West Africa was even less hospitable a place than the Caribbean, and the presence of powerful African rulers ensured that European traders failed to establish anything other than toeholds along the coast. Elsewhere in eighteenth-century Africa, the numbers of Scots were similarly limited. Some Scots in Dutch service had been at the Cape since the seventeenth century; still more arrived with and in the wake of the British military during the Napoleonic Wars.26
For those Scots who went to India and the East, too, sojourns in the Empire were meant to be temporary and opportunities for large-scale migration to India were limited. Even if Scots had wanted to move there and take their chances with the climate and disease, India was never regarded as a colony of settlement, nor even, like the Caribbean, as a colony of plantations. As a result, for those not in the military the main opportunities came in either the civil administration of the East India Company, as free merchants, or as captains or crews of merchant ships. The promise of great riches—even more than the Caribbean, India was regarded as a place where vast fortunes could be acquired—lured Scots, usually well connected and often from Scotland’s gentry and even aristocratic families.27
While the ambition of Scots in the Caribbean, Africa, and India was almost uniformly to make money and to return, it did not always work out that way. Not all Scots who went into the Empire were successful; indeed for all the promised riches of an imperial career, it often turned out to be an activity fraught with risk. Profits from trade were vulnerable to fluctuations in climate, production, price, and geopolitical circumstances. For migrants in tropical locations, in particular, disease was a constant threat and mortality rates were often ruinously high. Many who went out never came home. At the same time, though, there were some who decided to stay longer, sometimes because garnering their fortune took longer than planned, and sometimes because they settled and raised families with indigenous peoples.
This general perception of Scots seeing the Empire as a temporary situation in the eighteenth century did not apply to migrants to North America, however. The demographics of Scottish emigration there suggest the movement of people determined to carve out new lives overseas. Like many other aspects of eighteenth-century empire, large-scale Scottish involvement emerged fully in the second half of the century. There were, of course, significant movements before then, but the period immediately after 1763 was marked by what some historians regard as an ‘emigration mania’ that lasted until the American War. In this period perhaps forty-five thousand Scots went to North America, out of a total of one hundred thousand across the whole century.28
Unlike to the Caribbean, emigration to North America was quite democratic. People of all social groups emigrated, as a study based on a ‘Register of Emigration’ from 1773 to 1776 noted. Among the 3,872 Scots listed in the Register, most were drawn from agricultural backgrounds, or were artisans or labourers, but some were of gentle birth while others were involved in trade. Compared to English migrants, relatively few Scots went as indentured servants and most of them came from the industrializing central belt. Highlanders, on the other hand, tended to travel in family groups and to pay their own passage. By far the most common destinations were New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. These colonies were served by major ports, but they all also offered huge swathes of territory into which Scots would fan out, the 1763 Proclamation Line notwithstanding.29
This period coincided with fundamental transformations in Scottish economic and political life, which recast social relationships across the country. In addition, a series of short-term economic shocks in the 1760s and 1770s undermined the positions of many Scots. All the passengers on the Commerce, which sailed from Greenock for New York in February 1774, cited ‘Poverty and to get Bread’ as their reasons for leaving.30 North America, to them, appeared as a vast system of outdoor relief. At the same time, however, many highlanders and lowlanders were highly organized and motivated when it came to emigration to a continent that held out the promises of land and liberty. This was not yet the desperate flight of destitute highlanders fleeing rapacious landowners: most landlords and the government were appalled by the ebb tide of people and tried to prevent it. In this period, Scots were not necessarily forced from their homes, but saw emigration as a ‘rational choice’ in the face of fundamental and unpopular change at home.31
British territory in Canada had been increased by the retention of Quebec in 1763, but before the 1780s, Scots seemed drawn only to Nova Scotia, and even then, in comparatively small numbers. After American independence, however, Canada became the principal North American destination for Scots for the remainder of the century, taking more than five times the number of immigrants compared with its now-independent neighbour. The Scottish population there was swollen, not only by migrants directly from Scotland, but also by American Loyalists of Scottish descent, who moved north back into British-owned territory.32
Across North America, Scottish arrivals found themselves in polyglot societies, where they mixed with other Europeans and, importantly, Native Americans. It is difficult to ascribe a ‘Scottish’ response to the encounter between them. For those Scots who first met Native Americans in the Seven Years War, they encountered some as allies and some as enemies aligned with the French. Against the latter, ‘Highlanders who had seen scorched-earth tactics applied to their homelands in 1746 applied them in Cherokee country in 1760 and 1761.’33 To Scots like this, William Robertson’s Eurocentric view of Native American society as ‘savage’ seemed familiar. Indeed, Scots were much like any other European settlers and traders in their racialized and superior attitudes to Native Americans. Fur traders often took little account of Native American ritual custom and practice, while land-hungry settlers apparently felt little remorse (nor saw any irony) in clearing Native Americans from their traditional homelands. Civilians taken captive by Native Americans were equally as unsympathetic as their military counterparts.34
These examples serve as a useful corrective against any romanticized notions of a particular empathy between Scots colonists and the colonized Native Americans, but they do not tell the whole story. Some Scots, and highlanders in particular, engaged in cultural practices that if not necessarily familiar to Native Americans were at least comprehensible to them. In areas dominated by the fur trades and in the colonial back country, encounters between some Scots and Native Americans resulted in the emergence of new cultural forms and Metis (mixed-descent) populations. Among the latter were some significant players, not the least of whom was Alexander McGillivary, leader of the Creek Indians in colonial Georgia during the American War, who was the son of Lachlan McGillivary, a Scottish trader, and a Metis woman of French and Creek descent.35
For many Scots, as indeed for other Britons, the Empire was about commerce and, bolstered by the protection of Navigation Acts and the British military, they set about accumulating wealth. Merchants are often associated with particular colonial commodities, whether tobacco, sugar, or slaves. Houstoun and Company of Glasgow, for example, dominated the importation of sugar using a series of agents in a number of Caribbean islands, while the ‘Tobacco Lords’ of Glasgow have been the subject of meticulous scholarship. There were strong connections between them, with Glasgow’s increasingly powerful mercantile community sharing experience and intelligence, as well as joint-financing and intermarrying, which in some respects allowed (at least in the Atlantic) a ‘Glasgow style’ of trading to emerge. This was based on ‘store’ rather than ‘commission’ trading, and utilized carefully selected agents in the colonies, while control remained located on the Clyde. In this way, Glasgow merchants grew rich on colonial trade, and in so doing provided employment opportunities for hundreds of other Scots in the American south and the Caribbean.36 Other Scots, instead of basing their operations in Scotland, moved to positions of advantage in England, with Liverpool, Bristol, and London being the major destinations. From these ports, they embarked on trading ventures to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, facilitating the movement of colonial commodities, British manufactures, and the enforced displacement of Africans.
Yet while merchants can be identified as Indian merchants, ‘tobacco lords’, or sugar merchants, many of them had a far more global sense of their activities. The Baillies of Dochfour, for example, are associated with the Atlantic, and were renowned as traders in sugar and slaves. They were based originally in the Caribbean but shifted to Bristol and London by the 1780s as their operations expanded. At the same time, their near relations, the Baillies of Dunain, ventured east, to India and to the African coast. When James Baillie wrote suggesting India ‘for a change’ in 1775, it did not mark a shift but a widening in his imperial vision. This idea of a global, familial empire was not unique to the Baillies. Countless Scottish families developed interests that implied a global understanding of empire and transcended what historians have since regarded as shifts from west to east. Among the most important families were six of the seven sons of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall. In the Atlantic world, George Johnstone became Governor of East Florida in 1763, William acquired Caribbean interests through his marriage into the Pulteney family, and Alexander acquired the 1,000-acre Baccaye plantation in Grenada, which he renamed Westerhall, and which was valued at over £54,000 sterling in 1770. In India, meanwhile, John Johnstone amassed a fortune of £300,000, his brother Gideon also went there, while the youngest brother, Patrick, died in the ‘Black Hole’ at Calcutta in 1756. Six sons of this noble family thus made their ways in the Empire concurrently in the East and West. The career of Alexander Johnstone is particularly revealing. He started out in India before being dismissed from Company service in 1767.37 Did he know this was coming? Perhaps his acquisition of the Grenadian plantation in December 1766 suggests he did. In any event, his imperial movement was a swing to the West not the East.
It is clear that thousands of Scots seized one or more of the myriad opportunities overseas. Yet these prospects were open to all Britons. Why were Scots, in particular, so well positioned and so willing to seize them in the years after the Seven Years War? By the 1760s, the prospect of wealth in the Empire was apparent: Glasgow was being transformed by the tobacco lords, while the riches of the East seemed inexhaustible. To a people with education and aspiration, but relatively few domestic opportunities, empire appeared to be a panacea. For their English counterparts, patronage systems created more chances at home and this fostered a greater reluctance among them to take a chance on an imperial career. This should not be overplayed: the Empire was not short of English adventurers; but empire was more important to a greater proportion of Scots.
In essence, this is what Walpole had realized as early the 1720s when his use of Indian patronage became central to the political management of Scotland. In luring Scottish politicians with the wealth of the Indies, the Hanoverian regime also drew the Scottish elite closer to it.38 In this sense India, along with visible incomes from the sugar, cotton, and tobacco trades, helped unite a British elite. It did not, of course, do it completely or immediately: the Jacobite rising of 1745, if nothing else, signalled that Union was not to be taken for granted. By the 1760s, however, the Jacobite threat to the stability of Britain had diminished and the performance of Scottish (and especially highland) troops in the Seven Years War went some way to reducing the distrust of Scots. Scottophobia lingered, but triumphs like Quebec, with the very visible presence of highland soldiers, suggested that overseas endeavours were becoming British. For some Jacobites, empires (including those of other European powers) were significant in their ‘rehabilitation’ as Britons. Stints as officers, or planters, or merchants overseas allowed them to leave Scotland as dangerous, seditious Jacobites and to return as wealthy, imperial Britons. Empire profoundly reshaped the relationship of Scots with Britain: in some cases it made being British worthwhile; in others it enabled a mobility in mainland Britain, through which many more Scots settled in England than English people did in Scotland. Over time, the wealth and influence accruing to imperial Scots created a cycle (which Scottophobic satirists regarded as venial rather than virtuous) in which imperial standing enhanced positions in British civic, political, and economic life, which in turn enabled more and more Scots to seek advancement overseas.
The Empire had practical and visible effects in all parts of Scotland and across all walks of life. The wealth of empire and the impact of its profits have long been debated. Adam Smith, in an early salvo, argued that ‘under the present system of management … Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies’.39 In the twentieth century, successive generations debated this point, with Eric Williams proclaiming that profits from slavery bankrolled British industrialization, and others claiming that money invested in empire produced a lower return than it would have done at home.40 That said, and for all Smith’s misgivings, the authors of the 1791 account of Inverness in the Statistical Account of Scotland noted the ‘great influx of money from the East and West Indies’ that contributed to ‘the increasing prosperity of the burgh’.41 Indeed, while more scholarship is needed in this area, there is a growing corpus of evidence suggesting that powerful causal links can be made between imperial enterprise and economic, social, and cultural change in Scotland.42
Atlantic merchants invested in industry and often in ways that related to the commodities they imported. This integration of activities meant that sugar merchants were often investors in sugar refiners, while those importing cotton had interests in manufacturers in west-central Scotland. By investing in this way, some imperial Scots were quite explicit about what they hoped to achieve by linking Scottish and overseas interests. In 1766 James Stirling of Keir considered making the enslaved on his Jamaican estate wear tartan because ‘it will help encourage our Woollen manufactory’.43
The Empire was important not just for what was imported: long before the extraordinary industrial output of the later nineteenth century, the Empire provided an important export market for Scottish commodities. Between 1765 and 1795 there was a tenfold increase in exports of linen to Jamaica, where coarse cloth was in demand as clothing for enslaved Africans. By 1796, almost two-thirds of all Scottish linen exports went to Jamaica.44 The slave economies also fuelled demand for Scottish herring. The overseas markets drove further industrial development. Industries ancillary to textiles—kelp and chemicals, for example—grew with them. At the same time, new investments were proposed. John Campbell’s suggestion in 1774 of a canal linking Inverness to the west through the Great Glen was inspired explicitly by a desire to facilitate exports of Moray Firth fish and imports of colonial commodities.45
For all these industrial developments, investment in land remained a prime concern for imperial Scots. Gentility did not come instantly with the acquisition of land, but without it, was even less likely to be conferred on West India merchants and Indian nabobs. Imperial revenue was also important for those who already owned estates. For the latter group, the shifts in Scottish agricultural practice and the desire to construct and remodel country houses required wealth that only empire could bring.
Making these investments possible were significant capital flows, both in terms of revenue coming into Scotland and in the generation of credit for overseas ventures. George McGilvary has highlighted the injection of eighteenth-century Indian wealth into land, industry, and finance, and has estimated, albeit tentatively, that between £500,000 and £750,000 was invested annually. Similar patterns are apparent for Caribbean and North American revenue, as merchants and planters reinvested their imperial wealth. Many arguments about the impact of investment are based on case studies, from which wider macro-economic arguments are made. In this they remain—as McGilvary puts it—‘largely conjectural’.46 The general contours of the thesis are nevertheless convincing: the challenge for historians is to quantify accurately these capital injections.
Just as imperial wealth came into Scotland, so too did Scottish finance support overseas ventures. It is clear from the activities of Glasgow sugar and tobacco merchants, two of the most dynamic imperial sectors, that the generation of capital was a local affair. The emphasis on London as a financial centre is well known, and there is evidence of Amsterdam providing imperial capital, especially after 1772, but for Scottish Atlantic merchants, west-central Scotland remained the primary source of finance until the French Revolutionary War. Even more significantly, it was not banks to which merchants turned, but to investors from among the mercantile and manufacturing classes. In this way Scots without an otherwise direct link developed a stake in empire.47
It is easier to suggest some of the social and cultural resonances of imperial investment than to measure its economic impact. Imperial wealth clearly affected the nature of the Scottish elite. The emergence of Scottish imperial and industrial ventures as partnerships between merchants, manufacturers, and landowners indicates a growing coalescence within, and reshaping, of Scottish elites. One effect of imperial wealth, and the prominence of the mercantile class among Scottish politicians, was to enhance their standing in the Scottish elite, previously the preserve of the legal and intellectual establishment.
This process was felt throughout society. The ‘improvement’ of Scottish estates was significant not just for the elite, but for the tenantry whose lives were materially affected. The increasingly commercialized view of land—and the desire for profit—led not just to clearances but to a recasting of relationships and demands across the agricultural sector.
Other walks of Scottish society were reshaped too. Education in the new Scottish academies wore a distinctly imperial aspect, both in terms of investments in their construction and the curricula they offered.48 These schools, like the rest of Scotland, were also home to black people of Scottish descent. The immigration of (particularly) non-Europeans is now, of course, a matter of public controversy. The history of Scotland and the Empire suggests that notions of a previously ‘white’ country are misplaced. As well as a series of well-known Black Scots—the radical Robert Wedderburn, son of a Jacobite Scot in Jamaica being perhaps the most high profile—many ordinary people of African, Indian, and Scottish descent lived and worked and were educated across the country.49 Their presence challenges historians to think carefully about who they regard as ‘Scottish’ in late eighteenth-century Scotland.
The burgeoning scholarship in this field has illuminated as never before the range and vitality of connections between Scotland and the Empire. There is the promise of future research on India, the fur trade, and a host of other themes. Yet the real challenge is not just to explore the sectors in which Scots operated overseas, but to consider how Scottish practices and experiences explain how empires worked. There are a series of opportunities for meaningful comparisons with key English imperial regions that mirror Scotland’s mercantile connections and industrial or financial hinterlands, like the north-west or the south-west. This would also answer some occasional queries by non-Scottish historians about the typicality of the Scottish experience.50 But if we are properly to understand Scotland and empire (and not just the British iteration), and to consider Scotland as an exemplar of overseas entrepreneurialism, more detailed comparisons of the role of Scots in the British and other empires might allow a clearer sense of the precise ways in which Scots shaped empires. Moreover, comparisons with regions of other countries—notably in France and Spain—offer real opportunities to extend the notion of empire as a creator of new identities and thereby to contextualize the emergence of coherent European states marked by significant regional divergence.
Calloway, Colin, White People, Indians and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford, 2008).
Devine, T. M., Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2003).
Hamilton, Douglas J., Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005).
Hancock, David, Citizens of the World (Cambridge, 1995).
Harper, Marjory, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus (London, 2004).
Landsman, Ned C., ed., Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg, PA, 2001).
McGilvary, George K., East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 2008).
MacKenzie, John M., with Dalziel, Nigel R., The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester, 2007).
Watt, Douglas, The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 2007).
Whyte, Iain, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh, 2006).