IF we look for evidence of the impact of Empire on Victorian Scotland, we can find it everywhere: in offering economic opportunities and imperial careers; in patterns of migration from Scotland; in changing patterns of consumption and in advertising; in the military contribution of Scots and the iconic imagery of the highland soldier; in the commitment of churches to foreign missions; in the achievements of famous Scots whether as colonial administrators, generals, or missionaries; in commercial, industrial, and business connections; in the press, periodicals, and literature; and in politics. Home and Empire exerted mutual influences on one another, as Scottish culture informed the practice of Scots abroad, and they in turn transmitted their images of Empire back home. This interconnectedness is central to understanding the impact of Empire on Scotland in the Victorian period, and how multifaceted this impact was, manifesting itself within economic, political, military, religious, social, and cultural spheres.
Debates on the economics of the British Empire in the nineteenth century have been preoccupied with the extent to which economic motives fuelled imperial expansion, whether there were distinct phases of imperialism driven by different economic imperatives, and whether the costs of Empire outweighed the economic benefits to Britain.1 While many of these questions remain unresolved, at a general level there is a consensus that Empire was significant to Britain’s economic development in the nineteenth century, but not dominant given the advantages conferred on Britain by early industrialization and by pursuit of a free-trade regime from the 1840s. Historians of Scotland have tended to accord Empire a more central role in the country’s economic fortunes in this period, although limitations of data prevent any fully systematic comparison.
Scotland’s post-Union engagement with the ‘first’ British Empire facilitated its transformation into an industrial economy, since ‘colonial profits helped prime the engines of Scottish industrialization’,2 most notably via the American tobacco and Caribbean sugar trades, and Scottish involvement in the East India Company. The empire provided markets for Scottish products, while the Caribbean was a source of cheap cotton for the growing Scottish textile industry, which dominated the first phase of industrialization. Some of the profits from the tobacco and sugar trades were invested in domestic production, and also went into the acquisition of landed estates, where landlords were often active ‘improvers’ of agriculture. By the 1830s, Scotland was entering a period of rapid industrialization, dominated by the heavy industries in the west of the country. Its natural resources of coal and iron ore were central to this phase of industrialization, aided by technological innovation, urbanization, and availability of labour, and improving communication and transport networks. The expanding engineering and shipbuilding industries served both imperial and wider international markets, as well as providing much of the transportation for those markets in the form of locomotives and ships. By 1913, Glasgow and its hinterland manufactured a substantial share of British-produced locomotives, rolling stock, shipping tonnage, and steel, with many of these products being exported to the empire.3
Textiles continued to play a role in the Scottish economy. The cotton industry suffered a long period of decline, effectively disappearing by the First World War, with the exception of more specialized products such as the cotton thread of which the Paisley firm of Coats became a major international producer.4 The textile success story of nineteenth-century Scotland was the Dundee-based jute industry, which arose from the combination of Bengal-grown jute and whale oil from Dundee whalers, allowing the fibre to be spun in factory conditions.5 Phenomenally successful though this industry was, becoming the major source of employment in the city and generating high profits for the owners, it reached its peak relatively quickly. Factory production of jute in Dundee had begun in 1838, while the first jute mill in Calcutta was set up in 1855. By the 1890s Calcutta had become the dominant centre of production of jute sacking and hessian cloth. Calcutta mills were able to meet the world demand for jute at lower prices than elsewhere. Dundee manufacturers turned to the production of finer and more specialized lines of jute, but the industry as a whole had begun its decline. The manufacturers’ hope that the British government would intervene to protect them from Indian competition was never realized.
Trade with the empire was important to the Scottish economy throughout the period, and increasingly so towards the end of the century. As a proportion of tonnage shipped from the Clyde, exports to the empire accounted for about 39 per cent between the mid-1880s and the first decade of the twentieth century, while the share of imports from the empire for the same period was around 31 per cent.6 This would certainly have been higher than for the Scottish economy as a whole. Although not comparing like with like, it can be set against British figures, showing that the share of exports going to the empire for the period 1909–13 was 35.4 per cent, while the share of imports coming from the empire for the same period was 24.9 per cent.7 Glasgow, ‘deeply concerned with the trade side of imperialism’,8 saw trade to India and the Far East increase after mid-century. Further expansion of trade followed the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, with India becoming ever more important as a shipping destination. Trade to Australia and New Zealand increased from the 1850s, while the discovery of gold in South Africa in the 1880s led to a rise in shipping traffic. As well as locomotives and other products of the steel and engineering industries, goods such as beer and whiskies also enjoyed an increasing share of imperial markets. MacEwans were exporting beer to Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, and South America by the 1860s. Tennents also had large colonial sales, and in 1876 registered the Tennents’ Red ‘T’ trademark for sole use throughout the British Empire.9
The major export-oriented industries of Victorian Scotland were only part of its economy, and other spheres of economic activity also had many interconnections with the empire. Scottish financial services extended into colonial operations, such as investments in colonial banks. Furthermore, Scotland supplied many trained personnel to staff the imperial banking system.10 By the 1880s, ‘Indian and colonial banks had established a network of branches and agencies throughout Scotland’.11 Standard Life’s operations throughout the empire were initiated in the 1850s, while other Edinburgh-based insurance companies also operated on a global scale.
Economic growth from the 1830s onwards generated surpluses of profits and savings that were available for investment. Several companies formed in Aberdeen in the 1830s for investments in Australia provide an early example of colonial investment. However, this was to really take off from the 1870s. North America was the major destination of Scottish capital, with heavy investment in US and Canadian railways, but Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Ceylon were also of interest to investors. As well as railways, money was invested in agricultural concerns such as stock-raising in Australia and New Zealand, mining ventures in India and South Africa, and tea plantations in India, promoted, for example, by Finlay, Muir, and Co. Estimates of Scottish foreign investment have put this as rising from around £60 million in 1870 to about £500 million in 1914, which would have represented a disproportionate share of total UK foreign lending.12 More recent research by Christopher Schmitz has provided lower estimates for the total volume of overseas investment by Scottish residents, directly from Scotland and through intermediaries in London, suggesting that this rose from around £20 million in 1867 to £85 million in 1890 and £223 million by 1913, although he recognizes that the volume could have been higher.13 Investment activity was not restricted to wealthy entrepreneurs. The Dundee investment trusts launched by Robert Fleming in 1873, for example, were a successful mechanism for small investors, channelling significant sums of capital for the construction of railways, primarily in the USA, but also in Canada, Cuba, and Argentina.14 In Edinburgh substantial amounts of capital were similarly raised from small investors, through the establishment and management of investment trusts by Edinburgh legal firms.15 While the majority of small investors were middle class, they were not exclusively male professionals, as there were also female and working-class investors. Such patterns of investment were often facilitated by the links of Scottish emigrant communities to Scots at home.
Imperial trade also had an impact on patterns of consumption in nineteenth-century Scotland, a topic as yet little investigated. Tea became a drink of mass consumption during the century, aided by the popularity of the temperance movement and its demand for alternatives to alcohol. Access to tea from China had been one of the motives leading to British aggression against China in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60, although continuing anxiety about access to Chinese markets led to the development of tea plantations in India and Ceylon from the 1860s. Scottish entrepreneurs were active in this field, from Finlay’s tea plantations in India and Ceylon, established in the 1870s and 1880s, to Thomas Lipton’s retail empire started in Glasgow in 1871, at the centre of which were his innovations in the marketing of tea.16 The invention of refrigeration for longdistance shipping of goods brought Australian and New Zealand meat and dairy products to Scots’ dinner tables—the first cargo of meat from New Zealand arrived in an Albion line ship in 1882.17 Advertising of imperial commodities frequently stressed their colonial origins, for example, Camp Coffee. This product, produced by Campbell Paterson, was given a distinctive logo of a Sikh soldier serving ‘his master the British army officer’, a kilted Gordon Highlander.18 Furthermore, imperial experience informed fashion and material culture. Paisley became a major centre of production of the eponymous patterned shawls in the first half of the nineteenth century, the popular design being copied from Kashmir silks and shawls.19 Such habits of consumption were no doubt very similar to those elsewhere in Britain, but it would be of interest to investigate how Scottish importers, retailers, and commentators on consumption and fashion represented the imperial connection.
The imperial dimension of Scottish economic growth brought many benefits to the Scottish business class, and the empire increased in importance for both markets and investment towards the turn of the century. This no doubt consolidated the growing enthusiasm for imperialism, manifested also in militarism and missionary support. Yet much remains to be done to investigate how the entrepreneurs, merchants, and financiers who were most active in imperial spheres thought about Empire or whether they were influential in shaping public opinion in favour of imperialism. As is true of Britain generally, the empire played only a part in wider international economic relations, and the interests of industrialists and investors were often not tied exclusively to the notion of Empire. Some companies and individuals, however, have come to be particularly associated with imperialism, whether the ‘imperialism of free trade’ or the ‘scramble for Africa’. The entrepreneurs William Jardine and James Matheson, for example, operating on the boundaries of the formal empire to extend British economic influence in China, were instrumental in pushing the British government into the First Opium War and acquisition of Hong Kong.20 William Mackinnon, with his shipping and other commercial operations in East Africa, lobbied for British acquisition of territories in the region, thus participating in the ‘processes of “informal imperialism”’.21
Mackinnon’s career also adds weight to critiques of Peter Cain and Antony Hopkins’s ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis, which seeks to explain the character of late nineteenth-century British imperialism through the political and economic influence of a specific class of financiers based in the south-east of England.22 As Forbes Munro has argued, Mackinnon fostered a business network that sustained British political influence both within and beyond imperial frontiers, through its presence in Calcutta, as well as Glasgow and London, with London ‘merely one link in a chain of commercial cities across the world’.23 The question of the political influence of Scottish businessmen with imperial interests thus deserves further scrutiny. Gordon Stewart has argued that Dundee jute interests lacked the political backing that Lancashire cotton magnates could drum up, but commercial, industrial, and financial interests in Glasgow and Edinburgh were likely to have been better placed. It is notable that successful entrepreneurs often had political ambitions, albeit less frequently in Parliament than within civic government, and many successful businessmen carried influence within political parties whether or not they held political office. A number of cases of imperial entrepreneurs entering the House of Commons can be cited, however, including Jardine, Matheson, and Kirkman Finlay.24 The latter, for example, subsequent to his parliamentary career, played a leading role as a member of the Glasgow East India Association in campaigning for free trade and an end to the East India Company’s monopoly in trade with China in the early 1830s.25
Scotland’s form of industrial development in the nineteenth century has in retrospect been criticized for its narrow base and export-led character.26 It has been argued that too little was done with the capital accumulated through industrial enterprises to diversify into home-based industries, or even to reinvest at home. One factor contributing to this was the potential for higher rates of profit to be generated by the export of capital overseas. Another factor was the limited production of consumer goods for home consumption, as the low wages of Scotland’s unskilled working classes led to insufficient capacity in domestic consumption. This low-wage economy also reinforced Scotland’s tradition of migration, as many Scots went south, or overseas to the USA and British colonies in search of higher wages and better opportunities, constituting a movement of labour on an unprecedented scale.27 There were costs associated with this pattern of development as well as benefits. The narrow economic base was to prove disastrous in the long run, and the wealth generated was neither evenly distributed nor utilized productively at home. While industrialists, including those whose fortunes were owed to Empire, contributed some of their wealth to philanthropy, to founding schools, hospitals, or amenities such as parks, or to support for foreign missions, they showed little interest in the improvement of working-class conditions. Lack of investment in housing, for example, has been seen as an indictment of the industrial class in nineteenth-century Scotland.28 In this sense the profitability of empire-generated industries contributed to a very uneven distribution of wealth in Scotland, and to a high social cost to the labour without which such wealth could not have been created.
The British Empire provided employment for many Scots, whether as migrants to colonial territories or as part of the apparatus of imperial governance. Not least among these in numerical importance was service in the imperial army.29 Scots had a tradition of serving as mercenaries in European armies—in Sweden, Poland, Russia, and the Netherlands—although there had been a reorientation away from northern Europe to military service across the Atlantic by the late seventeenth century.30 Increasing engagement with the English military-fiscal state provided greater opportunities for Scots in the army.31 This had already been facilitated by the 1603 Union of the Crowns and the Union of 1707, but it was the post-1745 period that witnessed a substantial increase in the number of Scots in the British Army. Among other things this served as a means whereby former Jacobites could rehabilitate themselves, while the incorporation of highland Scots in the British Army was seen as crucial to the maintenance of the Union and to internal security within the British state.
Scots were contributing disproportionately to the ranks of the British and East India Company armies by the late eighteenth century, and in the earlier part of the nineteenth century were still contributing disproportionately to the British Army. In 1830 Scotland contributed 13.5 per cent of the forces of the British Army, with only 10 per cent of Britain’s population.32 However, by 1886 the proportion of men contributed by Scotland to the British Army had declined to 8.1 per cent.33 Indeed, by the 1830s and 1840s Scottish regiments had started recruiting outside Scotland.34 By 1878, of nineteen ‘nominally Scottish’ regiments, only three, all highland, recruited as many as 60 per cent of their officers and men from Scotland.35 Thus highland regiments recruited from the Lowlands and elsewhere, and lowland regiments recruited from England and Ireland.
Despite declining levels of recruitment to the army from Scotland in the nineteenth century, paradoxically Scottish regiments came to enjoy an ever higher public profile and popular acclaim. This was a consequence of the prominent role played by Scottish regiments in conflicts in the Victorian era, from the Crimean War in Europe in the 1850s to several colonial conflicts, for example, the suppression of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ (1857–8), the Asante war in West Africa (1873–4), the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–81), Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt (1882), and the South African War of 1899–1902.36 Regiments such as the Gordon Highlanders, the Black Watch, and the Seaforth Highlanders were praised for their bravery in combat, though the corollary of such fighting spirit was often a ruthlessness in punitive reprisals. But it was not only their military prowess that made Scots stand out. Highland uniforms drew the attention of war artists and photographers, while the newly developing practice of war reporting from the front in the newspaper press added to the glamour of the highland warrior. So entrenched was this image to become that at the time of the army reorganization of 1881 lowland regiments were also ordered to wear ‘tartan “trews” and highland-style doublets’.37
If levels of recruitment to the army did not tally with the popularity of the image of the soldier, the popular militarism of nineteenth-century Scotland did ultimately generate a more enthusiastic response to enlistment. In 1914 Scots signed up to fight more readily than did the English, Welsh, or Irish.38 One factor contributing to this response was the strength of the volunteer movement in Victorian Scotland. Launched in 1859, the volunteer movement produced twice as many volunteers per head of the population in Scotland than any other part of the United Kingdom.39 In Edinburgh, for example, this included separate Rifle Volunteer Companies of advocates, solicitors, bankers, merchants, and university staff, while in Glasgow accountants and journalists also formed separate companies.
The volunteer movement played its part in the South African War, which involved not only regular army regiments but also auxiliary forces such as the Militia, Volunteers, and Imperial Yeomanry, resulting in an ‘extensive involvement’ of ‘citizen soldiers’ from Scotland.40 As elsewhere in Britain, the South African War polarized political opinion in Scotland, leading to bitter divisions and public demonstrations by supporters on both sides of the pro-government and pro-Boer divide, which on occasion deteriorated into riots.41 The troops themselves, however, were not a target of protest, often being welcomed home by enthusiastic crowds. Indeed, the South African War came to be memorialized the length and breadth of Scotland. This continued to feed imperialist sentiment, which contributed to the levels of enlistment in 1914 and 1915. The success of the volunteer movement, reorganized into the Territorial Force by 1914, resulted in many middle-class, white-collar, and skilled working-class men signing up, groups that had not previously responded to appeals for recruits.
In the nineteenth century the popular militarism of Scottish society was not so much reflected in consistently high levels of recruitment to the army but in participation in the volunteer movement and uniformed youth organizations, and by celebrations of Scottish military success within the empire. This resulted from the growing links of army to community, and from the circulation and reproduction of the imagery of Scottish military valour. The volunteer movement, for example, served to link the army to the largely urban communities from which it was drawn. At the same time the army reforms of the 1880s strengthened the local and regional identities of regiments. Furthermore, while military service itself was an exclusively masculine pursuit, soldiers often had wives and families, some of whom accompanied them in their postings to colonial territories,42 or with whom they communicated by letter if they remained at home, while there were various veterans’ and welfare organizations providing support to ex-servicemen and their families. Women could also take pride in Scottish military success,43 and find attractions in the image of the soldier hero, and they turned out to see troops off or welcome them home.
While the conflicts being fought occurred in places remote from Scotland, the general public at home were well supplied with accounts of the actions of Scottish soldiers within the empire. As Edward Spiers makes evident, this was achieved by a variety of means, from the direct communications of soldiers to family and friends at home, the publication of memoirs, newspaper accounts, artistic representations in the form of paintings and prints, and in popular forms of entertainment such as song, music hall, and theatre.44 For example, Piper Findlater, the hero of the storming of the Dargai Heights on the North-West Frontier (1897), became a music-hall celebrity, touring England, Ireland, and Scotland. This widespread consciousness of the army’s role in Empire was reinforced through the links of regiments to communities at home, through the volunteer movement, and through uniformed youth organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade and Boy Scouts. In this sense militarism came to be embedded in communities across Scotland, and ultimately evoked the ready response to enlistment in the First World War. Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century the identification of Scots with the British Empire and its defence had come to assume a prominent role in the national consciousness.
If the army was, numerically, the most significant source of employment for Scots in the British Empire, several other occupations offered the possibility of imperial careers, particularly for the educated professionals graduating from Scottish universities. Across a range of occupations Scots played a part in shaping the life of the empire, whether as emigrants in colonies of settlement or as ‘sojourners’ in colonial territories in the service of the imperial state, in the armed forces, colonial administration, or in medical service, or building the infrastructure of the empire as engineers and technicians. For some imperial careers, the significance lay not so much in the numbers pursuing them but rather in the capacity to achieve distinction on the imperial stage, and in the position individuals occupied within social and political networks connecting Empire to metropole. From the ranks of colonial administrators, explorers, and missionaries, for example, emerged prominent and celebrated personalities, whose high public profile further contributed to the idea that Scotland was making a notable contribution to the empire.
By the late eighteenth century, Scots had gained a direct route of access to positions in the East India Company through the system of patronage, within which the most powerful patron was Henry Dundas. Subsequently, Scots’ share of positions within the Indian Civil Service (following the end of East India Company rule in 1858) was lower, but remained substantial. In mid-century a system of competitive examination for entry to the Indian Civil Service (and to other branches of the civil service) was introduced. While the Northcote Trevelyan reforms were intended to increase the proportion of civilians who had an Oxbridge background, this effect took some time to achieve, and both Scots and Irish continued to perform well within the competitive system.45
Scots achieved prominence as senior colonial administrators, making up a third of colonial Governors General between 1850 and 1939.46 Family dynasties were apparent in such careers, for example, the Elgins, father and son, who served, among other things, as viceroys in India, with the latter subsequently being appointed as Colonial Secretary in Campbell-Bannerman’s government in 1905. The Mintos, great-grandfather and great-grandson, were Governors General in Bengal and Canada respectively, with the latter also serving as Viceroy of India.47 Movement between senior postings in different territories was a common pattern in administrators’ careers, for example between Governor Generalship of Canada and Viceroyship of India, the latter recognized as the most important appointment within the empire. The empire thus helped to shore up the position of the Scots landed gentry. From the mid-eighteenth century, when access to positions in London was limited, colonial careers helped to incorporate the aristocracy into the British state as army officers and as colonial civil servants.48 This pattern persisted throughout the nineteenth century, maintaining the status of the aristocracy as their power at home declined both economically and politically. The imperial careers of Scottish peers were a source of pride to many Scots, and ‘the rising sentiment of popular imperialism stamped the role of the peerage in the consciousness of many’.49
One group of Scottish professionals with a highly visible role in Empire was missionaries. Foreign-mission societies appeared in Scotland with the establishment in 1796 of the Glasgow Missionary Society and the Edinburgh-based Scottish Missionary Society.50 Following endorsement of foreign missions by the Church of Scotland in 1824, and the subsequent energetic take-up of missions by the Free Church of Scotland and the United Presbyterian Church in the 1840s, foreign missions came to be of perennial interest among churchgoers. The number of missionaries in the field grew from a tiny handful at the beginning of the nineteenth century to several hundred by the end of the century. Scottish missionary figures were celebrated not just in Scotland but across the Protestant and English-speaking world, for example, Alexander Duff, James Stewart, Mary Slessor, and Robert Laws. David Livingstone, the best known of all Scots missionaries, was an employee of the London Missionary Society, like his celebrated Scottish father-in-law, Robert Moffat. Both were nonetheless acclaimed in Scotland as missionary heroes, located within a missionary tradition seen as fulfilling the spirit of John Knox’s reformation. Livingstone owed his fame as much to his explorations as to his missionary work, though he himself always stressed his missionary aims. While his achievements in exploration were exceptional, his qualifications as both minister and doctor, and his scientific interests, were less so. Several missionaries undertook expeditions to territories as yet unknown to Europeans, and their findings on geographical phenomena, geological formations, flora and fauna, and so on, were presented to scientific gatherings or published as scientific papers.
Missionaries were the emissaries of the churches at home, and in this sense enjoyed a special relationship to communities there. Supported by donations from Scottish churchgoers, and managed by foreign-mission boards of the Presbyterian churches, they were answerable to the Scottish churches and contractually obliged to send information for dissemination at home and to address congregations and public meetings when on furlough. The ultimate consequence of this was the acclamation of individual missionaries as heroic figures and the representation of the Presbyterian foreign-mission movement as a specifically Scottish contribution to the empire’s ‘civilizing mission’. Missionaries thus played a key role in shaping the perceptions of Empire and of colonial peoples among Scots at home throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.
The scientific activities of missionaries and others contributed to the imperial project of mapping, cataloguing, and codifying the territories, flora and fauna, and peoples of the empire. While the creation of this ‘imperial archive’ can be seen as a technique of management and control, it also acted as a catalyst for the flowering of scientific endeavour and for the application of technical skills across the empire. Scots played a notable part in this, as explorers, cartographers, doctors, botanists, geologists, linguists, and so on.51 Scottish universities were central to this, both through the volume of graduates being produced—which necessitated a proportion seeking careers outside Scotland—and through having a curriculum that provided the knowledge and skills relevant to the pursuit of scientific research and codification. John Hargreaves has indicated the extent to which graduates of Aberdeen University made their mark on the empire, though we still await detailed studies of other Scottish universities’ links to it.52 Over time the education of overseas students from British colonies was to become an additional vehicle for transmission of Scottish intellectual values to the empire. The strength of such links was not lost on contemporary observers. Edinburgh University, as the former prime minister the Earl of Rosebery declared in 1908, ‘was the assiduous mother and foster-mother of the builders of the Empire’.53
It was not only through economic activities, political, military, or other imperial careers that Scots demonstrated their engagement with Empire in the Victorian period. Civil society in Scotland also manifested a lively interest in the empire, through a variety of forms of organization, events, and cultural phenomena. Indeed the first significant civil-society movement that arose as a response to Empire, the abolitionist movement, had emerged in Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, in the late eighteenth century. Following abolition of the slave trade throughout the empire in 1807, the anti-slavery movement in Scotland experienced two further phases of intense activity—firstly, from the 1820s onwards the campaign for abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire gained in strength, while subsequently Scots mobilized in support of the abolition of slavery in the USA.54 There were many overlaps in membership between anti-slavery societies and foreign-mission committees, and continuing opposition to slavery was manifested in the aim of eradicating slave trading by Arabs in Africa, which contributed to enthusiasm for missions in East and Central Africa. A particularly significant dimension of the foreign-mission movement was its capacity actively to engage people across Scotland. For some churchgoers their interest in missions would have consisted of little more than passive consumption of sermons or addresses. Others, however, participated in organizational networks across Scotland, through systems of church organization for mission support, or through Ladies’ Associations and non-denominational societies such as the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society. They showed a keen interest in developments within the mission field, put great efforts into fund-raising, attended public meetings to hear missionaries speak about their work, and took part in campaigns, such as the lobbying of the government in 1888 to make Nyasaland [Malawi] a Protectorate, in order to ensure the security of the Scottish missions there.55
Philanthropic and religious impulses proved capable of sustaining organizations over the longer term, and represented the most significant organized forms of engagement with Empire by Scots at home. However, other organizations also demonstrated an interest in Empire, imperial affairs, and imperialism itself—ranging from learned societies to imperial propaganda organizations. The impact that the experience of Empire had on the development of scientific knowledge met a ready audience at home, though how extensively this was the case remains a matter for investigation. The Edinburgh Botanical Society founded in 1836, for example, had members in imperial territories and collected specimens from abroad. The Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS) was founded in 1884 at time of rising imperialist sentiment, and in its early decades was actively interested in imperial advance, especially in Africa, where the role of Scots in exploration was prominent.56 The society had branches in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen, and rapidly built up a substantial membership. Its objects were, however, to promote the utility of geography and not confined to imperial interests as such. Empire and imperialism were more specifically promoted by imperial propaganda organizations and through events such as exhibitions. The Imperial Federation League, the Unity of the Empire Association, the United Empire Trade League, the Primrose League, and the Victoria League all had branches in Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.57 The Edinburgh Unity of the Empire Association, for example, provided to a range of clubs and societies free lectures that aimed ‘to bring home to all minds the importance of the British empire’.58
International exhibitions, initiated in Scotland with the 1886 Edinburgh exhibition, provided a platform for promotion of both Scotland and Empire. In the major Glasgow exhibitions of 1888, 1901, and 1911, ‘empire and Scottishness predominated’, while the imperial emphasis was to reach its apogee in the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938.59 The Edinburgh exhibitions of 1886, 1890, and 1908 also celebrated imperial connections, with Edinburgh acclaimed as an imperial city in 1908. Organizing committees of international exhibitions brought together landed gentry, civic elites, and political leaders, leading lights in the churches, business, and commercial life, the universities and other professional circles. Like many of the explicitly imperialist organizations and societies such as the RSGS, with a similar composition of leading members, they thus represented a nexus of political, civic, and social interests within Scottish society, committed, among other things, to the promotion of the British Empire.
Leadership of such organizations was dominated by the middle classes, though landed gentry often had high profiles as patrons or patronesses of organizations. Nonetheless, some also attracted working-class interest. This was perhaps most obvious in the case of foreign missions, which through the churches had access to an audience that included sections of the working classes. The iconic missionary figures of humble origins, David Livingstone and Mary Slessor, were certainly held up as aspirational models for the lower classes. Their backgrounds indicated a dedicated involvement in church life, which though not unique in Scottish life was not likely to have been typical, since this was a period when industrialization and urbanization contributed to the rapid rise of the ‘unchurched poor’. The involvement of women, however, was characteristic of such civil-society interest in Empire, both in the earlier phase of philanthropic and religious organization and in the later development of scientific interest and imperial propagandist organizations.60 Whilst women’s participation often took the form of membership of auxiliary or separate women’s organizations, they saw themselves as having an active role to play, whether fund-raising for foreign missions, promoting emigration to the colonies of settlement, or lobbying for schools to celebrate Empire Day. Such evidence of interest in Empire through the churches and other forms of voluntary organization in Scotland is crucial in challenging the view that Empire was only of interest to those who ran it or gained directly from it. Furthermore, it demonstrates that Empire had an appeal across gender and across class, that Scottish participation in Empire exerted a fascination for many, and that the accounts of Scottish contributions to ‘civilizing’ the peoples of the empire, whether through bringing European forms of scientific knowledge or through Christianity, contributed to a sense of national pride.
As might be expected, the press and publishing industries were crucial to the dissemination of imperial imagery and ideologies within nineteenth-century Scottish society, whether through the newspaper and periodical press, specialist publications such as those of the churches or the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the production of imperial maps and atlases by firms such as Bartholomews, or through literary responses to Empire. Writers such as Tobias Smollett, John Galt, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson reflected in their fiction on the meaning of Empire, while poets and other writers took emigration as their theme.61 The travel writing of Scots also embraced the empire, from ‘Tom Cringle’s Log’ of Jamaican experiences to the African explorations of Mungo Park and Livingstone. The periodical press was a vehicle both for travellers’ accounts and commentary on imperial affairs. Particularly significant in this respect was Blackwood’s Magazine. Founded in 1817 as the Tory alternative to the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s was to become increasingly ‘identified as an official promulgator of conservative establishment views of the British imperial presence’.62 As well as reportage from imperial locations and poetry and fiction on imperial topics, the journal carried much commentary on the conduct of imperial affairs, particularly on military matters, and was read throughout the empire as well as at home. Blackwood’s was the vehicle for publication of early works by writers such as Joseph Conrad and John Buchan. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness first saw the light of day in the pages of Blackwood’s, a context which, David Finkelstein argues, has too frequently been ignored in interpretations of this text.
Although there is a growing literature on Scottish writing about Empire and on its audiences, there remains much scope for further work. Most seriously neglected here has been the coverage of Empire in Scottish newspapers. Robert Cowan’s study The Newspaper in Scotland, published in 1946, has demonstrated how wide a range of newspapers existed in the period 1815–1860.63 At this time much coverage of imperial affairs was reprinted from London-based newspapers, though editorializing and correspondence provided a clear flavour of Scottish opinion. For example, the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies was widely supported in Scotland by the 1820s. The Glasgow Courier, however, spoke up in defence of West Indian interests and ‘fought the slave question to the last ditch’.64 In the mid-nineteenth century, when the repeal of the Corn Laws and Navigation Acts ‘had opened new vistas of free-trade prosperity’, the press in Scotland reflected the view that colonies were a ‘fiscal encumbrance’ and should become ‘financially and politically autonomous’—a reaction to rebellions and other tensions in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. By the early 1850s, however, there was an awareness of the economic benefits arising from large-scale emigration, such as agricultural developments in Canada, while the discovery of gold in Australia persuaded many ‘that the Empire might have a profitable future’.65 Events in the East also attracted the attention of the press, with the Opium War of 1839–42 occasioning much anti-Chinese sentiment. Ambivalence in the 1840s towards the expense of ruling India appears to have been swept away by reactions to the Indian uprising of 1857–8. The coverage of the ‘Mutiny’ was extensive, reflecting not only the momentousness of events, but also the changes in communication technology, such as the use of the telegraph, and the opportunities created for increasing circulation by the abolition of stamp duties. Graphic accounts of ‘atrocities’ of course did much to expand newspaper readerships at this time.
From around the 1860s electric telegraphy and the foundation of specialist press agencies transformed the process of news gathering, making it possible to incorporate news on national and international affairs in local newspapers, such as, in William Donaldson’s example, the Peterhead Sentinel.66 Furthermore, the late nineteenth century witnessed the development of an imperial press network that resulted in increased coverage in the British press of the white Dominions.67 While much international coverage in Scottish papers still continued to be ‘cribbed’ from the London press, there was a range of ways in which a specific Scottish dimension might be manifested. As Richard Finlay has indicated, letters from soldiers gave direct accounts of imperial conflicts, the rhetoric of a superior Scottish contribution to Empire was used to disparage Irish aspirations to Home Rule, the imperialistic Volunteer movement was much covered in the local press, and Scottish papers were ‘an important conduit for the promotion of emigration’ through adverts, emigrants’ letters, and favourable images of Scots as migrants.68 Like Donaldson, Finlay stresses the importance of the local press. Furthermore, he questions the extent to which The Scotsman and The Glasgow Herald were representative of national opinion, given differences in political sympathies compared to the majority of local papers that tended to be liberal or independent.
If, as John MacKenzie has argued, study of the British press and the British Empire is underdeveloped, study of the Scottish press and Empire is even more so.69 Although coverage of imperial affairs was unlikely to have predominated over domestic concerns, Empire and imperial affairs became more visible in the Scottish press during the nineteenth century, and in the later decades was a constant presence as well as occasionally providing the major focus of debate. Investigation of press coverage is essential for a more effective assessment of the place the empire occupied in public consciousness, as well as illuminating changing attitudes to Empire, and local and regional differences in interconnections with it. Furthermore, the scrutiny of press coverage and readership has some potential to shed light on working-class responses to Empire, such as the shipyard workers’ celebrations of the relief of Mafeking covered in The Glasgow Herald in 1900.70
Scottish participation in the British Empire and its impact on Scotland have emerged as important fields of historical study relatively recently. There are many parallels with experience elsewhere in Britain, yet as Andrew Thompson has argued, both Empire and its impacts were diverse and pluralistic.71 Certain impacts of Empire appear to have been intensified in the Scottish context, and there is already much evidence to indicate this. There remains scope, however, for further quantification of impacts, for example, more investigation of economic data, not just at a macro level or that of large-scale enterprises, but at the level of small investors, family firms, and of retailing and consumption. And while evidence reviewed here suggests extensive direct economic interests in Empire by the late Victorian period, there were asymmetries of region, class, and gender in the magnitude and meaning of such interests, which are not yet necessarily well defined.
The mobility of nineteenth-century Scots has already been well attested to through quantitative data, especially on emigration, Scots’ share of the armed forces, and in colonial administration, but as yet the various groups of professionals who enjoyed colonial careers have not been afforded comparable attention. There is, however, a need to move beyond crude numbers and the reinforcement of ‘disproportionate’ Scottish participation, and to enquire further into motivations for and pathways to imperial careers, and how these shaped understandings of Empire in both colony and metropole. Such patterns of movement within and across the empire were, like other circuits of Empire, differentiated by class and gender.
Evidence considered in this chapter supports the view that Scotland’s participation in the British Empire was influential in shaping Scottish society and identity in the Victorian period, and that recognition of an imperial role was embedded in Scottish society. This was not only because of the numbers of people who gained direct benefits from Empire, but also because of the range of social strata touched by Empire, and the appeal that the vision of Scotland’s contribution to it exerted across boundaries of region, class, and gender. Furthermore, the networks of interests that bound people to Empire often overlapped and intersected in ways that reinforced its significance—for example, industrialists’ support for foreign missions, the channelling of investments between Scottish communities at home and abroad, or the transmission of imperial ‘knowledge’ by returning administrators and missionaries to educational and religious institutions. The repeated interactions of such groups, often inhabiting the same political, social, and cultural arenas, represented a mutual reaffirmation of the importance of their role in Empire. Nonetheless, attachment to Empire was conditioned by different interests. While in the Victorian and Edwardian eras these appear to have coalesced in celebration of an imperial identity, a deeper understanding of the asymmetries of imperial ties is likely to illuminate the emergence of the more fragmented and contested attitudes to Empire that were to emerge in the twentieth century.
Breitenbach, Esther, Empire and Scottish Society: The Impact of Foreign Missions at Home, c.1790–c.1914 (Edinburgh, 2009).
Devine, T. M., Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2003).
—— To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2010 (London, 2011).
—— and MacKenzie, John M., eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011).
Finlay, Richard J., ‘The Scottish Press and Empire, 1850–1914’, in Simon J. Potter, ed., Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain (Dublin, 2004), 62–74.
Leask, Nigel, ‘Scotland’s Literature of Empire and Emigration, 1707–1918’, in Ian Brown et al., eds., Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918) (Edinburgh, 2007).
MacKenzie, John M., ‘“The Second City of Empire”: Glasgow—Imperial Municipality’, in Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities (Manchester, 1992), 215–37.
Munro, J. Forbes, Maritime Enterprise and Empire (Woodbridge, 2003).
Schmitz, Christopher, ‘The Nature and Dimensions of Scottish Foreign Investment, 1860–1914’, Business History, vol. 39, no. 2 (1997), 42–68.
Spiers, Edward M., The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854–1902 (Edinburgh, 2006).
Stewart, Gordon, Jute and Empire (Manchester, 1998).