The centrality of empire to all aspects of the history of postunion Scotland is now widely accepted, as is Scotland's extensive involvement throughout the British Empire. Yet, until quite recently, much of the work on Scotland and empire did not engage seriously with the debates and conceptual models of current historiography on imperialism. This excellent collection of essays considers the significance of Scotland for the empire and the empire for Scotland and challenges scholars of both Scotland and imperialism to consider that country's experience within wider debates within imperial studies.
Scotland mattered to the empire, argues this collection. The empire would have been a different place, with a different history, without the influence of Scots' distinctive educational, religious, and cultural upbringing. In turn, Scotland's experience of empire was also unique, since it too was shaped by the country's specific history, traditions, and political situation. This is an argument based on differentness constructed by experience, it should be noted, not on Scottish exceptionalism. Scotland's contribution was in part an economic one. As T. M. Devine and Philipp R. Rossner show, Scots responded to the opportunities of eighteenth-century transatlantic trade, especially the tobacco trade, in a manner characteristic of their geographical and financial circumstances. Scotland continued to seize the opportunities of overseas trade in the nineteenth century. Devine and John MacKenzie argue that Scotland developed an unusual level of mutual economic dependence with imperial territories. The mutuality of that relationship is illustrated by Glasgow's stunning growth fostered by the city's deep connections with British imperial and global networks.
Scotland's intellectual tradition also shaped the British Empire. MacKenzie argues that Scots brought “particular skills, capacities and interests to the environments of colonial territories” (174), which developed from the legacy of the Enlightenment and from Scotland's tradition of medical training, agronomy, and geology. Esther Breitenbach finds that Scottish missionaries tended to be better educated and have more interest in medicine than their English counterparts, though these were differences more in degree than in kind. Cairns Craig notes that, wherever they settled, Scots brought with them a commitment to the importance of education. Craig suggests using the term xeniteia rather than diaspora to refer to Scottish global migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Xeniteian migrants, he says, do not arrive in their new homelands as victims but as architects who rebuild in a new place the familiar structures of their native home. Animated by this attitude, Scots transmitted Scottish ideas across the globe, reshaping the intellectual landscape in the very period when Scottish intellectual life is often supposed to have been in decline. In a similar manner, Angela Smith applies Stuart Hall's notion of “hybridity,” in which difference and diversity become key components of identity, to the Scottish literature of empire. Focusing primarily on works by Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, Smith suggests that the history and cultural experiences of Scotland had the potential to foster a distinctive approach to indigenous peoples, one that anticipated the preoccupations of much postcolonial writing.
Although this volume highlights the ways in which the empire was shaped by Scotland's particular traditions and history, the authors are well aware that, as Richard J. Finlay points out, an examination of imperialism through the lens of a national experience might be seen as swimming against the historiographical tide (283). However, the collection makes a convincing case that the example of Scotland illustrates some key limitations within current trends in the study of imperialism, an argument with significance to scholars beyond the field of Scottish studies. The “core/periphery” model, for instance, has distracted historians from the varieties of regional engagement with empire. In this regard, Andrew MacKillop's essay on Scots and the empire in Asia in the eighteenth century complicates the notion of London as the singular center of British expansion by demonstrating how London was a filter for personnel and capital that came from all across Great Britain outward to Asia. Nor, he notes, was London the only locale that connected landed wealth and imperial finance.
The argument for recognizing the significance of local particularity in the experience of empire is made most forcefully by exploring the extent to which empire enhanced Scottish identity. Although imperial studies have been moving away from national categories of analysis, empire was central to intense debates in Scotland about the very nature of the country. The implications of the links between empire and national identity were fundamentally different in Scotland than in England, a topic explored in many essays in this collection. Finley's survey of the relationship between Scottish national identity and imperialism from the 1850s to the 1970s reminds us that the connections among regional, Scottish, British, and imperial identities varied over time. He cautions against conflating the activity of individual Scots into a national trend. Only when the language of unionism developed in the 1880s to recognize the legitimacy of Irish nationality, he argues, did Scots recast their participation in empire in a specifically national context. Angela MacCarthy examines the various forms of associational culture through which Scots expressed their ethnic identity in the empire. Devine finds that Scots' military service both helped to cement the Anglo-Scots partnership and sustained a strong sense of Scottish identity within the union. Breitenbach argues that the Scottish missionary enterprise was a prism through which Scots at home perceived colonial territories and people, while also fostering pride in Scotland's role.
These essays are all of a high quality, and together they testify to the current vibrancy of the field of modern Scottish history and demonstrate that Scottish history has much to say on topics of central importance to British studies and to the study of imperialism. This volume's call to add the case of Scotland to broader historiographical conversations on imperialism should foster valuable new scholarship.
