Given Scotland's entrenched social structures, traditional business habits, and the lack of available or affordable land, the decision taken by so many Scots over the last 260 years to leave and look for new opportunities abroad is completely understandable. For the ambitious and enterprising, Scotland could not meet their needs. T. M. Devine's To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora is not so much about the Scottish diaspora as it is about the socioeconomic processes that emerged to lay the foundations for the mass out-migration that Scotland experienced from the middle of the eighteenth century. The book's timely publication, during a period of intense national self-reflection, has the potential to make people think more deeply about the role that the British empire played in the development of modern Scotland.

The book's twelve informative chapters are drawn largely from work Devine has already published. The first chapter, “Imperial Scots, 1750–1815,” provides a useful overview of Scotland's domestic situation and how its people became adept, very quickly, at capitalizing on the military service and business opportunities that the empire presented. The second chapter, “Did Slavery Help to Make Scotland Great,” based largely on a 2011 article published with Britain and the World, expands upon this by considering the Scottish involvement in the lucrative West Indian slave and sugar trade. Notably, Devine acknowledges that we still have a long way to go if we are to understand the extent to which slavery influenced Scotland's eighteenth-century economic revolution. Chapter 3, “Industrial and Financial Sinews of Scottish Global Power, 1815–1914,” considers how Scots began to work with markets outside Britain's formal empire, such as the United States and Latin America, and chapter 4, “The Great Migration,” considers the shift of emigration from Europe and Ulster in the early modern period to the Americas in the nineteenth century. Much of the fifth chapter, “Human Selection and Enforced Exile,” is drawn from his earlier and much-respected book The Great Highland Famine (Edinburgh, 1988) and considers the economic, social, and racial consequences of changing market forces. Chapter 6, “In the Land of the Free: Scots and Irish in the USA,” considers how the Irish and Scottish experiences of America were different and explains that both groups faced significant hostility before finding their feet. In the seventh chapter, “The Emigrant Experience in the New Lands,” he continues with this theme by discussing in a little more depth the anti-Scottishness that could be found abroad and points out, helpfully, that “the myth of the successful Scot was partly built up in opposition to the racial stereotype of the supposedly inadequate Irish” (150). Chapter 8, “Settlers, Traders and Native Peoples,” which is an important though rather short section, reveals that the Scots were just as brutal toward indigenous peoples in North America and in Australia as were other European groups. In chapter 9, “The Missionary Dynamic,” Devine considers Protestant Scotland and, like many before him, dwells on David Livingstone. Toward the end of this chapter, however, and informed largely by the work of Esther Breitenbach, he includes a useful discussion of female missionaries. Chapter 10, “Soldiers of Empire,” looks at the essential role that Highlanders played in imperial defense, and in chapter 11, “Funding New Lands,” Devine points out that while Scots were leaders in terms of investment outside Scotland, the domestic economy declined as a consequence. In this he echoes the opinion Catriona M. M. MacDonald presents in her Whaur Extremes Meet: Scotland's Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 2009). The final two chapters in To the Ends of the Earth, “Eclipse of Empires” and “Diaspora 1945–2010,” engage with Scotland's acute vulnerability in the face of new world market forces in years following the Second World War and how the revived interest in diaspora is inherently linked with a postdevolution Scottish-centered agenda that has been pursued by both the Labour and the Scottish National Party governments.

Those already familiar with the work that Devine has produced over the past couple of decades can expect to find little new research within its 397 pages, but for those who are less familiar, it presents a useful overview of how Scotland's involvement with the British empire facilitated a socioeconomic transformation that saw Scots spread across the world. Oddly, given the book's title and while emigration is a persistent theme, there is minimal engagement with the diaspora itself in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Nothing is said about either the popular or the associational culture that came to define the experience and identity of so many Scots and their descendants abroad. Nevertheless, this book, which explains why so many left in the first place, is relevant because Scots still see emigration as a viable option and are still choosing to leave. A very unscientific survey (simply a request for a show of hands) of 15 students taking an honors-level diaspora module at Glasgow Caledonian University in autumn 2012 revealed that over half were seriously considering emigration after graduation; it is doubtful that their counterparts in Canada, the United States, or Australia—the would-be destinations of these fourth-year respondents—would feel the same way. In relation to this, perhaps the most important point is made in the book's final chapter, because it is there that Devine reflects on the ways in which the diaspora has been used by Scottish politicians of all parties since devolution to boost tourism and to address the problem of an “ageing and shrinking” (288) population. As I considered this point, it made me think that much more attention needs to be paid to the nation's youth so that they might be convinced that sustainable futures are within reach at home. But before that can happen, there needs to be a willingness to break with tradition and to confront Scotland's problems head-on, and a good starting point will be for people to consider the past—To the Ends of the Earth will help them to do this.