Scholars of Ireland's diaspora will be aware of the fascinating examinations of personal letters between migrants and “home” correspondents by seasoned analysts such as David Fitzpatrick, Kerby Miller, Patrick O'Farrell, and Arnold Schrier. Their imaginative interrogations document the joys and travails of migrant life and engage with stimulating debate about such issues as mentalities, exile, and identities. Also arising from such works are important methodological questions about the benefits and limitations of migrant testimony, its form and function, and how we select and edit extracts.
In contrast, similar investigations of the Scottish diaspora, utlizing an array of diverse testimony from several correspondents exchanged between “home” and abroad are surprisingly absent. Instead, studies that do exist have drawn on personal collections of correspondence to examine the migrant experience of one individual or families rather than extended collective meditations. They include my own and T. M. Devine's Tea and Empire: James Taylor in Victorian Ceylon (2017) and Stephen Foster's study of the Johnstones in A Private Empire (2010).
Alexander Charles Baillie's Call of Empire draws primarily from a collection of more than two thousand letters from members of the Baillie family from the Inverness region. Baillie seeks to document the lives of two main family members: Colonel William Baillie and his nephew Colonel John Baillie. Two further family members—another Colonel John Baillie (William's brother) and Colonel Alexander Baillie (another nephew)—provide “supporting roles,” as do other family, acquaintances, native partners, and hybrid children.
The main narrative thrust is William's public life in India (including his military service and engagement in conflicts) with only occasional insights into the lived experience of migration and reflections on the environment, peoples, and cultures abroad. Instead, the most illuminating insights on these topics appear more readily from or in relation to his connections in Scotland, India, the West Indies, and the American colonies. Even so, whichever area of interest readers hope to encounter in the book, they are left to interpret the accounts for themselves as Baillie provides little or no context or reflection on lengthy quotations containing “offensive statements” about European entitlement and “racial superiority,” instead “trusting that readers would be able to place them in their proper context” (x). Further, we remain in the dark as to how and why Baillie chose to include or exclude certain extracts. An appendix outlining the main correspondents, and when and where they were writing from, would have been beneficial.
The book's structure is also problematic. Rather than focus, as Baillie does, on these few individuals in order to make the work “comprehensible,” a more analytically satisfying and readable approach would have been thematic. In this way, Baillie could have reduced the extensive quotations and left room to engage with debates in imperial studies surrounding class, race, and the impact of empire back “home.” The absence of such engagement with the scholarly field—and the omission of key works in the bibliography by historians of Scottish migration to India such as Andrew Mackillop and George McGilvary—means the book does not substantially advance our knowledge of the Scots in India, the Scottish diaspora, Britain's imperial experience, the methodology of using migrant letters, or how a focus on individual lives can illuminate broader historical controversies. That Call of Empire appears on the list of a university publisher and presumably underwent a refereeing process makes these issues all the more perplexing.
These criticisms aside, the book does alert us to a series of letters that other scholars may benefit from in future. Photographs, family trees, and brief descriptions of a “cast of supporting characters” may also assist in this respect.
