Scotland and the British Empire

The extraordinary influence of Scots in the British Empire has long been recognised. As administrators, settlers, temporary residents, professionals, plantation owners, and as military personnel, they were strikingly prominent in North America, the Caribbean, Australasia, South Africa, India, and colonies in South-East Asia and Africa. Throughout these regions they brought to bear distinctive Scottish experience as well as particular educational, economic, cultural, and religious influences. Moreover, the relationship between Scots and the British Empire had a profound effect upon many aspects of Scottish society.

This volume of essays, written by notable scholars in the field, examines the key roles of Scots in central aspects of the Atlantic and imperial economies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, in East India Company rule in India, migration and the preservation of ethnic identities, the environment, the army, missionary and other religious activities, the dispersal of intellectual endeavours, and in the production of a distinctive literature rooted in colonial experience. Making use of recent, innovative research, the chapters demonstrate that an understanding of the profoundly inter-active relationship between Scotland and the British Empire is vital both for the understanding of the histories of that country and of many territories of the British Empire.

All scholars and general readers interested in the dispersal of intellectual ideas, key professions, Protestantism, environmental practices, and colonial literature, as well as more traditional approaches to politics, economics, and military recruitment, will find it an essential addition to the historical literature.

John M. MacKenzie has been working on social and cultural aspects of the British Empire for some forty years. He has published on aspects of imperial propaganda, popular culture, the environment, art, and the dispersal of cultural institutions such as museums. He has also been interested in the role of Scots in the British Empire since delivering an inaugural lecture on the subject twenty years ago. He has lived in Canada, southern Africa, England, and Scotland, and has travelled extensively in many of the territories of the former Empire, conducting research and attending conferences. He has appeared on television and radio programmes associated with the British Empire.

T. M. Devine previously held the Glucksman Research Chair in Irish-Scottish Studies, was Director of the AHRC Centre in Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and was Deputy Principal of the University of Strathclyde. He holds Honorary Professorships at the Universities of North Carolina and Guelph, and has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research. He is Fellow of the British Academy and Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was appointed OBE for services to Scottish History (2005) and awarded Scotland's supreme academic accolade, the Royal Gold Medal, by HM the Queen on the recommendation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001.