Afterword

Scotland from the mid-18th century found a distinctive place in the international league tables of emigration and imperial involvement. Questions discussed in this chapter include the paradox of Scotland’s precocious industrialisation concurrent with its early and continuing outflows of emigrants and capital exports. These matters also relate to the problem of regional divergence within Scotland during the nineteenth century and the fate of the Highlands. The idea of the ‘diaspora’ generates currently controversial claims about Scottish identity at home and abroad. Quantifying Scotland’s exceptionality on all these issues entails tricky comparisons with other countries and also exposes important immeasurable elements in such comparisons. They all connect with the life’s work of Tom Devine.

‘Part of my Heritage’: Ladies’ Pipe Bands, Associational Culture and ‘Homeland’ Identities in the Scottish Diaspora

Throughout the imperial and non-imperial destinations to which Scots gravitated, they expressed their ethnic identities in various ways. To date, scholars have generally focused on either one particular aspect of Scottish expressions of identity, such as ethnic societies, or provided fleeting mentions of individual elements, such as pipe bands, without sustained analysis. Since most Scottish migrants did not join a Scottish association, it was their personal sense of Scottishness, which overshadowed their ethnic affiliations. This chapter will build on current scholarship by surveying Scottish ethnic identities through two new approaches: public group expressions of Scottishness as revealed by ladies’ pipe bands and their various connections to other forms of Scottish associational culture; and in the personal expressions of individual band members and their audience members across the diaspora. Further, this chapter sheds light on a glaring gap in scholarship regarding ethnic identities: the sense of identity held by multi-generational descent groups, as well as the extent to which these were articulated and reinvented.

What Scottish Diaspora?

This chapter assesses the case for categorising migration from Scotland as a national ‘diaspora’, rather than a mere sub-stream of British or European migration. Focused on the period of mass migration between the 1850s and the Great War, it places Scottish emigration on a scale stretching between the massive exodus from post-Famine Ireland and the much less intense movement from industrialising England. A number of tests are applied to published studies of the ‘Scottish diaspora’, concerning its magnitude, economic context, ‘national’ character, success (as measured by the economic performance of emigrants), ethnic group-formation in the various countries of settlement, and reverse impact on the homeland. Statistical tables based on published but underused official returns are used to explore issues requiring further analysis. The chapter concludes that Scotland’s claim to a distinctive and coherent national diaspora has yet to be fully tested and vindicated, while declaring that the case has been presented with impressive erudition and panache.

Encountering an Imaginary Heritage: Roots Tourism and the Scottish Diaspora

Around the world, some 40 million people claim Scottish ancestry. Every year thousands of members of the Scottish diaspora travel to their imagined homeland. They come to Scotland to experience the culture of their ancestors and to walk in the places where their forebears walked. They come to Scotland because, like many diasporic populations around the globe, they imagine that their home is somewhere other than in the place they reside, and they travel in order to connect with their roots. Scotland is, of course, not the only country with a strong tradition of roots tourism. Cultural heritage trips, in which participants seek out an embodied experience of culture and connection, are part of a growing global fascination with heritage and genealogy. Nations with significant migration histories, including Israel and China, have, like Scotland, recognised the power inherent in their global communities and actively promote heritage tourism programmes.

Understanding Scottishness among Sojourners, Settlers and Descendants in Hong Kong and New Zealand

Identities and their construction are often complex processes for migrants who in an increasingly globalised and transnational world may have a number of identities upon which to draw. Mary Waters, researching white ethnic identity among multigenerational groups in suburban California, describes the choice as ‘a social process that is in flux . . . a dynamic and complex phenomenon’.1 Additionally, it is a process that can change dependent on age, time and environment. Nor is it based on a set of rules structured along primordial ancestral lines. This chapter seeks to evaluate identity selection and the use of Scottish identity or ‘Scottishness’ among Scottish migrants to New Zealand (labelled ‘settlers’) and Hong Kong (‘sojourners’) and the multigenerational descent group in New Zealand. It does so by deploying the responses generated by a small sample of 145 respondents who answered a complex questionnaire, circulated through the New Zealand Society of Genealogists Scottish Interest Group and the Hong Kong St Andrew’s Society, designed to identify potential oral history interviewees. These responses are supported by in-depth, semi-structured life-story oral history interviews.

‘Our Old World Diff’rences are Dead’: The Scottish Migrant Military Tradition in the British Dominions during the First World War

Scottish volunteer corps were an established feature of the defence forces of the British Dominions in the decades before the First World War. Displaying and performing the essentials of traditional identity associated with the British army’s Scottish regiments, these military units constituted one form of associational culture for migrant Scots and their descendants. But when, in 1914, the British Dominions joined the imperial war effort, these identities transferred only partially into the expeditionary forces mobilised for overseas service. This chapter considers why it was that, with emigrant Scottish units prominent in the war iconography of Canada and South Africa, the overseas forces of Australia and New Zealand did not similarly embrace the Scottish tradition. The differences are found to lie in administrative arrangements for mobilisation, including conscription, as much as in the relative degrees of Dominion nationalism through which the war was represented and commemorated.

The Importance of Scottish Origins in the Nineteenth Century: James Taylor and Ceylon Tea

James Taylor is renowned as the ‘father of the Ceylon tea enterprise’. But how important were his Scottish origins in the successes he achieved in Ceylon’s tea economy? This chapter illuminates the social, cultural and economic world of Scotland especially developments in education, agriculture and engineering. The strong networking component of Scottish migration to Ceylon also proved influential as did Taylor’s personal attributes. The chapter argues that migrant backgrounds – as well as influences in new destinations – must be considered when assessing issues of adjustment abroad.

‘Have the Scotch no Claim upon the Cherokees?’ Scots, Indians and Scots Indians in the American South

This chapter traces intermarriages between Scots and Indians and the families they established in the matrilineal indigenous societies of the American Southeast. It examines the roles played by Scots in the deerskin trade and in the British Indian department, and by their children in Creek and Cherokee history. It reconstructs the historic connections between Scots and Cherokees that endured after the Cherokees were forced west by US policies of Indian removal.

‘As Hewers of Wood, and Drawers of Water’? Scotland as an Emigrant Nation, c. 1600 to c. 1800

This attempt to rethink how early modern Scottish emigration might be conceptualised began life as part of a conference which explored the theme of whether the movement overseas of its people worked to Scotland’s profit or to its loss. Leaving aside for a moment the entirely legitimate concern that such a complex human phenomenon cannot be so easily reduced to a simple dichotomy, there is little doubt that contemporaries understood the significance of the migrations which seemed such a recurrent feature of Scottish society between the 1603 and 1801 unions. If many commentators at the time wrestled with what to make of the propensity of Scots for mobility, it is unsurprising that some chose to emphasise the positive or negative consequences. In this sense at least, framing the topic in terms of ‘profit’ or ‘loss’ is perhaps less anachronistic than might at first seem the case. Take, for example, the sentiments expressed in a pamphlet published in Edinburgh in 1695. Ostensibly, the tract concerned itself with recent trends in the lucrative Europe-to-Asia trades. In explaining Scotland’s international standing, the author offered a blunt assessment of the kingdom’s experience of emigration since the uniting of the Scottish and English crowns. The conclusion was unequivocal. Despite the migration since the early 1600s of tens of thousands to Ulster, the Scandinavian kingdoms, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Dutch Republic, England and her Atlantic colonies, Scotland had not prospered – the opposite in fact. The pamphlet’s preface concluded: ‘we had some who raised their fortunes . . . yet still we have been hitherto advancing our neighbours, but securing no colonies, or settlement for ourselves . . . as hewers of wood, and drawers of water.

A Tribute to Sir Tom Devine

No Scottish historian has ever had as prominent a profile as Tom Devine who is widely considered to be the most influential modern historian of his generation. This chapter provides a succinct overview of Devine’s career and research interests into modern Scotland and the global significance of its diaspora, and includes an assessment from Christopher Smout, Scotland’s Historiographer Royal. It concludes with an overview of Devine’s personality, character, and plans for the future.