Extract from Scotland: A History

The following is taken from Scotland: A History edited by Jenny Wormald, and features several sections from Chapter 9, 'The Scottish Diaspora', by David Armitage.

'Rats, lice, and Scotsmen: you find them the whole world over,' ran the medieval French proverb. Half a millennium and half a world away from France in the Middle Ages, an observer in the 1850s of Highlanders on the Australian goldfields agreed: 'Poor as rats at home, they are as rapacious as rats abroad.'

The abiding reputation of the Scots for mobility and ubiquity has been well deserved; Scots emigrants' reputation for poverty much less so. By the late twentieth century, there were an estimated 25 million people of Scottish descent living outside Scotland. Their ancestors could have left Scotland at any point since the thirteenth century, and they fetched up on almost every imaginable foreign shore.

It is notable that so many of those who claim Scottish ancestry retain an attachment to their homeland, even as they and their forebears assimilated so successfully into the new societies in which they found themselves. The distinctiveness of the Scottish experience outside Scotland lies in this apparently paradoxical ability of the Scots to blend so completely with their background yet still to maintain sympathetic connections with Scotland itself.

The Scots have long been known for the supposed talents they took with them into their temporary or permanent exile. When John Macky, the notorious English journalist, traveller, and spy, toured Scotland in the 1720s, he admired Scottish wanderlust, and wondered about its causes. 'The Scots have made a greater Figure Abroad than any other nation in Europe,' he asserted; 'this hath been generally ascribed to the Barrenness of their Country, as not being able to maintain its Inhabitants: But this is a vulgar Error for it's entirely owing to the Fineness of their Education.' In support of the first observation, he catalogued the achievements of the Scots in Europe. They had formed the bodyguard of the king of France (the famous Garde Écossaise) since the fifteenth century; they had commanded the armies of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the early seventeenth century; as Macky noted, even the field-marshal of the Holy Roman Empire was General Ogilvy, the grandson of a Scot.

Quite apart from this military diaspora, Scots could be found in more peaceful occupations across Europe. There were Bruces, Gordons, and Douglases in Muscovy, a Count Hamilton in the Palatinate, and one could hardly travel anywhere in Italy without bumping into Scottish families, such as the Wemysses who Macky had met on Lake Garda. Though anecdotal, Macky's evidence was at least indicative of the fact that, even a generation after the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707, the Scots were still primarily a European people, as the had been since at least the thirteenth century.

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Scots often travelled on paths beaten by their forebears, but the shift away from Europe and outward to the Empire in the mid-eighteenth century snapped the chains along which migration had traditionally run. Across that divide, some broad characteristics of the Scottish diaspora remained stable. Scots were generally more likely than their English counterparts (save for those who travelled to New England in the Great Migration of the 1640s) to leave as families, or in parties, like the fifty who went from Glenorchy to North Carolina in 4 September 1775, in company with seventy-seven more from Appin in Argyll. Such group migration offered Scots ready-made communities on landing and aided settlement even as it reinforced Scottish separatism.

Scots were likely to be better educated that other European migrants because they frequently went as skilled professionals, dogging the footsteps of fellow ministers, merchants, soldiers, educators, or doctors. Such migrants followed the institutional channels of the Kirk, the army, the navy, the civil service, and the East India Company to new arenas for the skill and enterprise. Scottish patronage often smoothed their way. In this way, John Witherspoon and John Pagan tried to bring their countrymen to settle in Nova Scotia; Dundas packed the ranks of the East India Company with deserving Scots, as Ilay had done even more successfully before him; the Highland and Island Emigration Society attracted 4,000 Scots to Australia in the 1850s; and the countess of Aberdeen encouraged the departure of more than 330 female emigrants from north-east Scotland in the late nineteenth century.

Until the second half of the twentieth century, descendants of the Scots still formed the third-largest ethnic groups in both Canada and Australia. The availability of free land in British North America rapidly transformed soldiers into settlers after the Seven Years War and provided precedents for later migrants to Canada. Later, in the early nineteenth century, Scottish Catholics settled in eastern Ontario, on Prince Edward Island and in eastern Nova Scotia, and showed their neighbours that it was quite possible to be both Catholic and British, especially in the colonial context.

Between 1838 and 1905, the United States provided the focus of Scottish emigration to North America; after 1905, the migrant stream diverted again to Canada, as 170,000 Scots moved there in the four years before the First World War. Canada benefited especially from the emigration of skilled Scottish workers during the nineteenth century, and profited further from the wave of Scottish investment that accompanied them. Canada's cities drew urban Scots in disproportionate numbers, leaving a permanent mark on the cultural landscape of Ontario and Upper Canada as earlier Scots had left legacies in Quebec and, more distantly, in Nova Scotia.

Scots were the pall-bearers of the Empire: the British army in India made its retreat in 1947 to the sound of 'Auld Lang Syne', while the band of the Black Watch piped Hong Kong over to Chinese rule in July 1997. Sixty years earlier, Andrew Dewar Gibb, in his Scottish Empire (1937), had speculated that 'it may be that with her imperial task ended, Scotland will seek to form and justify a new conception of her function in the framework of European civilization'. In the aftermath of Empire, this seems prophetic.