AHR Forum
Nation, Migration, and the Province in the First British
Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600-1800
NED C. LANDSMAN
an essay on the topic of Scottish involvement with the
Americas in the early modern period would have been located securely within the
category of works on the subject of ethnicity in early America, at a time when one
of the priorities of historians was to add the category of ethnic background, along
with race, religion, region, and gender, to the available analytical apparatus for
examining the social configuration of Britain's early American colonies. That it is
.appearing now as part of a forum on the new British history indicates some of the
slippage that has occurred in recent years in the application of rigid territorial
boundaries to the study of early modern British societies, paralleling, it has been
suggested, the challenges those same borders have confronted in the contemporary
world. The same need to re-think the historical meaning of national boundaries
within the British state might lead one to question as well the utility of the
traditional framework for understanding the experiences of the various European
and especially British national groups in early America, and the applicability of
ethnicity as a conceptual category in the manner in which it has most often been
employed.
That concept of ethnicity in fact derived not from the experiences of groups
arriving in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but rather
their much later followers. It emerged principally to highlight those traits that
groups managed to retain during the seemingly inevitable process of adapting
themselves to a new American nationality. It fits rather imperfectly the situation of
those whose movements represented less the adoption of new nationalities than the
pursuit of opportunities within extended empires, at a time when imperial
participation ranked as one of the principal integrating features of a new British
identity and when American nationality had yet to be formed. The absence of such
a nationality, and the fact that Britishness also was far from fully established, leaves
very much open the question of how many colonial Britons understood the
settlement effort in which they were participating, as well as what effects national
experience within Britain may have had on the specific character of overseas
involvements undertaken by diverse groups and on the various forms of provincial
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identity that emerged: in short, on the British dimension of colonial British
America.'
This essay will reconsider the experience of one of the most prevalent and
certainly among the most prominent of national groups to involve itself with early
British America: the Scots, and in particular, Lowland Scots, a group for whom
involvement in the Atlantic world everywhere overlapped national concerns; access
to England's overseas empire was among their principal motives for becoming
Britons. Moreover, the nature of those involvements led Scots to traverse both the
physical and intellectual markers of national and provincial boundaries within the
empire with considerable frequency, before as well as after England and Scotland
united in the Union of 1707; indeed, the union itself represented just such a
traversal for Scots, who were far more likely than their new countrymen to assume
British identities, as North Britons." Their ability to do so was rooted in both a long
history of involvement abroad that predated the American colonization and in the
creation of Great Britain, and it gives us an opportunity to consider some of the
national, British, and European aspects of Scottish participation in the Atlantic
world.
THE IMAGE OF THE SCOT AS COLONIZER has a long history and nearly as long a
historiography. For generations, historians and hagiographers have traced the many
and varied ways in which Scots and Scottish ideas figured prominently and often
disproportionately in numerous areas of early American life, from commerce and
political economy to moral and natural philosophy to imperial and educational
1 On the role of imperial participation in the forming of British identity, see especially Linda Colley,
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); Colley devotes less attention to the
different kinds of British identities that emerged among various national groups in Britain; some of
their origins are discussed in David Armitage, "Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic
World 1542-1707," Past and Present 155 (May 1997): 34-63. The designation "colonial British
America" is from Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History
of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, Md., 1984). On the later formation of American nationality, see
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).
On the concept of ethnicity, see especially Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in
American Culture (New York, 1986),21-24. Historians of American ethnicity have of course gone well
beyond those original ideas of ethnicity, as even a brief perusal of a publication such as the Journal of
American Ethnic History makes clear. Among the most insightful recent works on ethnicity in early
America are A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British
America (Baltimore, 1993); Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630-1710: The Dutch and English
Experiences (New York, 1990); and Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in
Colonial New York City, 1664-1730 (Princeton, N.J., 1992).
For works that have sought to transcend national boundaries in their approaches to the first British
empire, see especially Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the
Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986); and
Greene, Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel
Hill, 1993); J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, ]660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics
in the Anglo-American World (New York, 1994); and David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British
Folkways in America (New York, 1989), which extends the power of ethnicity far beyond what this
author considers reasonable.
2 That Scots provided the most creative thinking on the Union of 1707 has been argued by John
Robertson, "An Elusive Sovereignty: The Course of the Union Debate in Scotland, 1698-1707," in
Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (New York, 1995),
198-227.
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administration.' For all that research, the overall pattern of Scottish involvement
with the Americas has remained elusive. In fact, it was a much more particular
pattern than has often been assumed, extending only to certain places and specific
areas of activity. Moreover, it was predominantly an eighteenth-century phenomenon. Seventeenth-century Scottish connections to the Americas were rather
meager.
Despite the celebrity attached to the Scottish presence in the Americas, Scots
were relative latecomers to that colonization. The English, the Spanish, the French,
the Dutch, and even the Swedes all may have been more active colonizers than the
Scots until late in the seventeenth century. The New Scotland settlements of the
1620s did not come close to matching the simultaneous New English or New
Netherlands or even New Swedish settlements, and the majority of Nova Scotia
settlers may have been English. An attempted Scottish expedition to New York
during the 1660s failed. Even the first permanent Scottish settlement, the Quakersponsored colonization of East Jersey, was in no way comparable, even on a
per-capita basis, to the adjacent and related English Friends' settlements in West
Jersey and Pennsylvania.' Not until the middle of the eighteenth century would
Scotland establish a reputation in North America as a nation of emigrants. Indeed,
until rather late in the seventeenth century, it would be difficult to find more than
a handful of Scots who displayed any significant interest in the Americas.
By European standards, there is nothing surprising about the limited scale of
those involvements, which was, in fact, more the norm than the exception in early
colonization. Nearly every northern European nation except the English faced
difficulties in inducing its people to migrate to the New World. New France, for all
its importance, was never a heavily populated colony. New Netherlands, which
could not compete with the lure of the Dutch commercial empire in the East, was
peopled by anyone the Dutch West India company could persuade to migrate:
English, Germans, Huguenots, Swedes, Jews, Africans, and others, as well as the
various "Dutch" peoples. The population of New Sweden may well have been
mostly Finns. The English were the exception here, and English men and women
were apparently a good deal more willing than most others to try their fortunes in
the unsettled environs of North America, perhaps because of the seemingly greater
3 The classical explanation for that involvement is John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, "England's
Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 11 (April 1954):
200-13. General surveys of the literature on Scottish influences in early America include W. R. Brock,
Scotus Americanus: A Survey of Sources for Links between Scotland and America in the Eighteenth
Century (Edinburgh, 1982); Richard B. Sher, "Scottish-American Cultural Studies, Past and Present,"
in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten, eds. (Edinburgh,
1990),1-27; Eric Richards, "Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire," Strangers within the Realm:
Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds. (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1991),67-114; and Ned C. Landsman, "The Provinces and the Empire: Scotland, the American
Colonies, and the Development of British Provincial Identity," in An Imperial State at War: Britain from
1689 to 1815, Lawrence Stone, ed. (London, 1994), 258-87. There has been no complete study of
Scottish emigration to succeed Ian C. C. Graham, Colonists from Scotland: Emigration to North
America, 1707-1783 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956).
4 George Pratt Insh, Scottish Colonial Schemes, 1620-1686 (Glasgow, 1922); N. E. S. Griffiths and
John G. Reid, "New Evidence on New Scotland, 1629," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 49 (July
1992): 492-508; Peter Gouldesbrough, "An Attempted Scottish Voyage to New York in 1669," Scottish
Historical Review 40 (January 1961): 56-62; Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony,
1680-1765 (Princeton, N.J., 1985).
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importance of landowning as an attraction to English settlers. That was a prospect
with which Scots settlers, few of whom had any opportunity to own land at home,
would have been largely unfamiliar.'
If the colonization of New Scotland was therefore not that modest when judged
against the general pattern of early seventeenth-century European migration to the
Americas, it is striking when judged by another, wholly Scottish standard. During
the seventeenth century, and for quite some time before that, Scots had amply
demonstrated that they were very willing to emigrate. T. C. Smout has estimated
that there may have been as many as 200,000 migrants from Scotland during the
course of the seventeenth century, at a time when the population hovered around
one million. That may have been the highest per-capita rate of emigration in
western Europe and was almost certainly the highest rate of net out-migration,
since few Europeans found much to offer in Scotland. It may have involved
something approaching 20 percent of the nation's young men in the early
seventeenth century."
Most of that movement was directed toward the European continent. During
those years, Scottish merchants and traders lived and worked. extensively in the
cities of France, Sweden, Denmark, and the Low Countries. Scots were especially
prevalent in Poland, to which as many as 30-40,000 migrated over a period of
several decades early in the seventeenth century; contemporaries believed that it
represented the largest out-migration of Scots to any country during those years,
exceeding even Ireland. Nearly as many may have gone to Scandinavia, many of
those into military service. Those were both well-established routes before 1600 and
far outstripped the fledgling colonies in New Scotland as competitors for Scottish
migrants."
The existence of such high rates of emigration before the union highlights a
growing dichotomy within the literature on Scottish involvements abroad. On one
5 See especially David Cohen, "How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?" New York History
62 (January 1981): 43-60; C. A. Weslager, Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley
1609-1664 (Philadelphia, 1961), chaps. 6-7; New Sweden in America, Carol E. Hoffecker, ed. (Newark,
Del., 1995). On English Atlantic migration, see Nicholas Canny, "English Migration into and across the
Atlantic during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move:
Studies on European Migration, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 1994), 39-75; and see Peter Moogk, "Manon's
Fellow Exiles: Emigration from France to North America before 1763," 236-60, in the same volume.
6 T. C. Smout, N. C. Landsman, and T. M. Devine, "Scottish Emigration in the Early Modern
Period," in Canny, Europeans on the Move, 76-112, which can be compared with other articles in the
same volume: Nicholas Canny, "English Migration into and across the Atlantic during the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries," 39-75; L. M. Cullen, "The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries," 113-49; and Jan Lucassen, "The Netherlands, the Dutch, and Long Distance
Migration, in the Late Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries," 153-91.
7 Smout, Landsman, and Devine, "Scottish Emigration in the Early Modern Period," 76-90; and see
also Gordon Donaldson, The Scots Overseas (London, 1966); Scotland and Europe, 1200-1850, T. C.
Smout, ed. (Edinburgh, 1986), especially the essays by Elsa-Britta Grage, "Scottish Merchants in
Gothenburg, 1621-1850," 112-27, and Anna Bieganska, "A Note on the Scots in Poland, 1550-1800,"
157-65; Thomas Riis, Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: Scottish-Danish Relations, c. 1450-1707
(Odense, 1988); and three books edited by Grant G. Simpson: Scotland and Scandinavia, 800-1800
(Edinburgh, 1990); The Scottish Soldier Abroad, 1247-1967 (Edinburgh, 1992); and Scotland and the
Low Countries, 1124-1949 (East Linton, 1996). Those studies built on three older works by T. A.
Fischer: The Scots in Germany (Edinburgh, 1902); The Scots in Eastern and Western Prussia (Edinburgh,
1903); and The Scots in Sweden (Edinburgh, 1907); see also Papers Illustrating the History of the Scots
Brigade in the Service of the United Netherlands, 1572-1782, James Ferguson, ed., 3 vols. (Edinburgh,
1899-1901), Publications of the Scottish History Society, First Series, vols. 32, 35, 38.
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side is a flourishing body of literature on Scotland's connections to the continent,
well represented by a 1986 collection titled Scotland and Europe, which concentrates on the period before 1700. On the other side is the traditional literature on
Scottish emigration, exemplified by an excellent 1985 collection of articles, The
Scots Abroad, which views emigration as a product of the modern period and
concentrates exclusively on the period since 1750, with hardly a mention of
Europe."
The assumptions of the latter work are clear: Scotland's opening to the world is
attributed to the union, the empire, and English connections generally, while the
kind of overseas contacts detailed in the more recent literature appear as incidental
and fragmentary, where they are noticed at all. The more work that appears on
Scottish involvement with Europe, the less persuasive such a view becomes. In fact,
it may have the story backward. Rather than the union opening Scotland to outside
involvement, it seems more likely that long-established involvements abroad
substantially inhibited the participation of a people long noted for exporting
population in the still-risky project of American colonization.
Neither the volume nor the direction of those movements was altogether
consistent. They varied with economic and political conditions as well as policies of
state. The influx of Scottish merchants and peddlers to the east, into Denmark and
the Baltic, expanded during the late sixteenth century and probably peaked during
the 1620s before tailing off. Some Scots settled down there and gradually
assimilated into the Polish and Danish populations. Increasingly, political and
spiritual motives propelled Scots to two other locales instead. Movement to the
Low Countries began to rise during the religious wars of the early seventeenth
century, as the Netherlands became a haven for Calvinist refugees, and Scots
continued to go there thereafter. Thus Rotterdam housed a permanent population
of Scottish merchants, mercenaries, and tradesmen, who built their own church
serving a congregation of a thousand worshipers by 1700. Migration to Ireland
greatly increased with the first plantation of Ulster, which has been called the first
British imperial venture, and again during the wars of the mid-seventeenth century,
which left the Presbyterian communities in western Scotland and Ulster closely
linked."
In spite of those fluctuations, there was almost always some migration from
Scotland, a continuity that was deeply embedded within the Scottish social order.
Migration provided a safety valve in the frequent times of overpopulation and
dearth, or in times of religious conflict, probably rising during the 1620s, 1670s, and
1690s. Moreover, the chance to travel to overseas communities provided middling
Scots with a greater range of opportunities than the domestic economy offered. The
8 Smout, Scotland and Europe; The Scots Abroad: Labour, Capital, Enterprise, 1750-1914, R. A.
Cage, ed. (Beckenham, Kent, 1985); see also the more recent Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society,
T. M. Devine, ed. (Edinburgh, 1993).
9 Riis, Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, esp. 156; Bieganska, "Note on the Scots in Poland"; W.
Steven, The History of the Scottish Church in Rotterdam (Edinburgh, 1832); M. Perceval-Maxwell, The
Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (New York, 1973); Nicholas Canny, "Fashioning
'British' Worlds in the Seventeenth Century," in Empire, Society and Labor: Essays in Honor of Richard
S. Dunn, Canny, Joseph E. Illick, Gary B. Nash, and William Pencak, eds., a special issue of
Pennsylvania History 64 (1997): 26-45; and Jane Ohlmeyer, "Seventeenth-Century Ireland and the New
British and Atlantic Histories," above, 446-62.
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fact that some of those communities maintained close Scottish connections allowed
for the maintenance of a larger Scottish population overall than the impoverished
countryside would otherwise have permitted.
Indeed, the term "emigration" may not have precisely the right connotations at
all, as there evidently was a fair degree of regular movement between Scotland and
other places; neither "emigrant" nor "sojourner," which has recently been introduced into the literature on Scottish overseas connections, fully captures the fluidity
of those movements. Certainly, some Scots who ventured abroad were unlikely ever
to return, including a high proportion of mercenaries and some of the peddlers and
tradesmen who spent their lives in Denmark or Poland. Other groups, such as the
large Scots contingent in Rotterdam, remained more distinct, forming something
closer to viable overseas communities. Northern Ireland housed some Scots who
settled there for generations, along with others for whom movement back and forth
to Scotland would be frequent. Scots who traveled to any of those places evidently
maintained a rather complex sense of nationality, and Scotsmen were never simply
those who lived in Scotland.'?
Migrants included not only impoverished Scots but a surprising number of
skilled, trained, and educated persons of middling status or above: merchants,
soldiers, clerics, and medical men, among others. Scotland was a consistent net
exporter of such persons. Scots had long maintained some regular places in
continental universities, for example, as well as in prominent commercial centers
such as Rotterdam or Veere.!' The persistent identification of the Scottish elite
with the European world of letters and the expansive pattern of Scottish higher
education were in part underwritten by Scotland's ability to export its surplus of
educated persons.
Migration at that level also served distinct functions in Scottish society. Within
the world of trade, Scottish merchants aggressively carved out distinct niches for
themselves, seeking out trade in markets whose merchants had little motivation to
travel to Scotland; such contacts evidently mattered a good deal more to Scottish
traders inhabiting the European periphery than to their more centrally located
commercial partners. Well before their notorious involvement in such branches of
the American commerce as the tobacco trade, Scots were known for trading widely
through extended networks of their own countrymen.'? In so doing, they were
behaving in a manner similar to that of theinhabitants of other smaller and weaker
commercial nations, whose principal strategy has often been to develop informal
trading networks of their countrymen overseas, often on the peripheries, where
competition was limited.
10 Alan L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1800
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1992); and see Riis, Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, on Denmark, as well as the
sources cited in note 9, above.
11 John Durkan, "The French Connection in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," in
Smout, Scotland and Europe, 19-44; James K. Cameron, "Some Scottish Students and Teachers at the
University of Leiden in the Late Sixteeenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," in Simpson, Scotland
and the Low Countries, 122-35; and J. Davidson and A. Gray, The Scottish Staple at Veere (1909).
12 T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union, 1660-1707 (Edinburgh, 1963), chap. 5; Smout,
"Scottish-Dutch Contact, 1600-1800," in Dutch Art and Scotland: A Reflection of Taste, Julia Lloyd
Williams, ed. (Edinburgh, 1992), 21-32.
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probably slowed Scottish involvement with the Americas. Between 1629 and 1632, perhaps a few hundred Scots went
to the New Scotland settlements. About the same time, what must have been tens
of thousands of Scots traveled to Ireland, to Scandinavia, and to Poland. Between
1680 and 1690, a thousand or more Scots ventured to East Jersey and Carolina. But
when a massive famine struck parts of Scotland in the following decade, only a
trickle of settlers went to the New World, while Ireland attracted tens of thousands.
Even the union did little to increase Scottish emigration to the Americas in the
short term. That was partly because the famine of the 1690s had reduced population
dramatically through both starvation and migration. Conversely, the north of
Ireland, which had attracted many of those emigrants, provided a disproportionate
quantity of British emigration to America over the ensuing half-century.P
The groups that did expand their involvement with America considerably were
emigrant Scots among the skilled and educated portions of the population. The
movements of those men were less affected by demographic imperatives than were
those of their less affluent countrymen and more by changing patterns in politics,
diplomacy, and trade. Much of the prominence of Scottish influences in early
America can be attributed to the very substantial representation of men of status
and education among the migrants, from a time well before their countrymen had
begun to emigrate in substantial numbers.
For those prominent groups, the turning point was less the Union of 1707 than
the Restoration, especially the 1680s, when the Scottish elite embarked on an
aggressive effort to expand their economy and narrow the distance between
themselves and their southern neighbors, in an attempt to remedy their subordinate
position to England under the Union of Crowns. Much of that effort was channeled
toward the Americas, which most often meant the English colonial world. During
that decade, about a hundred Scots of predominantly Quaker and Episcopalian
backgrounds invested in a half-share in the East Jersey colony, to which they sent
about seven hundred settlers. A Presbyterian group established a rival colony at
Stuart's Town in Carolina. During those same years, the Scottish Episcopal
clergyman James Blair settled in Virginia and began to establish a prominent
Scottish presence within the Virginia church, at just about the same time that
Scottish merchants began to push their way into the Chesapeake tobacco trade. The
greatest undertaking of all came in the following decade, as a group of Scottish
investors worked with English counterparts to establish the Company of Scotland,
which raised an unprecedented sum of capital in an attempt to break the
stranglehold of England's chartered trading monopolies by sending an ambitious
but ill-fated initial expedition to Darien.>'
THE EXISTENCE OF THOSE EUROPEAN CONNECTIONS
13 Still standard as a reference work on Ulster emigration is R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to
Colonial America, 1718-1775 (London, 1966); but see also Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A
Passage in the Peopling ofAmerica on the Eve ofthe Revolution (New York, 1986), chap. 1; and Marianne
S. Wokeck, "German and Irish Immigration to Colonial Philadelphia," Symposium on the Demographic
History of the Philadelphia Region, 1600-1860, Susan E. Klepp, ed., Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 133 (June 1989): 128-43.
14 Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony; Insh, Scottish Colonial Schemes; Parke Rouse,
Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971). On Darien, see George Pratt Insh, The Company
of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (London, 1932); David Armitage, "The Scottish Vision of
Empire: Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture," in Robertson, Union for Empire, 97-118; and
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Over the next three-quarters of a century, while overall emigration from Scotland
to America remained modest, the involvement of Scottish merchants, clergy,
physicians, and officials would grow rapidly, against the background of a British
union that legitimized Scottish participation within the overseas empire and
secured an extensive range of opportunities for ambitious Scots. As a group, those
men were tied to no one settlement or region in the manner of many earlier
American settlers but ranged widely across the British colonial world, becoming an
important part of an increasingly interconnected British imperial elite. They
contributed to the emergence within that elite of an identity that was neither wholly
metropolitan nor purely local but imperial and provincial, one that cut across
regional and provincial boundaries. That group would emphasize the benefits of
empire and of a stronger political authority over the provinces at the same time that
it asserted the claims of provincial communities to the full rights and privileges of
Britons.'> Theirs was a Britishness defined less by Anglicization than by the unifying
but centrifugal forces of religion, population, and trade that were propelling a
growing confidence among provincial citizens in Scotland and in America.
Scottish merchants were a prominent example. Historians have described how in
the Chesapeake, and elsewhere in British America, traders from the west of
Scotland developed commercial networks beyond the established mercantile
sphere, often trading through networks of their countrymen, in an attempt to
capture a share of a developing commerce for themselves". Scots were especially
prominent on the peripheries, and everywhere they worked to expand the boundaries of trade-into the Virginia Piedmont, where they created an extensive
network of Scottish factors or agents and storekeepers, throughout the backcountry, the lower South, and into sectors of the Caribbean, Quebec, and eventually the
western Canadian territories."
Bridget McPhail, "Through a Glass, Darkly: Scots and Indians Converge at Darien," Eighteenth-Century
Life 18 (May 1994): 129-47.
On the efforts of the 1680s generally, see Gordon Marshall, Presbyteries and Profits: Calvinism and the
Development of Capitalism in Scotland, 1560-1707 (Oxford, 1980), as well as the sources cited in note
5, above. Roger Emerson has pointed out that during the same decade the Scots literati began to
develop a keen interest in America; see Emerson, "The Scottish Literati and America 1680-1800," in
Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas 1600-1800, Ned C.
Landsman, ed. (East Linton, forthcoming).
15 On Scots' use of the union to extend their places within the empire, see Colley, Britons, 127-32;
Richards, "Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire"; Armitage, "Making the Empire British,"
and the discussion in the Forum below. On Scots within the imperial elite, see Ned C. Landsman, From
Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680-1760 (New York, 1997), chap. 1.
16 Jacob Price, "The Rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade," William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d ser., 11 (April 1954): 179-99; Thomas M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the
Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and Their Trading Activities, c. 1740-90 (Edinburgh, 1975); Richard B.
Sheridan, "The Role of Scots in the Economy and Society of the West Indies," Comparative Perspectives
on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, V. Rubin and A. Tuden, eds. (New York, 1977),95-106;
and Karras, Sojourners in the Sun. On Canada, there are many works by David S. Macmillan; see
especially "The 'New Men' in Action: Scottish Mercantile and Shipping Operations in the North
American Colonies, 1760-1825," Canadian Business History: Selected Studies, 1497-1971 (Toronto,
1972),44-103; and "Scottish Enterprises and Influences in Canada, 1620-1900," in Cage, Scots Abroad,
46-79; and, of many works by J. M. Bumsted, The People's Clearance: Highland Emigration to British
North America, 1770-1815 (Edinburgh, 1982); and "The Scot and Canada," in Landsman, Nation and
Province in the First British Empire; and on Scottish ventures into the periphery generally, Bailyn,
Voyagers to the West, pt. 4. For the role of Scottish merchants in the creation of a global British trade
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Scottish doctors, a group who often sought employment within the Scottish
regiments, also began to look for places in America. Their numbers were
substantial, certainly approaching two hundred in the mainland colonies alone
during the eighteenth century, with perhaps a majority of the physicians in the
British Caribbean, including many of the most prominent medical men everywhere
they went. The proliferation of Scottish physicians in America has often been
attributed to the rise of the University of Edinburgh within the field of medical
education, but some of the most prominent, such as Cadwallader Colden and
William Douglass, had arrived in America before its rise. They were from a
generation of physicians trained principally at London and especially Leiden, then
the most renowned center of medical education in Europe. The prominence of that
group in America illustrates the continuing importance of continental educations
for the Scottish elite; the subsequent rise of Scottish medical training to world
renown depended in part on the ability of the doctors it educated to find places
abroad.'?
The perspective of those men was broad. As men of letters, they attended to a
variety of subjects, including medicine, politics, natural history, and natural
philosophy. Many were active members of a transatlantic circle of natural history
enthusiasts that corresponded regularly across the Atlantic and across provincial
bounds. A few wrote important works of colonial history, the focus of which was not
restricted to any single colony but ranged extensively throughout the provincial
world.!"
Another important group was the Scots clergy, both Presbyterian and Episcopalian. Scotland regularly produced a surplus of clergymen, who sought posts in
Ireland, within established Scottish congregations such as the one at Rotterdam,
and, increasingly, the American colonies. James McLachlan has counted more than
a hundred Scottish Episcopal ministers in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, who
helped convey the principles of the Scottish Episcopal Enlightenment to that
region.!?
The influx of Presbyterian clergy was even more important to the emergence of
distinct provincial identities, owing to the security granted that church in Scotland
network, see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British
Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (New York, 1995).
17 Roger Emerson, "Scots Gentlemen of Some Credit: Medical Emigres to America, 1685-1800,"
(unpublished paper presented at the Wellcome Unit Conference on Scottish Medicine, Glasgow,
October 7, 1995), has estimated that Scotland was able to retain no more than a third of the physicians
it trained during the eighteenth century. See also C. Helen Brock, "Scotland and American Medicine,"
in William R. Brock, Scotus Americanus: A Survey of the Sources for Links between Scotland and America
in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1982), 114-26, Appendix B; Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and
Slaves (Cambridge, 1985); Karras, Sojourners in the Sun, 55-60.
IR William Douglass, Summary, Historical and Political, of the British Settlements in North-America, 2
vols. (Boston, 1747-52); Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the
Province of New-York in America (New York, 1727-44); John Mitchell, The Contest in America between
Great Britain and France (London, 1757). Mitchell may have been born in America, but he was Scottish
educated and had close Scottish connections. The provincial natural history circle was first described
by Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), chaps. 2-3.
19 James McLachlan, "The Scottish Intellectual Migration to British North America 1650-1770: New
England and the Chesapeake," paper delivered at conference on Scotland and the Americas, John
Carter Brown Library, Brown University, June 1994.
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under the Treaty of Union. As a result, after 1707, the Church of England could no
longer claim to represent the ecclesiastical establishment of a British empire in the
way that it had within the English dominions. This became evident almost
immediately after the union, in the trial of the Ulster-born Presbyterian minister
Francis Makemie, who was arrested early in 1707 within what was then still the
English colony of New York, on the charge of preaching without a license from that
colony's Anglican governor. After the union took effect on May 1 of that year,
Makemie abruptly changed his defense, which had rested on the English Act of
Toleration, which he now contended did not apply to New York, since no legal
establishment existed there. On the contrary, Makemie maintained that Presbyterians now possessed, "since the Union, a National Establishment in Great Britain,
as nighly related and annexed unto the Crown of England, as the Church of
England themselves." Makemie was hailed by members of dissenting churches
throughout the colonies for securing their liberties against a metropolitan establishment, which constituted but local law having "nothing to do with the Plantation," in the words of Cotton Mather.>'
Presbyterianism grew especially rapidly during the ensuing half-century. That was
partly because of the influx of Scottish and especially Scots-Irish settlers after 1717;
it was also the result of the additional protections Presbyterian churches could
claim under the law by affiliating with the Church of Scotland. Perhaps most
important, Presbyterian clergymen, like their merchant counterparts, worked
aggressively to extend their reach, building bridges across denominational boundaries and organizing both congregations and an unprecedented range of educational institutions on the colonial frontiers, far beyond where such institutions were
otherwise found."
Still another important group who came in substantial numbers was a large
contingent of imperial officials, among whom Scots were noted for both their
visibility and aggressiveness. Men such as James Abercromby, Henry McCulloh,
James Glen, Alexander Spotswood, and Archibald Kennedy would become notorious in America for their often uncompromising insistence on the primacy of
imperial authority. Yet what was imperial within the eighteenth-century empire was
not necessarily metropolitan. Most of their specific policy recommendations, while
subordinating local interests to larger imperial concerns, emphasized at the same
time the right of provincials to be treated as equal subjects commensurate with their
growing "strength and wealth," in Abercromby's words, drawing on the tenets of the
new political economy then being popularized by Scots and other provincials. The
basis for their position closely resembled that of Scottish Unionists in 1707: to
20 Francis Makemie, A Narrative of a New and Unusual American Imprisonment of Two Presbyterian
Ministers, and Prosecution of Mr. Francis Makemie One of Them, for Preaching One Sermon at the City
of New-York (Boston, 1707), in The Life and Writings of Francis Makemie, Boyd S. Schlenther, ed.
(Philadelphia, 1971), 193-244, 230; Mather is quoted on p. 25. A different view of the Makemie case
more sympathetic to Lord Cornbury can be found in Patricia U. Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal:
The Politics of Reputation in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 71-72.
21 For American links to the Church of Scotland, see "Case of the Presbyterian Congregation at New
York, 1724," Church of Scotland Ms., Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh, 49: 43-58; for educational
institutions, Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York,
1971); and Howard Miller, "Evangelical Religion and Colonial Princeton," in Schooling and Society,
Lawrence Stone, ed. (Baltimore, Md., 1976), 115-45.
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promote the interests of empire, nation, and province over strictly local concerns
within an expansive and secure political and commercial union. They were
unusually active in promoting both colonial expansion and provincial unity,
repeatedly pressing for political alliance across provincial and even racial boundaries on the colonial frontiers. Such measures did not always endear them to locally
minded colonists, nor did they necessarily accord with policies emanating from the
metropolis.F
Those officials brought other Scots with them, including doctors, military men,
and other minor officials; the famous scientist-politician Cadwallader Colden, for
instance, came to New York under the patronage of the soldier and literary man
Robert Hunter, then governor of the colony, as did the prominent lawyer James
Alexander and Hunter's successor, the equally literate William Burnet.> They also
helped direct the emigration of common settlers, who often arrived as individuals
or families attached to a trading firm, a clergyman, or a manor lord, especially when
emigration accelerated after the end of the Seven Years' War. 24
Collectively, those Scottish elites displayed something like what Bernard Aspinwall, describing nineteenth-century Scots and Scottish emigrants, referred to as a
"portable" faith. That phrase certainly applied to the political economy employed
by imperial officials and clergymen alike, which emphasized the ability of demographic and commercial forces to alter and even reverse the direction of established
political authority, as represented by James Abercromby's insistence that imperial
reform take into account the wealth and strength of the colonies. Adam Smith's
well-known solution to the American crisis-extending parliamentary representation to the colonies on the assumption that one day even the imperial capital would
move to America-constitutes only the most prominent articulation of a common
prediction in eighteenth-century Scotland about the future flow of authority within
the empire. A similar point could be made about an emerging moral sense
philosophy that Scots preached in their ministries and taught in their colleges and
22 On Scottish Unionists, see especially Robertson, "Elusive Sovereignty"; and see Ned C. Landsman,
"The Legacy of the British Union for the North American Colonies: Provincial Elites and the Problem
of Imperial Union," in Union for Empire, 297-317, for a discussion of that imperial elite. Abercromby's
phrase is from "An Examination of the Acts of Parliament Relative to the Trade and the Government
of Our American Colonies," in Magna Charta for America, Jack P. Greene, Charles F. Mullett, and
Edward C. Papenfuse, Jr., eds. (Philadelphia, 1986), 76-77. A good example of the kind of measure
Scots especially promoted was the Albany Plan of Union, for which Benjamin Franklin credited the
active support of Archibald Kennedy and James Alexander and which coincided with Kennedy's
repeated calls for alliance with the Six Nations. The plan was rejected by both locally minded colonial
assemblies and imperial authorities. See Alison Gilbert Olson, "The British Government and the
Colonial Union, 1754," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 17 (January 1960): 22-34. Kennedy,
Cadwallader Colden-author of the History of the Five Nations-Spotswood, Robert Livingston, and a
host of others were famous for their efforts to promote Indian alliances. For Spotswood's role in
promoting provincial union, see Bruce Lenman, "'Garrison Government'? Governor Alexander
Spotswood and Empire," in Simpson, Scottish Soldier Abroad, 67-80. For the national significance of
Scottish political economy, see especially Istvan Hont, "The 'Rich Country-Poor Country' Debate in
Scottish Classical Political Economy," in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the
Scottish Enlightenment, Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds. (New York, 1983), 271-316.
23 On Hunter's circle, see especially Mary Lou Lustig, Robert Hunter, 1666-1734: New York's
Augustan Statesman (Syracuse, N.Y., 1983).
24 See Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 392-97; and John Witherspoon, "Letter Sent to Scotland for the
Scots Magazine," The Works of the Reverend John Witherspoon, 2d edn., 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1802), 4:
281-89.
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academies, which gave primacy to the common judgments of an informed community of citizens rather than to long-established authorities.>
One of the most striking illustrations of the complexity of attitude toward nation
and place can be found in the pronouncements of John Witherspoon, the
Presbyterian pastor from Paisley who left Scotland in 1768 to become president of
the College of New Jersey at Princeton and who took it upon himself to serve as
spokesman for Scots and Presbyterians in the colonies. After his arrival in North
America, Witherspoon began to work toward a reconsideration of nationality,
basing his ideas on a political economy that emphasized people and community
over boundaries and territory. Thus when critics at home attacked his sponsoring of
continuing emigration from Scotland, Witherspoon responded with a vision of the
Scottish nation far larger than the mere inhabitants of the homeland. What did it
mean, he asked, for a man to be a friend to his country? Was it to promote the
well-being of the land itself, or of the people, wherever they might happen to
reside? Witherspoon would further develop his portable version of nationality
during the revolutionary crisis, speaking to his fellow Scottish Americans in the
guise of a Scottish patriot and "lover of his country" in order to justify American
independence. Independence would benefit both them and their countrymen at
home, who would be among the principal beneficiaries of an expanding American
empire of liberty and trade.>
MUCH OF THE BEHAVIOR OF THOSE SCOTTISH AMERICANS is not easily encompassed by
versions of ethnicity intended to assess the portions of Old World heritage that
were ceded or retained. The best model for understanding Lowland Scottish
Americans in the eighteenth century may not be Scottish communities at home but
rather mobile Scots settlements abroad. The Scottish experience in British America
was distinctive, at least before the upsurge in emigration of the 1760s, in the relative
prominence of skilled and educated groups among the migrants for most of the
colonial period, and by the fact that classical ethnic communities of Lowland Scots
in America were rare before the eve of the American Revolution, compared to the
experience of some other cultural groups, including Scottish Highlanders.
Most Lowlanders arrived in the American colonies as individuals or in small
groups over diverse routes and only rarely in organized emigration parties before
25 Bernard Aspinwall, Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820-1920 (Aberdeen, 1984);
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, R. H. Campbell and A. S.
Skinner, eds., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976), book 4, chap. 7. See also [William Thorn], The Present Conduct of
the Chieftains and Proprietors of Lands in the Highlands of Scotland (London, 1773), among many
suggestions similar to Smith's. On moral philosophy, see T. D. Campbell, "Francis Hutcheson: 'Father'
of the Scottish Enlightenment," in Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, R. H. Campbell and
Andrew S. Skinner, eds. (Edinburgh, 1982), 167-85.
26 John Witherspoon, An Address to the Natives of Scotland Residing in America, in Works, 3: 47-60;
and see "Letter Sent to Scotland for the Scots Magazine." By the end of the war, other Britons also
would predict that American independence would lead to the expansion of Britain's informal empire,
partly because a substantially provincial political economy emphasizing the determining power of
population and commerce was prevailing in the metropolis as well. See Eliga H. Gould, "A Virtual
Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution," below, 476-89; and see
Ned C. Landsman, "Witherspoon and the Problem of Provincial Identity in Scottish Evangelical
Culture," in Sher and Smitten, Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, 29-45.
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the 1760s. They attached themselves in small numbers to a variety of individuals and
institutions: factors and storekeepers to the tobacco merchants in the Chesapeake,
tradesmen and small traders to larger merchants in the mid-Atlantic cities and
across the principal commercial routes, occasional parishioners with clergymen,
small farmers beside the estates of wealthier landowners, with other farmers
blending into common Presbyterian communities developing in the backcountry
and frontiers. Where they did establish ethnic clusters, Scots moved freely among
them. There was undoubtedly a considerable surplus of males among them, as there
had been among the peddling and soldiering populations on the European
continent; where Scottish families settled, there is some evidence that women also
played important roles in linking geographically dispersed Presbyterian communities
one to another. Everywhere, there was a sense of mobility and of internationalism: by
the eve of the American Revolution, Scottish travelers in the colonies, for instance,
often could not help but encounter a variety of other Scots, whether arriving,
settled, or in the process of moving about-wherever in America they traveled.F
By the time Witherspoon and most of those travelers wrote, much of that pattern
had begun to change. The upsurge in emigration during the 1760s and 1770s
Bernard Bailyn describes led to a much greater influx of ordinary Scots and Scottish
families, including farmers and artisans in well-organized land companies intending
compact ethnic settlement, as Scottish Highlanders had also begun to attempt.
After 1783, much of that settlement would shift northward, to the remaining
provinces of British North America. The Canadian provinces would see a greater
diversity in the forms of Scottish settlement. There, organized companies of
Lowland farmers, artisans, and Highlanders would flourish in ethnic communities,
like those of other national groups, alongside coteries of ambitious Scottish
merchants, clergy, officials, and traders on the western frontiers, whose movements
more closely resembled those of earlier generations of Scots migrants. The
presence of those very different types of immigrant Scots would influence what
would become Canadian culture in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.>
27 One of the rare Scottish Lowland communities was the outgrowth of the East Jersey colony. For
ties to merchants and proprietors, see Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 211-22; for
women in Presbyterian communities, 160-61, 249-50. For some interesting travel accounts, see
"Correspondence of Hugh Simm," Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.; Journal of Robert
Mercer, GD 1/787/37, Mercer of Pittendriech Ms., Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh.
28 Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pt. 5, esp. 604-37. Some contrasting legacies of Scottish culture in
Canada are described in Bumsted, "Scot and Canada"; and Michael Vance, "Advancement, Moral
Worth, and Freedom: Some Possible Meanings of Independence among Early Nineteenth-Century
Glasgow Emigrants to Upper Canada," in Landsman, Nation and Province in the First British Empire.
Ned C. Landsman is a professor of history at the State University of New York
at Stony Brook. The author of Scotland and Its First American Colony,
1680-1765 (1985) and From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and
Culture, 1680-1760 (1997), he is currently working on a history of the Middle
Colonies in early America and a transatlantic study of the evangelical
enlightment within the British provincial world. Landsman is also editing a
volume of essays, Nation and Province in the First British Empire (forthcoming),
derived from a conference in 1994 at the John Carter Brown Library, which was
the inspiration for this essay.
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