Transatlantic Scots

Introduction

Ef¤e, and their numerous counterparts to do things in the Cape Fear River country they never could have done in Skye. That is why, from the late eighteenth century onward, America features in Gaelic songs and poems as a place of almost fabled opportunity and freedom; a country where (and this was the big thing) there were no evicting landlords; a country where, as was then impossible in Scotland, a working family could acquire a home, a farm, of their own. Which is not to say emigration had no downsides. Yes, emigration was a generally enriching experience from the standpoint both of emigrants themselves and of the societies that received them. But in the places North Carolina’s Scottish settlers came from—Skye, for example—emigration’s consequences were unremittingly, absolutely, almost terminally negative. The thousands of Skye families who took themselves across the Atlantic constituted, from a North American perspective, a huge gain in human capital. To Skye, on the other hand, those same families represented a massive loss—of talent, manpower , and capacity. Making good that loss has not been easy. But today we are at last beginning to create circumstances that are attracting folk to the Highlands and Islands in much the same way as Murdoch and Ef¤e MacLeod were long ago attracted to North Carolina. The consequences of this success are readily apparent in Skye. Forty years ago, the island’s population had been falling for more than a century, and that trend seemed set to continue. Instead the opposite has happened. Present-day Skye, its population up by nearly 50 percent since the 1960s, has thousands of new residents, hundreds of new homes. The island’s economy has diversi¤ed enormously. As a result, Skye is home to several high-tech businesses, a college delivering higher education through the medium of Gaelic, ®ourishing arts and heritage centres, ¤rst-rate hotels, and The Three Chimneys—which an international panel has voted twenty-eighth best restaurant in the world. I am convinced that in Skye and in much of the rest of the Highlands and Islands, positive developments of this sort will continue. That is ultimately because new communications and other technologies are enabling us to envisage a much more dispersed pattern of economic activity than the one familiar to us since the industrial revolution. Age-old barriers of distance and remoteness are starting to break down. Globally, the most advanced, the most exciting businesses are beginning to be located in places where their owners and workforces can simultaneously earn a good living and have immediate access to natural heritage—to coastal or mountain landscapes—of the very highest quality. Hence the current success of American regions like the Paci¤c North xii / Foreword West or Colorado. Hence my belief that where those American localities have led, the Highlands and Islands can readily follow. To those of us trying to help with the emergence of a new Scotland, the Scottish diaspora can be a source of endless aggravation. Don’t you realise, we ask our North American cousins, that Scotland has moved on; that it’s no longer the country your ancestors left; that there’s much more to our twenty-¤rst-century nation than castles, clan chiefs, kilts, Highland games, and thatched cottages? But if Americans of Scottish ancestry can legitimately be accused of misunderstanding modern Scotland, so we Scots are guilty of failing to come to terms with the fact that Scottish Americans are the product of a history that is not ours. Just as Scotland did not become frozen in time the moment your ancestors left it, neither did your forebears cease to evolve and develop when they crossed the Atlantic. You have been shaped by your North American, as well as by your Scottish, heritage. We, on our side, need to understand that. After all, it has to be from a Scottish standpoint a huge asset, given that we are a tiny country of just ¤ve million people, to have many times that number of folk out there—in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as the United States—believing they share kinship with us. If we are to make the best of what you can do for Scotland, we need to come to terms with who you are, with why you think and feel and act the way you do. This wholly admirable book will help us do that—which is why it’s hugely...