Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750-1820 (review)

Douglas J. Hamilton's volume addresses several different traditions in a gallant effort to build bridges between them. This crisply written book addresses many of the relevant questions, though perhaps not completely, while making excellent use of archival material that will be unfamiliar to most of its readers. At the same time, the book, while achieving the goal of showing the Scottish contribution to the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fails to assert the quite significant, if largely invisible, contribution that Scots made to world history during the same period – and in subsequent generations. The problem here is one of framing, or knowing just how far to push the argument's significance given the author's carefully collected data.

Scottish migration patterns to North America were generally thought to be well-known; the traditional story had groups of highlanders crossing the Atlantic after the Clearances in search of a better life, far away from the grasp of those who had caused them to migrate. Ned Landsman and I published books that complicated that story, by showing that not all of the migrants fit this particular pattern. Many lowland Scots emigrated, and they were well-educated and trained. They chose to migrate; they were not forced to emigrate. They found and then went to places where their skills were in demand, particularly newer areas of British settlement in the Americas. Once there, they created networks that served a variety of purposes, including drawing in more Scottish migrants. In Jamaica and Virginia at least, I showed that many of them intended to strike it rich and return home. That desire to return home shaped their behaviour while in the colonies, as well as the response that they met from fellow colonists. These findings expanded what both Scottish and American historians already knew, by highlighting the stories of Scottish migrants and, at the same time, linking them to the history of the British Empire in the Atlantic world rather than to either the story of a particular colony or country.

Hamilton builds upon this work, though it is clearly modelled upon it. The book's first two chapters, 'Scotland in the eighteenth century' and 'The West Indies in the eighteenth century', present the context. The author relies heavily in these chapters upon synthesizing secondary sources in order to explain what drove the migration. The next several chapters each address a specific area of Scottish experience in the West Indies. These chapters are all based on archival material, which is clearly the book's strength. In each chapter, Scottish sojourners appear in commerce, in plantation management, and in medicine. They resided across all of the Caribbean islands, but especially those with greater opportunities in this period. After 1763, the British gained control of Tobago, St Vincent's, and Grenada (among others) from the French – and those islands are precisely where Hamilton finds the greatest number of new sources. British victory over the French allowed for new British settlement in the islands, even as it raised new problems. Because these islands already had European populations and experience with another colonial rule, transitions to British rule were not always smooth. Some of the problems are discussed here; others are not. It might have been helpful for the author to directly articulate what roles the Scots played in the internal feuds that sometimes developed between the British and French merchants in the islands, for example.

Each of the book's next two chapters deal with politics, and Scottish contributions to them, in the West Indies and Britain. The book's final chapter deals in general with the theme of repatriation – either in terms of the Scottish residents in the islands returning or, in some cases, of their investments returning before them. The book is clearly well-researched. Perhaps its greatest contribution is that it has brought some additional archival sources into the migration story. These documents provide further...