Scotland and the 19th-Century World, edited by Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew, and: Scotland and the British Empire edited by John M. MacKenzie and T. M. devine (review)

With the referendum on scottish independence looming on the horizon, it is perhaps inevitable that there should be resurgence in scholarship aimed at demarcating Scotland’s place on the world stage and its distinctive contribution to history. As John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine note in the introduction to their edited volume on Scotland and the British Empire, interest in Scotland’s role in the Empire developed alongside the rise of nationalism in the early twentieth century “when Scottish activities in the British Empire seemed to offer Scots … the status of a global people worthy of a separate state” (7). Scotland’s historical connections with other nations were celebrated in the hope that relationships with these powers would prosper in the future. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the nationalist Scottish government seems committed to the same agenda. Alex Salmond, the First Minister, sent words of congratulation on the opening of the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2008; his government also provided funding for the creation of a new US-UK Fulbright Commission award in Scottish studies in order to tighten the academic bonds between Scotland and the United States (of which this author, it should perhaps be noted, was a grateful recipient). The government seems determined notjust to support research in Scottish academia but also to celebrate Scottish achievement. The two books under consideration here aim to do something similar. By considering Scotland’s relationship with the wider world, they emphasise Scottish distinctiveness and examine the contributions of Scotland as a nation to imperial and world history in the modern era. Nevertheless, the authors and editors make a real effort to eschew triumphalism; they are alive to the dangers of parochialism and, at a time when scholars are embracing the postcolonial trend toward transnation-alism, of adopting a potentially inapposite national framework.

Scotland and the 19^h-Century World, edited by Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew, aims to rehabilitate nineteenth-century Scottish literature. Nineteenth-century authors were condemned by their twentieth-century nationalist descendants because they failed to champion the idea of an independent Scotland; this volume insists, by contrast, that while the concerns of Romantic and Victorian authors were supra-national, and while they responded to and shaped intellectual trends of global significance, they were not un-Scottish. Far from being a wasteland, literary Scotland in the nineteenth century was a fertile field. To a great extent the concerns of these writers lay beyond Scotland, but their encounters with the wider world were shaped by and reflected their Scottish experiences. This book is innovative and rigorously researched with an animated introduction. It has a literary focus and reassesses the well-known figures of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Refreshingly, however, it defines literature very broadly, considering the periodical press, missionary tales, orientalist literature, and military writings. The volume considers exchanges between Scotland and America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, looking not only at reciprocal cultural influences but also at what literary constructions reveal about the nature of Scottish society.

Scotland and the British Empire is similarly wide-ranging, both geographically and thematically: the contributions cover the United States, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, and the book includes chapters on subjects from economics and slavery to the military, missions, literature, and the environment. Andrew Mackillop’s contribution on the Scots in Asia is a standout chapter. Mackillop contends that London was a hub of strategic importance but insists that provincial localities—in this case, the Scottish east coast burghs—were integral nodes within the imperial network. Acknowledging this regional dimension is important, Mackillop...