Empire and Scottish Society: The Impact of Foreign Missions at Home, c. 1790 to c. 1914 (review)

The critical role Scotland played in the British Empire has received increasing attention in recent years. Michael Fry's The Scottish Empire (2001) and T. M. Devine's Scotland's Empire (2003) are two of the most prominent examples of recent full-length treatments that trace the Scottishness of the British Empire through an analysis of the various institutional forces and conduits of influence by which Scots shaped the British imperial world. Whereas much of this scholarship is devoted to exploring the role of Scots on the ground—in colonial administrative and military service—in shaping imperial policy and power, recently there has been a surge of analysis of the vital Scottish role in shaping British imperial culture. The intellectual foundations that Scots inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment—made manifest in the long nineteenth century in discourses of anthropology and ethnography, travel writing, and national or regional literature—underwrote many British imperial assumptions. For one, Scots provided much of the cultural apparatus that defined the "Britishness" of the British Empire just as they provided fundamental assumptions about the nature of indigenous peoples and the dynamics of cultural encounter around the globe. In addition, perhaps to a much larger degree than for the English, empire building became a key component in the construction of Scottish national identity. While both Fry and Devine, for example, are careful to identify Scotland's important contribution to the British missionary movement, the role of Scottish missionary work—not only in exporting British culture to the colonial world but in shaping imperial and national identities at home—has not been thoroughly researched. (This is in contrast, for example, to studies of Highlandism and the dominant role of Scottish regiments in accounts of British military exploit in the colonies.) Esther Breitenbach's Empire and Scottish Society provides a more complete picture of the Scottish foreign missionaries' impact on both Scottish culture and the Scottish sense of themselves as Scots, Britons, and empire builders.

Breitenbach's study is divided into two parts. The first part investigates the structures of large Scottish institutions and organizations that disseminated missionary work and ideas. The second part looks at ideas and assumptions gleaned from individual colonial writings: memoirs, magazine articles, travel narratives, public lectures, and other sources. The study thus proceeds along two tracks of historical enquiry, with each requiring different methodological approaches. Both parts, however, provide examples from varied documentary sources, revealing careful and detailed archival work. Both are also integral to the larger questions Breitenbach's work pursues and combine to form a compelling and cogent analysis.

In the book's first chapters, Breitenbach traces the history of key institutions in Scottish civil society, from single-issue abolitionist societies only tangentially interested in Scotland's colonial work to institutions that emerged later in the century, such as the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and various colonial societies, which were explicitly dedicated to promoting Scotland's continued engagement in the imperial project. The focus of Breitenbach's analysis in early chapters, on "associational activity" in Scottish organizational structures and networks (47), narrows in ensuing chapters to the emergence of the Scottish missionary movement; it is here where the work's key contribution begins to take shape. Breitenbach traces the rise of the Scottish missionary movement, situating it within the context of larger developments in the history of Scottish religious institutions and culture. From the movement's beginnings in the late eighteenth century—both the Scottish Missionary Society and the Glasgow Missionary Society were founded in 1796—to the period of intense missionary activity between 1880 and 1920, Breitenbach's study reveals the profound influence of missionary culture in shaping Scottish national identity in the period.

The latter half of Empire and Scottish Society examines the work of identity construction and missionary involvement. Breitenbach's analysis reinforces the complexity of national and ethnic identity in the Scottish context, where...