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    The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914
    The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914
    The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914
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    The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914

    By John M. MacKenzie and Nigel R. Dalziel

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    The description of South Africa as a 'rainbow nation' has always been taken to embrace the black, brown and white peoples who constitute its population. But each of these groups can be sub-divided and in the white case, the Scots have made one of the most distinctive contributions to the country's history.

    Now available in paperback, this book is a full-length study of their role from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. It highlights the interaction of Scots with African peoples, the manner in which missions and schools were credited with producing 'Black Scotsmen' and the ways in which they pursued many distinctive policies. It also deals with the inter-weaving of issues of gender, class and race as well as with the means by which Scots clung to their ethnicity through founding various social and cultural societies. This book offers a major contribution to both Scottish and South African history and in the process illuminates a significant field of the Scottish Diaspora that has so far received little attention.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateJul 19, 2013
    ISBN9781847796899
    The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, identity, gender and race, 1772–1914
    Author

    John M. MacKenzie

    John MacKenzie is Emeritus Professor of Imperial History, Lancaster University and holds Honorary Professorships at Aberdeen, St Andrews and Stirling, as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Edinburgh.

    Read more from John M. Mac Kenzie

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      The Scots in South Africa - John M. MacKenzie

      CHAPTER ONE

      Introduction: imperialism and identities

      When Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the phrase ‘the rainbow nation’ for post-apartheid South Africa he was no doubt thinking of varying shades of black, brown and white. But within each of those categories there are of course further ethnic subdivisions, identifiable through language, history, cultural traditions and religious forms. Africans are mainly divided into different branches of the Nguni and the Sotho–Tswana peoples, as well as migrants (and sometimes refugees) from adjacent states. People of Asian descent have migrated, or been brought as slaves and indentured labourers, from parts of the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia. The Cape Coloured people are extraordinarily diverse in their genetic make-up, incorporating some of the original Khoisan (hunter-gatherers and pastoralists) inhabitants of the region, the so-called Malays, as well as many mixed-race groupings. Yet they have a sense of identity and pride in their cultural forms that are second to none. So far as the whites are concerned, it has long been customary to divide them simply into Afrikaans- and English-speakers. Yet the first are made up of an amalgamation of at least Dutch, French, German and even Scots forebears (the latter will be explained below), while the second include those who owe their descent to English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, as well as European migrants who adopted the English language and at least some elements of English cultural norms.

      Of course South Africa is far from unique in this respect. Most modern nations are made up of complex amalgams of various ethnicities. The nineteenth-century notion of the ideal coherence of state and ethnic nation, so strongly propagated by Germany, but also the ambition of other Europeans, including the English, was always an impossible dream. It is ironic that this vision of nationalism helped to produce the imperial expansion which was to prove its nemesis. Imperialism created ‘colonies of white settlement’, all of them with dispossessed indigenous populations, which briefly clung to a notion of globalised nationalisms retaining some semblance of linguistic, cultural, religious, if not ethnic, purity. From the eighteenth century at least, the Dutch, French and British all vainly assumed that empires could envisage such an expansion of a European national ideal. It was of course a chimera, doomed to what might be described (in both older and more modern formulations) as dilution, contamination, reordering and cultural drift. Empires went further: in Asia, Africa and the Americas they created wholly artificial borders, incorporating multiple ethnicities, and called them territories, colonies, or in the Indian case a separate ‘empire’. These were destined though not necessarily designed to become multi-ethnic states, often riven by the tensions and potential conflicts of such a condition.

      In the territories of white settlement, the increase in ethnic complexity became part of the process of migration and population growth. Of course, as we shall see in the case of the Cape (and later South Africa), some diversity in European origins was always characteristic of the white population. A degree of polyglot migration was necessary not only to the yearning for power and dominion which developed among such populations but also to the growth and extension of exploitative forces and economic diversity. Efforts at overwhelming indigenous populations, through a high degree of violence (intentional) as well as the spread of destructive disease (largely unintentional), required infusions of population that were not always available within the parent imperial society. Imperial expansion in that period often had a curiously international flavour, but usually such additions to the white population were sufficiently small that they could be assimilated into the majority group. By the nineteenth century, however, these multiple migrations were accelerating, largely as a result of the pull of mineral discoveries. As ever, gold proved a powerful lure in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Reversing the alchemist’s dream, golden opportunity invariably turned to dross, but the migratory deeds had been done, aided by many other ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. United States society turned this diversification of its immigrants into a virtue, part of its professed national mission to be a melting pot of (mainly white) peoples, although it was quick to raise the barriers in the twentieth century when it faced economic recession or feared particular forms of migration.

      The melting pot was the perceived ideal, creating a wholly new and supposedly enlightened society, but the reality was that assimilation was often hindered by the scale of migration of particular ethnicities, providing them with the opportunity to survive as separate cultural forces, sometimes living in the same regions or neighbourhoods, dominating particular jobs, or adhering to specific religious or national institutions. Sometimes, degrees of assimilation could be reversed, as when new generations rediscovered cultural ‘roots’ and found comfort in emphasising difference, in identifying themselves as representatives of a national, or indeed international, ethnicity which distinguished them from the common herd. Blood lines (however ‘contaminated’) offered opportunities to mark themselves out as belonging to different ‘stock’. For some, this is no more than a folkloric residue; for others it represents cultural affiliations of significant psychological value. For many it offers the chance to participate in attractive cultural expressions – music, dance, dress, games, processions and the like – forms that connect them with others exhibiting similar predilections across the globe, all supposedly tying them into a European ‘Ur’ culture. Such ethnic identity seldom disrupts national affiliation, but it provides an appealing alternative layer.

      Canada, Australia and New Zealand have all exhibited similarly complex migratory patterns, ethnic constructions and layers of identity. In the case of these former British ‘dominions’ there has been a striking range of studies of these phenomena in recent years. Among these, perhaps the Irish and the Scots have received most attention. Apart from the obvious fact that these two nationalities contributed a high proportion of their populations to international migration, the reasons for this renewed interest are complex. Ireland’s economic miracle, largely resulting from membership of the European Union, has turned the country into a sophisticated and affluent society. Despite the continuing difficulties in Ulster, though now much ameliorated, older nationalist and religious hang-ups have been put to rest. Restoration and modernisation have proceeded apace, and in parallel with this the writing of Hibernian history has also been refurbished. As the nationalist ‘master narrative’ has to a certain extent receded the strength of cultural affiliation seems to have survived or even advanced.

      In the case of Scotland, devolution has produced greater interest in bilateral cultural, educational and political relations with Ireland. An Irish consular representative came to reside in Edinburgh. There is renewed concern with aspects of a common Celtic inheritance, in language, literature, music and sport. Universities sought research partnerships, and scholars, notably historians, linguists and literary critics, came to collaborate on what they perceived to be parallel patterns and common interests both within the history of the United Kingdom and in the British Empire beyond.¹ It was not, of course, always so. Although there have been, since the Elizabethan settlements, close relations between Scotland and Northern Ireland (creating the category of the Ulster Scots or the ‘Scotch Irish’), the Scots in the nineteenth century largely sought to distance themselves from the Catholic Irish. The Scots had a domestic and international reputation to uphold. The English had a tendency to emphasise their supposed virtues in contrast to the alleged disabilities of the Irish. Nineteenth-century imperial travellers like Sir Charles Dilke and J. A. Froude extolled the Scots, even in comparison with the English, while Anthony Trollope compared the Irish unfavourably with Scots, revealing a biased ethnic preference of the day.² Quite apart from the prejudice, we now know this to be often false in economic terms. The Irish were much more successful economically and socially in many parts of the British Empire than they were given credit for.³ They also came to dominate (often together with the Scots) certain professions, including surveying and medicine, and they played a striking role in the creation of complex identities.⁴ The recent historiography of the Irish diaspora has been subtle, suggestive and sophisticated. No one concerned with Scottish migration and activities in the former imperial territories can ignore it.

      Scots and empire

      Sir Charles Lucas,⁵ writing in his Historical Geography of the British Colonies in 1897, pointed out that ‘the annals of the dark continent are rich with Scotch names’. Having listed many missionaries and explorers, he noted that ‘the first British commandant of the Cape was General Craig, his successor in command of the forces was General Dundas. The second and final expedition against the colony was led by Sir David Baird. All three were Scotchmen.’ He also considered that:

      the strength of the missionary movement was in great measure due to the infusion of Scotch blood and to the effects of Scotch training. We trace to this source enterprise and tenacity, endurance and shrewdness, capacity for hard practical work, zeal in controversy. Difficulties, whether physical, social, or intellectual, have always acted as a stimulus to the northern character, and the qualities which are inherent in Scotchmen were tested and strengthened by the trials and dangers of missionary enterprise. Men of this type put their hands to the plough and looked not back.⁶

      Earlier in the century, Sir Joseph Banks, the great scientist and President of the Royal Society, had written, ‘So well does the serious mind of a Scotch education fit Scotsmen to the habits of industry, and frugality, that they rarely abandon them at any time of life, and I may say never while they are young.’⁷

      Both of these were non-partisan commentators, but their views reflect the nineteenth-century admiration for imperial Scots, noted for their military and business capacity, as well as their educational attainment. Moreover, such views of the distinctive character of the Scots were apparently shared by the functionaries of other empires. A German traveller, Tom von Prince, a Schutztruppe lieutenant travelling to Lake Nyasa, found himself in Blantyre in about 1893. Under the heading ‘African Scotland’, he noted the cold and un-African fog, and went on, ‘all around was the unmistakable accent of that kind of Englishmen. What is more, Livingston⁸ [sic], who discovered that area, was a Scotsman. Almost all inhabitants there seem to be Scottish, a breed of men which is very clever in monetary affairs. They combine the pleasant with the useful, are the best soldiers of England, and are very precise as businessmen.’⁹ In a sense, the Scots have almost had to live down this inflated reputation, but in recent years there has been a positive spate of studies of their roles in the original American colonies, the United States and the British imperial territories throughout the world.¹⁰ There have also been exhibitions and museum displays, with associated publications.¹¹

      Some of this work has assumed the character of ‘celebration’, but most has been concerned with much more hard-headed interests. Among the earliest works devoted to the Scots in the United States and the British Empire, such as W. J. Rattray’s four-volume The Scots in British North America (1880) and J. H. Brander’s The Scot Abroad (1881), the principal concern seems to have been with the identification of significant migrations and key individuals.¹² From the 1880s, the decade of the first act in the process of devolution, the founding of a Scottish Office and the ministerial post of Secretary of State for Scotland (1885) to the 1930s and beyond, there was a disposition to view the overseas activities of the Scots as a source of national pride, even as an indicator that they were perfectly capable of running their own affairs. Andrew Dewar Gibb, a professor of law and member of the imperial faction of Scottish nationalism, published his Scottish Empire in 1937. Gibb framed his imperial ideas with two books whose titles tell all, Scotland in Eclipse (1930) and Scotland Resurgent (1950).¹³ He seemed to be suggesting that a greater awareness of Scottish activities (he would certainly have called them ‘achievements’) in the British Empire and beyond would lead to a renewal of national pride, even to a new national determination. The same sentiments emerged at the British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938, encapsulated in a specific appeal to history. The distinguished Tudor historian J. D. Mackie wrote in one of the exhibition publications that ‘in the far-flung outposts of Empire’ Scots ‘never lose their identity’. They were bound by ‘traditions and customs which, while their outward forms may change with the passing of centuries, their inward and spiritual significance remain rooted in the heart’.¹⁴ At the same exhibition, the Church of Scotland even dared to have a mural depicting the failed Darien scheme between 1695 and 1700.¹⁵

      Almost inevitably, a contrary tendency saw Scots’ exploits overseas as a badge of shame, evidence of their subservient status to the English, of their complicity in an English project of power and domination.¹⁶ Others saw Scottish involvement in the British Empire as evidence of a shared experience of subordination and exploitation with the indigenous peoples of other continents.¹⁷ They too were a colonised people, albeit in different ways from the Irish. They were the dispossessed victims of extreme forms of landlordism (the Highland Clearances), of a cyclically fragile and socially disruptive capitalism (the periodic exigencies of the heavy industrial complex of the central belt), of an excessively rapid and destructive urbanism (the horrors of the slums of Glasgow, Dundee and elsewhere), not to mention the displacement of rural workers and small tenants from the richer agricultural lands of eastern Scotland and the Borders as a result of the development of new, more highly capitalised, technologically advanced and latifundian agricultural practices.

      In examining Scots in the empire we should, however, remember that the Scots also migrated in large numbers to England and that this most obvious and nearest migration has, perhaps, been the least studied.¹⁸ The Scots ‘colonised’ the professions in England. Working-class Scots created whole new communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in places such as Barrow-in-Furness and Corby. The Scots population has been long in decline and, uniquely in Europe, continues to be so. Dr Johnson’s celebrated canard about Scots and the high road to England has remained true for more than 250 years. The same economic and social forces were at work here, but at the elite end of society it is also possible that Scotland seemed to be just too small a stage upon which to act out ambition. The number of Scots Prime Ministers since Gladstone (genetically a full Scot, though born in England) has been out of proportion to the respective populations. Even in the twenty-first century, the predominance of Scots in British public life has been much commented upon. In 2005 the celebrated television journalist Jeremy Paxman suggested that England was labouring under a ‘Scottish Raj’.¹⁹ Since the artist William Hogarth and others satirised the Scots in British public life in the eighteenth century they have paradoxically been seen as both perpetrators and victims, driven from their own country by a powerful range of forces.

      In recent years, this ‘victimhood complex’ has been displaced by a realisation that the activities of Scots need to be examined in much more independent and instrumental ways. Of course some were involuntary migrants (and they make good copy for sentimental depictions in paintings and in literature), but the vast majority made elective decisions to try their fortunes elsewhere. Once there, the Scots seized the opportunities afforded by colonisation with an eagerness which belies any sense of being in some kind of slavish relationship with English political masters or a dominant landlord class. Scots migrants came from all the social strata and brought their cultural, religious, educational and social experiences to bear upon new environments. In all these ways a new degree of sophistication has developed in considering the manner in which the domestic affairs and predilections of Scots interacted with those peoples (fellow white settlers and indigenous inhabitants) and places (fresh climatic, social, economic and environmental contexts) to be found in their new locations elsewhere in the world.²⁰

      Sceptics suggest that none of this matters. Irish, Scots, English and Welsh soon adopt another identity in their new social and environmental context. Patrick O’Farrell has forcefully argued this, quoting his father, an Irish immigrant to New Zealand, as saying, ‘What has Ireland ever done for me?’²¹ Another notable sceptic is Eric Richards, who, despite (or maybe because of) his studies of the distinctive character of Highland land owning, believes that the strongly assimilative and integrative forces in Australian society obliterate ethnic origins fairly rapidly.²² Intermarriage accelerates these processes, soon diluting such identities. Thus it does not ultimately matter whether economic enterprise, acts of oppression or political dispensations (to use just three examples) prompt the migration of one ethnicity or another. If migrants do cling to some cultural forms, this is no more than adherence to a kind of comforting residuum, a relatively minor social arabesque, which ultimately has little effect upon their actions or upon the structural character of the society and state to which they now offer allegiance.

      This book is dedicated to the overturning of this proposition. Even if the contemporary situation suggests that ethnic identities are in retreat (and even this proposition is debatable, given the survival and even development of cultural and clan societies around the world), such a sense of allegiance to ‘home’ is significant and instrumental in the historical period covered by this book.²³ This may constitute a phenomenon continuing into the twenty-first century which may be described as the homeland remembered, reimagined and reinvoked.²⁴ There is plenty of evidence to suggest that migrants retained not only an awareness of layered or multiple identities, but also in many cases a sense of plural domicile. The more distant identity, from the migrant’s or ancestor’s place of cultural origins, does not necessarily experience a linear decline. Even after generational ‘dilution’ through intermarriage, such identities can experience surprising revivals. To a certain extent, this runs contrary to the notion of a homogeneous British approach to empire which was of long standing, had a clearly propagandist purpose and has always been deeply embedded in an imperial historiography. Sir John Seeley entitled his lectures of 1883 The Expansion of England because he saw the English conquest or assimilation of the other nations of the British Isles as a necessary prerequisite of global dominion. This was, in other words, an English-led and English-dominated imperial project. At the other end of an imperial historiography, Sir Reginald Coupland, who was himself involved in the constitutional debates surrounding the progressive decolonisation of the twentieth century, notably in Ireland and India, worried that the logical extension of such a decline of empire might indeed be the contraction of Britain. His last and posthumously published book, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (1954), was devoted precisely to this proposition. The greater part of Ireland might have gone, but the other components of Union had to survive to maintain national self-respect. With the sinking over the horizon of such an imperial historiography, at precisely the time that the sun was setting on the British Empire, we now take an entirely different approach to imperialism. The fact of the matter is that the creation of a supposedly English dominion equally involved the Expansion of Scotland, the Expansion of Wales and the Expansion of Ireland.

      Perhaps the extreme form of expressing this notion lies in the title of Donald Akenson’s book If the Irish ran the World.²⁵ In this latter-day series of lectures, a distinguished historian of migration has charted the Irish effect upon the island of Montserrat, the Irish contribution to its genetic code, as he puts it, despite the fact that there are no people who could be identified as Irish left. Their significance as planters and slave owners in the past left place and personal names. Even more significantly, they contributed various aspects of the culture of the island (though he is sceptical of overplaying this, as some have done). But, whereas the Irish in Montserrat have been assimilated or have departed, the inheritors of the Scots and Irish mantle are an identifiable and sometimes all too visible strand in the populations of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where they constituted, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a considerably higher proportion of the population than their numbers in Britain warranted. In the Cape and the other South African territories which combined in the Union in 1910 they were never so prominent numerically. But their influence was out of proportion to their numbers.

      Scots, Scottish identity, Scotland and southern Africa

      There was no truly large-scale Scots migration to the Cape, although the gold mines of the Transvaal sucked in a surprising number at the end of the nineteenth century. (These figures are examined in Chapters 3 and 5.) But before that the Scots at the Cape and in the other territories were largely (though not exclusively) members of a commercial and intellectual elite. As merchants and shipowners they seized the opportunities available at the Cape after the colony was first taken from the Dutch in 1795. Scottish regiments were prominent in the garrison (and some soldiers stayed). But, above all, the intellectual and religious life of the colony was indelibly marked by Scots (or people trained in Scotland) and their activities. Scots were active in the establishment of the intellectual institutions of the Cape from the 1820s. They were central to the development of printing and a free press. They were key figures in the creation of educational and medical services. They were prominent in all the infrastructural and environmental professions, as surveyors, engineers, builders, botanists, foresters. They were significant in the transfer of the concept of the museum, in the study of natural history, geology, fossils, and in astronomical research. Later, they were active as trade union leaders. They virtually saved the Dutch Reformed Church from decline and they established their own forms of Presbyterianism almost everywhere. Above all, they constituted, through various societies and denominations, a highly significant band of missionaries. As such, they developed important connections with the frontier (as well as with the heartland of the colony) and consequently with African societies.

      To produce this list is not to suggest that the Scots were uniquely enlightened, humanitarian or politically and culturally radical. They were just as capable of being reactionary, as brutal in the carving out of their settlements and involvement in warfare, as any other whites. But this book is not designed either to celebrate or to pass moral judgements – except in so far as these are unavoidably entwined in the meanings of words as they have mutated in contemporary times. Far too many recent histories have fallen into E. P. Thompson’s well expressed trap of looking at the past with the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.²⁶ Rather, the argument will suggest that the Scots brought a particular set of experiences of cultural and religious institutions, of an intellectual background with a severely practical bent, and of the social relations of both urban and rural life, to bear upon the region, and that their world view was so formed by these sets of influences that they operated in significantly different and clearly identifiable ways from, say, the English, the Welsh or the Irish.

      This raises the whole question of whether there was a distinct Scottish identity which was maintained, promoted or even developed at the so-called periphery of empire. This is the corollary of the notion that an overall Scottish identity after the Union of 1707 was specifically related to the Scots participation in the opportunities of the British Empire (so called precisely to embrace the Scots and other ethnicities within the British Isles).²⁷ There has been a very considerable debate about these complex questions of identity, not least from the point of view of the relationship between a new sense of ‘Scottishness’ in the era and the nature of ‘Britishness’ as developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.²⁸ I have myself argued that some of the regional differences among Scots were broken down overseas, where a stronger sense of a distinct Scots ethnicity based upon a range of cultural, religious, military and historical signifiers came into play.²⁹ It may even be the case that the British Empire was actually the milieu for the cultural survival of the various ethnicities of the British union.³⁰ But all identities are dynamic and fluid. They can be multiple and complex, shifting according to sets of relationships connected with gender, generation, class and occupation, all modified by geographical and historical context. They change over time and space, through individual and group experience, and with the evolution of each individual generation and its successors. The metaphor of strata or layers has been used, but that is perhaps too mechanistically archaeological.³¹ The process is much more like a compound which changes both its composition and its overall characteristics as new elements are added.

      Moreover, identities are made up of internal and external perceptions. We each of us have some sense of our identity, complex or simple as it may be. We are also aware of how others perceive us, and that external perception interacts with and modifies our own self-construction. The Cape produced its own diverse set of identities, framed in both interior and exterior forms, among White, Black and Coloured peoples deeply embedded within their economic, social and spatial relations. And yet, within the ethnic complexities of the Colony, and the other territories that eventually made up the Union of South Africa, there emerged a continuing and changing sense of being both Scottish and colonial in the nineteenth century. The Southern African experience, for example, significantly modified and enhanced the military and religious components of the emerging identity of the Scots.³² But as these latter examples illustrate, we should remember that expressions of these identities, particularly in the nineteenth century, were invariably generated by, and mainly applied to, males. Women were just as active in their identity formation and may well have influenced that of males in the process.

      I have also argued that, although the British Empire was English in its administrative and legal forms (as it happens in the latter case less so in South Africa), it was strongly influenced by the Scots in most other respects.³³ The reservations of the Act of Union of 1707 preserved Scottish religious, educational, legal and financial systems, and this meant that Scottish civil society survived. Indeed, it was the continuing existence of such a distinct civil society which constituted one of the strongest arguments for devolution, namely that this civil apparatus should be regulated in the place where it was best understood, in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh. By extension characteristics of the Scottish civil experience can be identified clearly surviving throughout the former British Empire in a range of educational, religious and other institutions. To this we may add the specific contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment, notably the manner in which it created new disciplines. These included political economy, comparative social study constituting a proto-anthropology, early forms of geography, a scientific tradition that was connected to European networks, as well as social, legal and political ideas that were national in some of their forms but international in their connections and significance.³⁴

      Moreover, the Scottish universities (generally numbered as four, but by some calculations there were six) were grossly over-producing graduates in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.³⁵ Greater social mobility could be exercised through education in Scotland than elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and Scots were often forced to seek career opportunities overseas. Such graduates came from a relatively sophisticated urban society where powerful economic and social forces, related to the early phases of the industrial revolution, were at work. While some doubt has been cast on such high figures, it is possible that literacy (at least in basic forms) in Scotland was as high as 75 per cent in 1750. Scots were also surrounded by examples of new technology and their capacity to produce dramatic transformations in economic forms, affording fresh opportunities for power in every sense. These produced, and were backed up by, the provision of infrastructure and the creation of new or renewed built environments. Even in rural areas, technical change was frequently apparent. On the great Scottish estates landowners exerted considerable power, and each estate was a minor polity and community in its own right. Each had its great house and economically active outbuildings, decorative and productive gardens and woodland, its home farm, residences for a hierarchy of workers from factor to labourer, with central institutions like church, mill, sawmill and school.

      Another key influence in the framing of a distinct Scotland was the fact that it was one of the centres of the Romantic movement, both in terms of its own writers and artists, and also in respect of the manner in which it was regarded by Europeans. The faked Ossian sagas of James Macpherson and the novels of Sir Walter Scott were celebrated and highly influential throughout Europe. Constructions of landscape, appreciation of its natural historical, geological and fossil forms, became central characteristics of Scottish attitudes to the environment. As is well known, Johnson and Boswell, despite their rather hostile account of the Highlands, were travelling at a time when new forms of exploratory, scientific, quantitative and aesthetic travel were beginning to be fashionable. The attitudes of the English Tory Johnson can be contrasted with those of the Welsh Whig Thomas Pennant, who had influenced Johnson in his desire to travel to Scotland in the first place.³⁶ As the revolts of the eighteenth century – notably the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46 – retreated into history the land came to be mapped. The Statistical Accounts of Scotland first mooted in 1790 and which came to be known as the Old, were published in twenty-one volumes between 1791 and 1799. These were followed by the New, compiled between 1831 and 1845 and the whole enterprise impressively charted the population, settlements and economic activities of the country. Even these were based upon earlier proposals for the surveying of Scotland parish by parish dating from the 1760s and 1770s, an early manifestation of a fascination with statistics that was to become so significant in the early nineteenth century. Antiquarian, archaeological, historical, naturalist and scientific societies as well as field clubs were springing up everywhere between the 1780s and the middle of the following century, mirroring the grander societies of Edinburgh, like the Royal Society of 1783 and the Wernerian Natural History Society of 1814. Thus, virtually for the first time, the wildness was tamed and both wilderness and population patterns and occupations came to be understood. As Charles Withers has forcefully argued, Scottish identity was defined by science, societies and surveys of all sorts.³⁷ And the membership of these societies reflects a striking degree of social mobility.³⁸

      The yearning to chart and survey everything to do with Scotland came partly from its diversity, partly from its relatively small size. The first made the project apparently necessary, but also intriguing and possible. The second ensured that the country could be conveniently swept up into research and publication projects on which professionals, members of the elite and amateurs, often drawn from a variety of social classes, could work. All this activity emphasised the notion that Scotland was a country of distinct geographical, geological, botanical, zoological, ornithological, and in some ways ethnographic regions. It was a land where there was strong awareness of the significance of frontiers – Highland, Lowland, Borders, western and northern islands. Occasionally these frontiers were religious in form, as in the remaining Catholic parts of the Hebrides and the Highlands. It was also a land which was trilingual. As well as Gaelic and English, most of the Scottish population spoke dialects of the Scots tongue which, though linguistically related, were more or less impenetrable to the English. Burns, after all, wrote in both Scots and standard English. Many ministers were accustomed to delivering sermons in both Gaelic and English, or at times with Scots variants. Scottish culture was thus thoroughly hybrid and this was to be highly significant in its colonial manifestations.

      Although the founding of societies, scientific study and literary and philosophical movements were similarly occurring in other parts of the British Isles, the Scottish examples had a degree of intensity and comprehensiveness that contributed to this sense of Scots distinctness. The conviction that Scotland was different was also derived from its educational system of parish schools associated with the Church and from its universities. These both mirrored and created sets of social and economic characteristics that offered an awareness of forms of cohesiveness and potentiality for achievement arising out of this very sense of supposedly unique diversity. Meanwhile, processes of rural change and economic structural weaknesses, invariably noticed by contemporary observers, were to contribute greatly to the force of the Scottish diaspora. Thus, on the one hand, these very studies threw up evidence of the dislocations which were to affect the Scottish economy and society down to the end of the twentieth century, and which were to influence Scottish migration, not least to the Cape and elsewhere in South Africa. On the other, the notion of the strengths to be derived from statistical and qualitative forms of knowledge was to be transferred to other parts of the globe.³⁹ Information systems and the data they provided were not only a prerequisite of power; they also offered a means to self-knowledge and a definition of ethnic identity.⁴⁰

      In some respects, this identity was made up of a sense of being a marginal people, marginal in terms of Europe, marginal in respect of the larger British state. And there were degrees of marginality within Scotland itself. As we shall see, there were those in South Africa who thought that Highland Scots in particular were better able to cope with the harsh conditions of the Cape frontier because of the nature of the lands and climate which were their lot beyond the Highland frontier. Even those who migrated from Scots cities and towns or from more favourable land in the east and central areas of Scotland were not unused to hardship. Their living conditions were generally far from luxurious and some of them at least put up with the rigours of a supposedly primitive frontier existence. They also indulged in forms of clannishness and mutual help that were also observed in other parts of the nineteenth-century Empire.

      All these characteristics were to be powerfully influential in southern Africa. Just as in Europe Scots migrants and traders had formed connections between the worlds of the Baltic and the Low Countries,⁴¹ and then effectively created a seagoing bridge to North America, so, at the Cape, Scots discovered a port which linked the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds, a key link between Europe, the Americas, South Asia, the Far East and Australasia. It also constituted the major jumping-off point to an extensive interior. Yet this port largely lacked the infrastructure and the intellectual, scientific and literary institutions which its importance warranted. Like Scotland, South Africa was a land of geographical, environmental, and climatic frontiers, though they were grander and more extreme in their forms. The societies of southern Africa, white and black, were complex and polyglot. As in Scotland, they ranged from the comparative sophistication of the town (at this stage only Cape Town and a few much smaller outriders like Stellenbosch, Swellendam and Graaff Reinet) to remote and, to European eyes, ‘primitive’ settlements, whether white, black or those of mixed race like the Griqua. It seemed obvious to the influential Scots who arrived in the early years of British rule that the techniques and institutions that had so transformed Scotland were eminently exportable and could be equally effective in a seemingly alien land.

      Hence, for good or ill, Scots contributed more powerfully than their numbers would suggest to the processes of westernisation and modernisation in the region. Through their linguistic and ethnographic activities, particularly in the context of the frontier missions, they had a considerable influence upon attitudes to African peoples, to the classic nineteenth-century activity, derived from the Enlightenment, of creating taxonomies and stereotypes for humans as much as for the phenomena of the natural world. Such activities led to strong, though inevitably diverse, ideas about the frontier, African administration, labour policy, and much else. These views invariably made some missionaries and ‘intellectuals’ distinctly unpopular with settler farmers (of whom some were of course Scots) and other exploiters of the land and environment. Moreover, they were seldom popular with colonial administrations. But they had a tendency to be ‘noisy’. That is, they entered vigorously into controversy, made their views known through the press and any other media available to them. They published books, and they set out to activate their contacts and networks at home in order to influence religious, administrative and political policy makers.⁴²

      Through all this activity, they imprinted themselves on the landscape. Perhaps more than any other group, they set out to establish a taxonomy of southern African plants, to systematise the geology of the region, to create lexicographies and orthographies (however flawed) for African languages, as well as to produce literary accounts of land and peoples.⁴³ They would have seen this as an essential prerequisite in the creation of forms of Calvinist theocracy as mediated through the Scottish and Dutch variants. Meanwhile, Scots ministers gave their names to subdivided parishes. Other settlers named farms and geographical features. This was part of the international process of founding miniature Caledonias in unlikely places. Missionaries attempted to recreate what were in effect Scottish estates on their mission stations.⁴⁴ They saw newly planted gardens and woodland as evidence of the redemptive power of a recreated environment.⁴⁵ As we shall see, Scots surveyed roads and alarming routes over kloofs, or passes. They were involved in the building of railways and harbours. Later in the nineteenth century, a fresh wave of Scots brought with them some knowledge of mining techniques. Experimental chemists in Glasgow were also to produce the methods by which the low-grade gold of the Witwatersrand could be extracted.

      But some sceptics would enquire whether this overall designation of ‘Scots’ really works. It has sometimes been argued that Scots were more conscious of their local than of their supposedly national origins. It has been suggested that migrating Scots thought of themselves much more as Highlanders, Islanders, residents, for example, of Aberdeenshire, Fife, the central Lowlands or the Borders. Although the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 offers evidence of a sense of Scottish national identity much earlier than was envisaged by Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’,⁴⁶ this sense of nationhood may have been largely restricted to an elite. Yet, as suggested above, the evidence seems to suggest that migratory Scots did identify themselves as belonging to some national identity larger than the purely local. In 1825 a party of people from the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway left Leith for Argentina. A shipboard diary kept by a Dumfriesshire farmer, William Grierson, indicates just such a sense of national origins. He waxed lyrical about the land that was left behind, declaring that ‘our present children will prattle your names, and our future offspring shall learn your songs’, all demonstrating that ‘our reciprocal Love [emphasis in the original] is immortal’. He described the nostalgia of hearing bagpipes played on board (although bagpipes do of course have a wider incidence than the Highlands) and he described the party as indulging themselves in Highland reels (or ‘flings’) on deck on fine tropical evenings.⁴⁷ This also suggests that the adoption of Highland symbols as signifiers for the whole of Scotland, long attributed to the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, so carefully choreographed by Sir Walter Scott, had already percolated through both the geographical regions and the social classes.

      But a more general sense of Scotland was also invoked. ‘Fiddle, flute and bagpipe … showed that 8,000 miles of Sea had not cooled their Scottish blood’ and ‘an hour or two was dedicated to some of Burns’ most Patriotic lays’.⁴⁸ On arrival in Buenos Aires the existence of a Scottish network there was demonstrated by the way in which Grierson passed from one ‘Scotchman’ to another, organising the details of the settlement.⁴⁹ A memoir written in old age by another member of this party, Jane Robson, reveals her clinging to her Scottishness in the southern hemisphere into the twentieth century, and demonstrating the manner in which members of the Scots community held together in an alien environment, complete with weddings, dances, church dedications and funerals. In a politically disturbed Argentina, she found it a ‘wild uncertain life after leaving our peaceful Scottish home’.⁵⁰ The younger generation retained their Scottish identities despite the changes wrought in their countenances by a different climate. Jane was much disgusted when a visitor remarked that ‘No one would think you girls were Scottish with your white heads and black faces’.⁵¹

      Maybe Argentina, outside the formal British Empire and much racked by civil strife, invoked different and mutually protective emotions, but some of the reactions of Grierson and Robson must have been matched by migrants across the South Atlantic in another part of the southern hemisphere. The evidence from South Africa also indicates that, however

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