This is the first book wholly devoted to assessing the array of links between Scotland and the Caribbean in the later eighteenth century. It uses a wide range of archival sources to paint a detailed picture of the lives of thousands of Scots who sought fortunes and opportunities, as Burns wrote, ‘across th’ Atlantic roar’. It outlines the range of their occupations as planters, merchants, slave owners, doctors, overseers, and politicians, and shows how Caribbean connections affected Scottish society during the period of ‘improvement’. The book highlights the Scots’ reinvention of the system of clanship to structure their social relations in the empire and finds that involvement in the Caribbean also bound Scots and English together in a shared Atlantic imperial enterprise and played a key role in the emergence of the British nation and the Atlantic World.

This book participates in the modern recovery of the memory of the long-forgotten relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean. Drawing on theoretical paradigms of world literature and transnationalism, it argues that Caribbean slavery profoundly shaped Scotland¿s economic, social and cultural development, and draws out the implications for current debates on Scotland¿s national narratives of identity. Eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Scottish writers are re-examined in this new light. Morris explores the ways that discourses of "improvement" in both Scotland and the Caribbean are mediated by the modes of pastoral and georgic which struggle to explain and contain the labour conditions of agricultural labourers, both free and enslaved. The ambivalent relationship of Scottish writers, including Robert Burns, to questions around abolition allows fresh perspectives on the era. Furthermore, Morris considers the origins of a hybrid Scottish-Creole identity through two nineteenth-century figures - Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. The final chapter moves forward to consider the implications for post-devolution (post-referendum) Scotland. Underpinning this investigation is the conviction that collective memory is a key feature which shapes behaviour and beliefs in the present; the recovery of the memory of slavery is performed here in the interests of social justice in the present.

Country houses and the British empire, 1700–1930 assesses the economic and cultural links between country houses and the Empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Using sources from over fifty British and Irish archives, it enables readers to better understand the impact of the empire upon the British metropolis by showing both the geographical variations and its different cultural manifestations. Barczewski offers a rare scholarly analysis of the history of country houses that goes beyond an architectural or biographical study, and recognises their importance as the physical embodiments of imperial wealth and reflectors of imperial cultural influences. In so doing, she restores them to their true place of centrality in British culture over the last three centuries, and provides fresh insights into the role of the Empire in the British metropolis.

This collection of compact biographies puts a human face on the sweeping historical processes that shaped contemporary societies throughout the Atlantic world. Focusing on life stories that represented movement across or around the Atlantic Ocean from 1500 to 1850, The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850 explores transatlantic connections by following individuals—be they slaves, traders, or adventurers—whose experience took them far beyond their local communities to new and unfamiliar places. Whatever their reasons, tremendous creativity and dynamism resulted from contact between people of different cultures, classes, races, ideas, and systems in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. By emphasizing movement and circulation in its choice of life stories, this readable and engaging volume presents a broad cross-section of people—both famous and everyday—whose lives and livelihoods took them across the Atlantic and brought disparate cultures into contact.

An engaging and authoritative history of Scotland’s influence in the world and the world’s on Scotland, from the Thirty Years’ War to the present day Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, yet by some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. Neither a colony of England nor a fully equal partner in the British union, Scotland has often been seen as simply a component part of British history. But the story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance—and global consequence. In this wide-ranging, deeply researched account, Murray Pittock examines the place of Scotland in the world. He explores Scotland and Empire, the rise of nationalism, and the pressures on the country from an increasingly monolithic understanding of “Britishness.” From the Thirty Years’ War to Jacobite risings and today’s ongoing independence debates, Scotland and its diaspora have undergone profound changes. This groundbreaking account reveals the diversity of Scotland’s history and shows how, after the country disappeared from the map as an independent state, it continued to build a global brand.

The essays in this collection examine religion, politics and commerce in Scotland during a time of crisis and turmoil. Contributors look at the effect of the Union on Scottish trade and commerce, the Scottish role in tobacco and sugar plantations, Robert Burns’s early poetry on his planned emigration to Jamaica and Scottish anti-abolitionists.

Significant study of colonial Caribbean literatures in the context of the high rates of disease and death in the region.