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Scottish Empire, The
Michael Fry
6” x 9” • 608 pages • b&w illus.
“...this door of the seas and the key of the universe...will of course enable the proprietors to give laws to both oceans and to become arbitrators of the commercial world....”
—William Paterson on the ill-fated Darien enterprise, the venture intended to transform Scotland into a great trading nation at the end of the seventeenth century.
The Scottish Empire charts the involvement of the Scots in the British Empire from its earliest days to the end of the twentieth century. It is a tale of dramatic extremes and craggy characters, of a variety of concerns, from education, evangelism, and philanthropy to spying, swindles, and drug running. It sets stories of Scottish regiments on the rampage, of cannibalism and of atrocities beside the deeds of heroic pioneers such as David Livingstone and Mary Slessor. It tells of little-known incidents of famous men—such as William Gladstone’s punch-up with a Greek bishop and of the Earl of Elgin’s burning of the Summer Palace in Peking. But above all this book tells of how the British Empire came to be dominated by and run by Scots and of how it truly became “The Scottish Empire.” “I am a Scot and prefer to do what I have to do cannily as well as boldly,” proclaimed the Earl of Dalhousie, Governor General in India.
Throughout his book Michael Fry takes care to connect the colorful external history with the more humdrum realities of the internal history, but especially with the continuing development of the Scottish intellect, which has done so much to keep the idea of the nation alive. What emerges is a history also of Scotland’s precarious place in the world, from hard-fought independence to uncertain Union, from deceptive imperialism to self-government now seeking its definitive form. No other small nation can boast such a wealth of experience.
As the author says: “nobody could sensibly claim that Scotland had been other than transformed beyond recognition by Empire...So with the Empire: Scotland, neither fully nation nor fully province but both, was also neither fully coloniser nor fully colonised but both, yet at the end vindicated herself by rising anew ...Empire is...one of the great formative experiences of a nation now facing a fresh future.”
Michael Fry is active in three aspects of modern Scotland: politics, journalism, and scholarship. He has written for many newspapers in Britain and abroad. He is the author of works on the political, religious, and intellectual history of Scotland, and is the biographer of Henry Dundas.
Birlinn
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