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This pioneering volume focuses on the scale, territorial trajectories, impact, economic relationships, identity and nature of the Scottish-Asia connection from the late seventeenth century to the present. It is especially concerned with identifying whether there was a distinctive Scottish experience and if so, what effect it had on the East. Did Scots bring different skills to Asia and how far did their backgrounds prepare them in different ways? Were their networks distinctive compared to other ethnicities? What was the pull of Asia for them? Did they really punch above their weight as some contemporaries thought, or was that just exaggerated rhetoric? If there was a distinctive 'Scottish effect' how is that to be explained?
List of contents
Introduction: The Scottish Experience in Asia, c.1700 to the Present: Settlers and Sojourners by T. M. Devine and Angela McCarthy.- A Scottish Empire of Enterprise in the East, c.1695-1914 by T. M. Devine.- Scottish Orientalists, Administrators and Missions: A Distinctive Scottish Approach to Asia? by John M. MacKenzie.- Scottish Agency Houses in south-east Asia, c.1760-c.1813 by George McGilvary.- Scots and the Imposition of Improvement in South India by Joanna Frew.- Death or a Pension: Scottish Fortunes at the End of the East India Company c.1800-1857 by Ellen Filor.- Governor J.A. Stewart Mackenzie and the Making of Ceylon by Patrick Peebles.- Scots and the Coffee Industry in Nineteenth Century Ceylon by T.J. Barron.- Ceylon: A Scottish Colony? by Angela McCarthy.- Addicting the Dragon? Jardine, Matheson & Co. in the China Opium Trade by T.M. Devine.- The Shanghai Scottish: Scottish, Imperial and Local Identities in the Scottish Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps by Isabella Jackson.- Ethnic Associationalism and Networking among the Scots in Asia: A Longitudinal Comparison, c. l870 to the Present by Tanja Bueltmann.- The Right Kind of Migrants: Scottish Expatriates in Hong Kong since 1950 and the Promotion of Human Capital by Iain Watson
About the author
T. M. Devine is Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He was knighted in 2014 for ‘services to the study of Scottish history’.
Angela McCarthy is Professor of Scottish and Irish History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the author and editor of several books on migration, including that of the Scots.
Summary
This pioneering volume focuses on the scale, territorial trajectories, impact, economic relationships, identity and nature of the Scottish-Asia connection from the late seventeenth century to the present. It is especially concerned with identifying whether there was a distinctive Scottish experience and if so, what effect it had on the East. Did Scots bring different skills to Asia and how far did their backgrounds prepare them in different ways? Were their networks distinctive compared to other ethnicities? What was the pull of Asia for them? Did they really punch above their weight as some contemporaries thought, or was that just exaggerated rhetoric? If there was a distinctive ‘Scottish effect’ how is that to be explained?
