Scotland's Diaspora - Reviews - Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus - Book Review

Contemporary Review, July, 2003 by R. D. Kernohan

Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus. Marjory Harper. Profile Books. [pounds sterling]25.00. 422 pages. ISBN 1-86197-304-7.

A Scottish inclination to emigration was evident when Dr Johnson claimed that 'the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road to England'. Marjory Harper, a senior lecturer at Aberdeen University, traces the inclination to earlier centuries, when Scots traders and mercenaries ranged over Northern Europe, but the substance of her book is about the high seas, not the high road. Nearly two million Scots emigrated from Britain in the nineteenth century, among them thousands of orphanes and other children who would nowadays be 'taken into care'. The United States, thanks to its economic opportunities, was the most popular destination, though the stamp of Scottish influence was more evident in Canada, even if many Scots-Canadians were later seduced southward across the border. It was also emphatic in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. There were even attempts to establish Scottish farming settlements as well as commercial connections in South America.

This is a sober history of the phenomenon, not a hymn of praise nor of lamentation. Although written with great clarity and continuity, it makes some sacrifice of style through the sheer volume of fact, detail, and extensive quotation from emigrant diaries and letters which it crams into a narrative which the author calls 'thematic' rather than chronological. Among the themes are emigrants' experiences, activities of agents and promoters from exemplary to dishonest and the relationship of emigration to the Highland Clearances and to depopulation even in areas where landlords opposed and obstructed it.

The book will not please the polemical romanticists for whom Highland history is about wicked landlords and saintly peasants, but it is well balanced not only in analysis of Highland and Hebridean complexities but in exploring why emigration also appealed intensely to Scotland's Lowland majority, who had far more freedom of choice and economic opportunity. Perhaps it is a pity that the book could not be vast enough to set the overseas emigration in the wider context of the Highlanders' move, along with the Irish, into the Scottish cities and the continuing traffic on Dr Johnson's high road.

But this social history of different continents is sustained by hundreds of human-interest stories whether of emigrants who were disappointed or cheated or of others who secured subsidy under dubious pretences, like the recruit for domestic service whose Canadian employers claimed her real aim was 'to play the piano in a moving picture show'. All human life is. there, with much hardship and grief, especially in the age of sail, but the majority of the permanent emigrants prospered modestly or even mightily, with heartache giving way to nostalgic Bums suppers and Saint Andrew's night dinners or the romanticism of clan societies and tartan museums.

Sometimes the story is of conflicting interests and greatly exaggerated expectations, hard times on isolated farms or dull jobs, but the underlying theme is of moderately enlightened self-interest, both among emigrants and those encouraging them. Most of the emigrants, especially after 1840, had a reasonable idea of what to expect, generally supplemented by enough resource, stamina, and resilience to adapt to unexpected or rapidly changing circumstances in developing countries. They ranged from a Carnegie making good in the grand manner to humbler immigrants unwittingly recruited as strike-breakers, but most went with hopes of their own farms or high wages for scarce skills. Although far less of an ethnic factor in politics than the Irish, some of them and their descendants made their mark on political history. Canadian Macdonalds and Mackenzies or Australians from Macquarie to Menzies and Fraser.

But if other countries gained did Scotland suffer? It certainly gained from that substantial minority of emigrants (providing one of Marjory Harper's 'themes') who planned to work abroad, whether for a year or two or till early retirement, and then to come home. They brought back considerable assets, whether in cash or experience of a wider world than the kailyard or Glasgow tenement. But two-thirds of those who went were gone for good, and all through the great age of emigration there was a rumbling dispute between those who dreaded 'overpopulation' at home, and those who feared emigration would attract the vigorous and leave the shiftless. In the end people voted with their feet and passage-money, and Scottish public opinion took pride in the Burns nights from Montreal to Melbourne. It may not be so sure now that the country faces an ageing, even declining population and some Scottish politicians reflect on how to encourage immigration.