In October 1773, the factor of the estate of Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat invited Samuel Johnson and James Boswell to stay with him at a house in Armadale formerly occupied by his chief. That evening ‘the company danced as usual. We performed, with great activity, a dance which, I suppose, the emigration from Sky[e] has occasioned. They call it America.’ It was not the only time that Boswell and Johnson experienced Highland elation at the possibilities of reaching America. Boswell's recollections of the visit are replete with references of Highlanders gone or planning to go to America. But this ‘dance called America’ has become a staple of understanding connections between the Gàidhealtachd and North America, used as titles for everything from popular histories of Highland emigration to a song on Runrig's 1985 album Heartland. The potential of America as a land of opportunity for Gaels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is well established and has shaped academic and popular understandings of the relationship between the Scottish Highlands and the Atlantic world. Emigration agents and emigrants themselves were keen to portray North America as a land ideally suited to Gaels where, in the words of one promoter, ‘Is iad na tuaidh luchd-uailse na duthcha. Tha iad gun mhàl 's gun bhacadh seilge / The tenantry are the gentlemen of the country. They pay no rent and there is no restriction on hunting.’ Or, as one early emigrant told a correspondent on Islay, America ‘is one of the best poor mans [sic] Country you ever heard of ‘.

This assumption that Gaels interpreted America as a panacea to dispossession, marginalisation and the aggressive imposition of rural capitalism, however, requires careful consideration. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the uneasiness and ambiguity that stood at the centre of Gaelic contacts with the Atlantic world. As powerful as America was as a possibility for many Highland emigrants, it was also a place where the tragedy of displacement and transitory movement became harsh reality. Just as North America was constructed in the minds of potential emigrants and emigration agents – or by dancers in Armadale – it was equally made in the lived experiences of emigrants who struggled to carve out new lives in an exacting and unforgiving environment.

This is an account of a Highland family in the Caribbean, Liverpool and Scotland, explored through a focus on Christy (Christian) Robertson, whose life, although she never travelled beyond the shores of Britain and Ireland, was shaped by involvements in the West Indies. These involvements were a source of material wealth – and from relatively modest beginnings she came to move in elite circles in Liverpool, Edinburgh and elsewhere – but also of personal loss. Two brothers and two of the five children of her first marriage died in, or returning from, the Caribbean; and two other brothers and two other sons spent many years there. In these human terms she was as much an investor in the Caribbean as any man of money.

Christy was married twice and her second husband, Thomas Stewart Traill, wrote a ‘Memoir of Mrs Traill’ immediately after her death in 1842, a private record of her life composed for himself and for her family. Traill, who was a friend before he was her husband, also preserved much of Christy's correspond-ence, including letters from her brothers and sons in Guyana. These sources make it possible to understand Christy's life in unusual detail. This might be described as an example of what Emma Rothschild in The Inner Life of Empires has called ‘a micro-history of the uneminent’. But Rothschild's study is of more prominent individuals active across the British Empire – the four sisters and seven brothers of the Johnstone family of Westerhall. Christy was truly a minor player on the stage of Britain's empire; a woman whose life illuminates both the long reach of the Highlands into networks of commerce and influence within and beyond Scotland – and the continuing importance of a Highland identity and connections within these networks.

Kiltearn and Kiltearn

Christy Robertson, the sixth of ten children of Anne Forbes (1753–1826) and the Reverend Harry Robertson (1748–1815), was born and brought up at the manse of Kiltearn, on the north shore of the Cromarty Firth in the Highlands of Scotland. Her mother, who came from Golspie in Sutherland, was a daughter of William Forbes, gardener to the Earl of Sutherland at Dunrobin Castle and later the tenant of a farm on the estate.

Much the most striking feature of this collection, to someone of my vintage, is its scope and diversity. When, in 1971, I began researching the doctoral thesis published, five years later, as The Making of the Crofting Community, academic enquiry into the post-Culloden Highlands and Islands was notable mainly by its absence. There was little on the clearances, next to nothing on the famine era, a couple of sketchy articles on the Land League period and still less on early twentieth-century land settlement – despite such settlement then being within living memory. Nor was migration from the region, whether to the rest of the UK or to overseas destinations, much better served. In 1971, it followed available academic analysis of the topics I was looking to explore could be got through in days. This, from my perspective, was a good thing. It meant that I was able, with the brash confidence of youth, to set about constructing, more or less from scratch, my own crofter-centred take on the history of the West Highlands and Islands in the period between the 1790s and the 1920s. Today that would be difficult. As can be seen from this book's contents, academic explorations of Highlands and Islands history – a history seen increasingly to have been influenced by Highlands and Islands involvements with the wider world – has uncovered nuance and complexity of a kind that, half a century ago, was utterly unknown to me.

In 1974, my thesis completed, I quit the world of academic history and wouldn't re-enter it until, from 2005, I spent five years helping to provide the University of the Highlands and Islands with its Dornoch-based Centre for History. But during the later 1970s and throughout the 1980s, when working as a journalist and when employed for a period by the Scottish Crofters Union, I continued to be intrigued by the north of Scotland's past and by the way an understanding of this past, or so I’ve long thought, can aid efforts to provide the region and its population with a worthwhile future. And so, on a freelance basis now, I began again, in the 1990s and subsequently, to write history – with a view, in part, to looking into the experiences of the many people who left the Highlands and Islands to make new lives for themselves in North America.

The complexity of colonial identity

This book reminds us how daunting an intellectual task it is to interrogate the nature of colonial identity. The authors in this volume deftly illustrate how the social and cultural dimensions of empire were – and are – multi-faceted, dynamic and conflicted. This volume is timely, for it urges the reader to pause and reflect on the complexity of our colonial past. And, indeed, our colonial present: as the authors explore, the legacy of transatlantic migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continues to shape the social and cul-tural contours of community and identity today. These ongoing influences are dynamic, real and complicated.

At the moment – at least in Canada – ‘colonialism’ is frequently referenced in popular social and political discourse. Usually when used, the word con-notes something wholly negative. It is a heuristic for a monolithic, oppressive force that is unidirectional and fundamentally destructive.

On the one hand, this shorthand is useful and important: it gives us a vocabulary for myriad social ills that have grown out of post-Enlightenment political and economic structures. European hegemony in the modern age has resulted in persistent and intersecting forms of oppression, and this legacy is recognisable across all societies touched by the Western imperialism of the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Words are powerful: in naming this legacy ‘colonialism’, we hold ourselves to account and create a framework for righting some of the wrongs of the past. On the other hand, if we are reductionist in how we talk about colonialism – by conflating the simplified heuristic with the messier reality – we do ourselves a disservice. Half a millennium of social, political and economic interaction was not monolithic and is not adequately summed up in a single term. If we are to fight the daunting, intersectional forces of racism, sexism and classism (among others) stemming from colonial experiences, we must be clear-eyed about their complexity. We must accept that colonialism was an aggregate of disparate, layered and competing human experiences. These were both positive and negative, and were constantly shifting and being negotiated in light of local circumstances – not only political and economic, but equally environmental, linguistic, social and cultural.

This volume is a compelling case study in this complexity. By examining the connections between the Scottish Highlands and the Atlantic world from a variety of different vantage points, the authors demonstrate that the roles of coloniser and colonised were not fixed.

The dispersal of Gaelic speakers throughout the colonies of the British Empire in the course of the nineteenth century coincided with, and to an extent contributed to, a rise in Gaelic secular publishing, and in particular the emergence of a Gaelic periodical press. The contribution of emigrant Gaels to nineteenth-century Gaelic literature took a variety of forms including, for example, subscribing to Gaelic dictionaries, with a substantial proportion of the subscribers to two Gaelic dictionaries published in the 1820s based in the West Indies. These were for the most part temporary migrants and this financial support for Gaelic scholarship and publishing provided them with an opportunity to retain a cultural connection with a homeland to which they hoped to return. Periodicals, on the other hand, offered an opportunity for an ongoing connection and commitment and, as Jude Piesse has noted in the wider context of the English language press, ‘played a crucial and overlooked role in performing and dramatizing the central dynamics that characterized settler emigration’.

There is a growing body of scholarship on Gaelic literature in North America and indeed on the maintenance of diasporic Gaelic identity more generally. This includes work which deals specifically with diasporic literary networks such as Robert Dunbar's on the first weekly Gaelic newspaper, Cape Breton's Mac-Talla (Echo) (1892–1904), and Michael Linkletter's on the networks of the Canadian Gaelic scholar and writer, Rev. Alexander Maclean Sinclair. This chapter takes a broader perspective in considering the pre-Mac-Talla period, concentrating on two periodicals, Cuairtear nan Gleann (The Traveller of the Glens) (1840–3) and An Gaidheal (The Gael) (1871–7), and considers the emer-gence, and nature, of Gaelic literary networks in the course of the century.

The focus of the chapter is initially on the periodicals of the first half of the century, periodicals with aims which were frequently inextricably entwined with the agendas of landlords in promoting emigration. It moves on to consider the ways in which the embryonic literary networks nurtured by these journals expanded in the middle decades of the century through the work of Glasgow publishers with discussion of Islay–Glasgow–Ontario links in particular.

Introduction

In the early nineteenth century, emigration from the Scottish Highlands to Atlantic Canada was at the heart of a heated, acrimonious debate among some of the wealthiest and most powerful Scottish landowners. Lord Selkirk, an influential supporter of emigration as the solution to the economic and demographic problems of the Highland region, found himself in direct opposition to the house of Sutherland, whose tenants he was proposing to assist to emigrate to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (hereafter PEI) in the first decade of the nineteenth century. As he later wrote, ‘the prejudices entertained against the situation I proposed, were industriously fomented by some persons, who had conceived a jealousy against my undertaking; and, in consequence of this obstruction I found it necessary to extend my offers of encouragement as far as I could.’ The obstructions and jealousies referred to consisted of a well-organised and well-supported campaign by Highland landowners to prevent emigration from their estates, a campaign which culminated in the 1803 Passenger Vessels Act. This legislation increased the cost of emigration by imposing minimum standards of food and other supplies on emigrant passages, thereby reducing the numbers who could afford to leave. Highland landowners had been keen to prevent emigration to retain the growing population on their estates for work in the burgeoning kelp and fishing industries, and so were entirely opposed to Lord Selkirk's plans to settle Cape Breton and PEI.

Just over a hundred years later, in 1910, a prospective emigrant to Canada from the Highlands of Scotland explained his reasoning to a newspaper reporter. He was leaving Scotland because, he said, ‘I prefer to establish myself in my own colony.’ It was a classic statement of emigrant aspiration from the common person: to start a new life of freedom, with access to land free from the shadow of landlords. Ironically, this statement was made by Cromartie Granville Leveson-Gower, the 4th Duke of Sutherland and great-grandson of the anti-emigration 1st Duke, one of the richest and largest patrician landowners in Britain, about his recent decision to sell land in the Scottish Highlands and use the capital freed up to purchase land in Alberta, Canada.

During a grand tour of Scotland in the summer of 1799, Virginian born merchant Littleton Dennis Teackle attended an exclusive meeting of the Gaelic Club of Glasgow, held in the Black Bull Inn in the commercial centre near the Trongate:

Established in March 1780, the Gaelic Club's surviving minutes – held in Glasgow City Archives – confirm Teackle's attendance as a ‘stranger’ alongside a ‘numerous and highly respectable company’ on 18 July 1799. The group of prominent merchants and manufacturers enjoyed an evening of ‘great harmony and conviviality’ in the company of Teackle, a transatlantic merchant who would go on to become an enslaver in Virginia and ultimately a member of the Maryland House of Delegates. These events brought together not only those of Highland descent in Glasgow but established relationships between commercial luminaries in Scotland and across the Atlantic world.

Recounting how guests from Virginia dined on calipee and calipash with tartan-clad Highlanders at a club in eighteenth-century Glasgow reveals a colonial mentalité better than any ledger book. On the evening of 18 July 1799, one of Glasgow's most prominent West India merchants, Alexander Campbell of Hallyards, ‘presented the club with a Turtle’, one that was likely brought back alive from the Caribbean as a fresh, luxury item for the elite dinner table. Teackle was invited ‘to partake of their mirth and hilarity’ and enjoy the feast:

Hugh MacLennan set his 1951 novel Each Man's Son in the town of his birth, early twentieth-century Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. At the time he was born, in 1907, Glace Bay was a booming coal town in the fast-growing industrial area at the eastern tip of Cape Breton Island, and his father, Samuel, was a col-liery doctor for the Dominion Coal Company. The century before, in 1832, MacLennan's great-grandfather, Neil, had arrived in Cape Breton with the great wave of Highland migration to the island in the 1820s and 1830s and settled in Malagawatch. Each Man's Son is situated within a common experience of outmi-gration from the countryside, which had shaped MacLennan's own family his-tory. It is, in MacLennan's telling, a tragic story of Highlanders leaving behind bucolic home communities for the ‘country of coal’, where they experienced a sudden and disorienting departure from a past ‘unblighted by the mines’. Fighting and drinking appear in the novel as symptoms of cultural despair and displacement among Gaelic-speaking miners lost in the modern world. Archie MacNeil, a brawny prize fighter and would-be miner living away in the United States, embodies this incapacity. Dan Ainslie, a local doctor tortured by his Calvinism, is closer to MacLennan's own experience. These two characters, Ainslie and MacNeil, drive the narrative arc of Each Man's Son to its tragic conclusion and stand for the profound class divisions of the mining town: ‘It was hard to believe, in the grounds of the doctor's house, that the beginning of the miners’ row was less than a quarter mile away.’ Though born in Glace Bay, MacLennan resided in Montreal and had limited direct experience with the coal town. His romantic, tragic representation of Glace Bay and its Highland resi-dents was itself a metropolitan projection upon a hinterland community, recon-structed through ethnic essentialism and class stereotypes. Nonetheless, the novel and MacLennan's own social origins suggest an important, yet often understated, historical fact: those who migrated from Highland settlements in rural Cape Breton were not all destined to work underground; a significant number joined a middle class that expanded with the making of industrial Cape Breton and constituted an important element of the social order.

Growing up in Cape Breton, an island that is part of the province of Nova Scotia on Canada's Atlantic coast, it felt like history was always around me. I come from a little village in Inverness County called Margaree Forks. It is distinctively rural, was originally inhabited by the Mi’kmaq and had a mix of settling groups: Acadian, Loyalist, Scottish (predominantly Highland) and Irish. Many residents today can still trace their families back to the original settlers; they have their own stories and traditions, and many have a genuine interest in who ‘their people’ were. On this western or sunset side of the island, a strong Scottish Highland identity tends to dominate and often gets projected over the other groups. That Cape Breton is home to many ethnicities is thanks also to the rise of heavy industry in the early twentieth century, when a variety of people arrived to work in coal and steel and set up as merchants. I remember, as an undergraduate student in the 1990s, reading Anne Marie MacDonald's award-winning novel, Fall on Your Knees, and being shocked to discover that Cape Breton had a Lebanese community. It was not something that anyone locally ever mentioned nor anything we were taught about in school. It was a similar situation with the island's African Caribbean community, though I do recall one confusing incident in junior high when a class project on family tartans was announced. Those of us with no Scottish ancestry protested, including a young woman who highlighted her African Caribbean heritage as an example, but an annoyed teacher ignored our arguments and told us to find one we liked and use that. This is a small example, but it reveals how a Scottish Highland identity could dominate.

To the Mi’kmaq, the region's Indigenous people, Cape Breton Island is known as Unama’kik, which loosely means ‘Land of Fog’, and if you arrive on the island by road via the Canso Causeway, two signs will greet you: the English ‘Welcome to Cape Breton’ followed by the Mi’kmaw ‘Pjila’si Unama’kik’. The Mi’kmaw welcome was only added in the summer of 2021 as a step towards reconciliation and an acknowledgement of their historic presence. According to the Mi’kmaw elder and scholar, Daniel Paul, the Mi’kmaq occupied much of what we now know as the Canadian Maritimes for somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years.

These excerpts come from the last couple pages of Scotchman's Return, a short story by Hugh MacLennan, a Nova Scotia-born author of Highland descent. MacLennan uses this story to explore the legacy of his father's Highlandism and to share the essence of a personal journey that many others in the Scottish Highland Diaspora must have experienced when they realised that ‘home’ was not the Highlands. It reveals something of that moment of consciousness when the significance of place is recognised as defining identity; that moment when it comes to be understood that how and who one is depends upon an ability and willingness to interrogate assumptions about one's ancestors and the spaces they occupied.

It can be a transition of agonising complexity. MacLennan was born in 1907 in Glace Bay, a Cape Breton mining town, and many of his stories, including this one, are autobiographical in how they confront the inherent tensions of understanding oneself in the broader context of the Scottish Highland Diaspora. The fact that Highlanders ended up in a place like Cape Breton Island, for example, was a consequence of empire. The story of Highland emigration to Cape Breton represented, on the one hand, Highlanders’ own rejection of profound and irreversible socioeconomic and cultural change, and, on the other hand, their opportunism and desire to exploit colonial opportunities for their own benefit.

Sculptural Conversion

Positioned in a semi-circle around a tomb-like altar on which rests the supine Christ, twelve biblical figures participate in one of the seven corporeal works of mercy – the burial of their dead (Fig. 3.1). Lifelike in their bodily and emotive expressions, these heavily draped, winged, and armoured figures – portraying the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, the Three Maries, the Angels of the Resurrection, and the three sleeping soldiers – solicit the viewer to witness the dead body of Christ in tangible time and space. Together, the life-size polychrome statues form a sculptural group, Compianto sul Cristo morto (Lamentation over the Dead Christ). The monumental composition is kept in a brick-vaulted chapel inside the church of Santa Maria della Scala in Moncalieri, a town just outside Turin. The sculptures are framed against a pastel-coloured wall and an ornamental iron gate, which is not how they were exhibited initially, namely without any barriers. Between the early fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, hundreds of such large-scale works made of various materials were displayed in parish, monastic, hospital, and cemetery churches across Europe. In this chapter, I examine several of these groups – they come from sites in France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain – and I propose that their formal, iconographic, and contextual characteristics reveal how local artists and patrons adopted different artistic traditions and devotional practices for their making. In contrast to previous scholarship that has, for the most part, categorised the Sepulchre groups into distinct regional works, I argue that they belonged to the same artistic phenomenon that made Christ's burial a site of multifold processes of conversion, the first of which is sculptural.

Two bearded attendants stand atop a rugged base on either side of Christ's tomb in Moncalieri (Fig. 3.2). The attendants are slightly hunched forward because they hold onto the edges of the shroud with which they transported Christ from the Cross.