Scotland and the Atlantic World

For a small, resource-poor nation on the periphery of western Europe, few peoples had as conspicuous a presence in the world of the early modern Atlantic as did the Scots. Indeed, they would seem to have been outsized contributors to a whole range of activities in the Atlantic world: religion and education, migration and trade, medicine and botany, military affairs and imperial administration, and more—so much so that historians have begun to speak of a Scottish empire in the Atlantic. So extensive and so threatening did the Scottish presence seem that by the eve of the American Revolution, English people at home and North Americans in the colonies exhibited prominent instances of “Scotophobia.” Scots became famous for the extent of their loyalism during that conflict, even as Scottish influences became deeply embedded in the culture of British North America as it sought independence. Paradoxically, all of this occurred in spite of their having been relative latecomers to Atlantic involvement, and never dominant demographically. Yet their influence extended not only across the mainland British colonies that would become the United States, but also to the peripheries of settlement in Florida and the Canadian provinces as well as the Caribbean and beyond, eventually reaching Britain’s Asian empire as well. Historians long attributed the activism of the Scots to the 1707 Union of Parliaments, which, in creating a new United Kingdom opened up the American trade to Scottish participants in what was now a British empire. More recently they have come to recognize its roots in Scotland’s long history as an uncommonly migratory nation whose people regularly and prominently involved themselves abroad, including an unusual number of prominent and educated people. Indeed, as a poor and peripheral nation of the fringes of Europe, Scots had long before recognized that in order to develop their trade and find economic and cultural opportunities they would have to travel abroad to find them, and so Scots developed a skill for networking and a portable culture well suited to overseas involvement. That culture of Enlightenment proved to be influential overseas as well. It was in fact the very connectedness of Scots with places abroad on the European continent in the 17th century that limited their early involvement in the Atlantic world, and Atlantic traveling and trading never fully replaced those earlier connections.

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