Highlanders and the City: Migration, Segmentation, and the Image of the Highlander in Early Modern London, 1603-c.1750

The study of Scottish migration in the early modern period has experienced extensive growth in recent decades, but has tended to privilege overseas movement over the presence of Scots elsewhere in Britain. This is particularly true of migrants from the Scottish Highlands: much has been written about Highlanders in America or Continental Europe, but almost nothing is known about their experiences in England and Wales, and in particular in London, consistently the major destination of Scots moving southwards. This article seeks to address that gap by exploring the extent and nature of Highland migration to London during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It begins by surveying the surviving evidence for Highlanders’ presence in the English capital, suggesting that they were most readily to be found in the elite and mercantile sectors, and were comparatively rarer among the ranks of artisans, professionals, or the poor. It is also argued that Highlanders tended not to form a coherent ethnic ‘bloc’, but instead were subsumed within the wider Scottish diaspora. This, however, was paradoxical, because London was during this period developing a strong image of ‘the Highlanders’ as distinctive from ‘the Scot’. The article therefore goes on to explore the origins of Highlander imagery, and concludes that those Highlanders actually resident in London contributed very little to it. Instead, image-makers drew predominantly on pre-existing Scottish stereotypes, travellers’ reports, outlaw tales, and political discourse, for example surrounding Jacobitism. All of this suggests a degree of invisibility around the Highland community in early modern London, and that, the article suggests, underlines the fundamental blurriness of the Highland/Lowland divide within Scotland. It also indicates that a segmented, rather than ethno-cultural model of assimilation might offer the most reliable means of understanding the Scottish diaspora in early modern London.

The Scottish Theological Diaspora

The Scottish diaspora in Australasia exhibits many of the characteristics of colonialism and post-colonialism. Initially the Presbyterian churches reflected their largely Free Church origins, with its Calvinism, memories of the Disruption, and evangelical churchmanship. In the Victorian period it again mirrored the Scottish Church’s opening up to mission, biblical criticism, and evolution. Two World Wars both strengthened the links to Scottish theology and encouraged a transition to ecumenism, especially in the Uniting Church of Australia, and to indigenization, with growing attention to Asian and to aboriginal and Maori theology. American influences became increasingly evident in pastoral theology. However, the personal and institutional links to all four Scottish theological faculties, Aberdeen, St Andrews, Edinburgh, and Glasgow remained and remain creative and strong.

Diasporas: Thomas Pringle and Mary Prince

Chapter two argues that Thomas Pringle’s experiences of exile and displacement informed his editorial contributions to The History of Mary Prince (1831), the first narrative of a black woman’s life published in Britain. While critics have looked at Pringle’s contributions to emphasize the intercultural aspects of the History and slave narratives more generally, few have attended to the transnational elements of Pringle’s own background. In 1820, the collapse of his family’s fortune forced Pringle and his family to leave Scotland and sail for the Cape Colony, where he led a party of Scottish immigrants to newly opened settlements along the frontier. Tensions with colonial officials forced Pringle to leave, and he resettled in London, where he became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society and crossed paths with Prince. As a product of a Scottish diaspora, Pringle’s contribution manifests a partial identification with Prince, while providing its own distinct expression of dispossession..