The final section examines how their activity abroad enabled Highlanders to become involved with and expand charitable enterprise at home by considering the foundation of three academies, Fortrose, Inverness and Tain, and the region’s first hospital, the Northern Infirmary at Inverness. It was their acquisition from France in 1763 that gave Highlanders the opportunity to really establish a footing in the Caribbean. It begins by considering how the Highland experience fits within the emerging historiography surrounding Scottish slave-ownership before exploring the pivotal importance of the ceded islands, Grenada, the Grenadines, St Vincent, Dominica and Tobago. It will consider the extent to which the links between the Highlands’ and the Caribbean influenced the development of charitable enterprise at home between c.1750 and c.1820. This article builds upon and expands the important work of pioneers such as Douglas Hamilton, David Alston and Allan Macinnes, who have followed those west-bound Scots by mapping their networks and examining estate investment. It became firmly linked with local development and those who previously had been excluded from positions of authority on account of a deeply entrenched social hierarchy began to assert their influence through initiatives designed to remake society. Migration, overseas soldiering and external trade had always been part of the Highland story, but it took on a new meaning in the eighteenth century. The imperial environment’s rising profile, especially after 1750, inspires countless questions about how Britain’s more geographically isolated and economically vulnerable regions responded to and collaborated with the process of socio-economic transformation at home. Convinced that Highland geography as well as the ‘indifference – even antipathy – of the people toward innovation’ would forever plague the north and stall development, the government had all but written off the Highlanders’ ability to improve their own situations to many southerners, they were fit only for military service or wage labour. These individuals were responsible for managing the lands seized from Jacobites after 1746 and perceived the region as being in a state of perpetual decay. Like countless others, he showed a level of enterprise and ambition that was thought impossible by officials like the commissioners of the annexed estates. This was epitomised by people like Thomas Fraser, the author of the opening quotation and a modest entrepreneur from Inverness-shire, whose ventures took him to Grenada and St Vincent. Many hoped that their involvement in the Caribbean would enhance their lives, and those of their families. This was the Age of Improvement, a period marked by profound technological change and intellectual development, but for many Highlanders it was also the age of survival. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Highland communities, through families, individuals and professional networks, became so entangled with the colonial world that their very survival came to depend upon the connections being forged in the Caribbean. By the middle of the eighteenth century many people had recognised that what was happening was not, in fact, really about the Highlands or even about Scotland, but a consequence of the larger and more pressing project of building and securing an empire. Culloden, a bloody battle that culminated in the death of between 1,500 and 2,000 Jacobite soldiers near Inverness in 1746, was an important turning point for the Highlands, but there had been many tremors before it to signal that changes were afoot. Scattered across Scotland in various archives lie letters, wills and other documents relating to the lives and experiences of Highlanders who had made the decision to go to the Caribbean at a time when their communities, which were located in Britain’s northernmost region, were convulsing from the aftershocks of Culloden. Inclosed you have on a slip of paper the notes I promised to send you, I send it you for the purpose of giving you some idea of my little affairs in this country in case any accident happening to me that you may be able to render a service to my children y eldest boy Simon is now going on four years old e goes to school and I hope he will read and write a little before he is sent home which I mean to do if possible when he is seven years old I understand you have a very good academy in your town furnished with good teachers in several branches of Education, if it pleases the Almighty to spare me to see my three boys able to shift themselves I shall think myself the happiest of mortals.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |