Product Description

A dazzling account of Scotland's role in the world by Scotland's bestselling historian. The Scots had an enormous impact on the global development of the British Empire as emigrants, soldiers, merchants and colonial administrators. Scotland's Empire provides a comprehensive examination of their crucial role during the formative era of the long eighteenth century. The book ranges from the Americas to Australia and from the Caribbean islands to India. It explores in depth many key themes including the slave trade, the Scots on the colonial frontier, Highland soldiers, the saga of the Ulster Scots, the effect of the Scottish Enlightenment and the connection between empire and the economic revolution in Scotland itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119019 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

About the Author
T.M. Devine is University Research Professor and Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Customer Reviews

Devine History
If you're Scottish or have Scottish ancestry, or even if you're just vaguely interested in the way the movements of ordinary people affect nations, this book is an essential part of the picture of who we all are. Neither jingoistic nor cynical, it explores the waves of emigration from Scotland that lapped out east and west from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and in doing so maps out millions of new stories, one for every person who left Scotland and settled elsewhere, while exploding several chest-beating myths along the way.

We might like to believe in the entrepreneurship, hardiness and heroism of the plucky ex-pat, but Devine is able always to cut through the mist of sentiment to the much more interesting facts. That Scots who had been cleared from their lands were probably more than competent at 'cleansing' new territories of their own indigenous tribes is one such piece of bad news. The long-term effects of the renowned Highland regiments, raised successfully only a few years after the '45, on their home-lands, and the possible ways in which Empire injected cash into industrialism at home, are similarly unpalatable items. Unlike other historians who present a much more one-sided picture, Devine never turns a blind eye to the dark side, or portrays Empire and the imperial project as something that Scotland only lost or gained from.

Devine's contribution to Scottish history would be weighty even without the political and social changes that have taken place already in Scotland and are continuing to gather pace, and he is justly acknowledged as Scotland's most eminent academic in his field. But, more than that, his work is helping to shape Scotland's own knowledge of itself as it moves from an uneasy partner within the Kingdom that is meant to be United, to something different. This book isn't just about the past but about the present and the future. Get hold of it if you want to be kept up to date.

Making the past a pleasure
Devine's abiblity to enthuse the reader comes to the fore in this book. He deftly takes you on a journey across the globe, as he skilfully and imaginatively recounts the role the Scots played in creating and expanding the British Empire.

This has to be one of the most readable histories on any bookshelf. It will appeal to both the serious scholar and historian, as well as to the general reader.

A definate "must" for every Christmas "wish list"