This pioneering volume focuses on the scale, territorial trajectories, impact, economic relationships, identity and nature of the Scottish-Asia connection from the late seventeenth century to the present. It is especially concerned with identifying whether there was a distinctive Scottish experience and if so, what effect it had on the East. Did Scots bring different skills to Asia and how far did their backgrounds prepare them in different ways? Were their networks distinctive compared to other ethnicities? What was the pull of Asia for them? Did they really punch above their weight as some contemporaries thought, or was that just exaggerated rhetoric? If there was a distinctive ‘Scottish effect’ how is that to be explained?

Human capital and empire compares the role of Scots, Irish and Welsh within the English East India Company between c. 1690 and c. 1820. It focuses on why the three groups developed such distinctive and different profiles within the corporation and its wider colonial activities in Asia. Besides contributing to the national histories of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, it uses these societies to ask how ‘poorer’ regions of Europe participated in global empire. The chapters cover involvement in the Company’s administrative, military, medical, maritime and private trade activities. The analysis conceives of sojourning to Asia as a cycle of human capital, with human mobility used to access a key sector of world trade. As well as providing essential new statistical information on Irish, Scottish and Welsh participation, it makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on the legacies of empire.

This book brings to life for the first time the remarkable story of James Taylor, ‘father of the Ceylon tea enterprise’ in the nineteenth century. Publicly celebrated in Sri Lanka for his efforts in transforming the country’s economy and shaping the world’s drinking habits, Taylor died in disgrace and remains unknown to the present day in his native Scotland. Using a unique archive of Taylor’s letters written over a forty-year period, Angela McCarthy and Tom Devine provide an unusually detailed reconstruction of a British planter’s life in Asia at the high noon of empire. As well as charting the development of Ceylon’s key commodities in the nineteenth century, the book examines the dark side of planting life including violence and conflict, oppression and despair. A range of other fascinating themes are evocatively examined, including graphic depictions of the Indian Mutiny, ‘race’ and ethnicity, migration, environmental transformation, cross-cultural contact, and emotional ties to home.

Imperial Inequalities takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare. In doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe’s global empires. The idea of ‘imperial inequalities’ provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities. This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces. Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world. These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue durée. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities

This book presents an alternate history of colonial India in the 18th and the 19th centuries. It traces the transitions and transformations during this period through art, literature, music, theatre, satire, textiles, regime changes, personal histories and migration. The essays in the volume examine historical events and movements which questioned the traditional parameters of identity and forged a new direction for the people and the nation. Viewing the age through diverse disciplinary angles, the book also reflects on the various reimaginings of India at the time. This volume will be of interest to academics and researchers of modern Indian history, cultural studies and literature. It will also appeal to scholars interested in the anthropological, sociological and psychological contexts of imperialism.

An account of eighteenth-century global commerce as seen through the lives of three Scottish traders, “written with verve and filled with arresting details” (Tonio Andrade, author of The Gunpowder Age). This book delves into the lives of three Scottish private traders—George Smith of Bombay, George Smith of Canton, and George Smith of Madras—and uses them as lenses through which to explore the inner workings of Britain’s imperial expansion and global network of trade, revealing how an unstable credit system and a financial crisis ultimately led to greater British intervention in India and China. “This book is a history of British seafaring and imperialism, written largely from a micro-level perspective, placing the focus on individual traders rather than the East India Company as a whole. But it is not only an imperial history. It also unravels the interwoven financial, political and social relations between Britain, China and India in the eighteenth century . . . Hanser has consulted an impressively wide range of archival sources in different languages and located in various countries, from private letters to periodicals, and from official Chinese documents to East India Company reports. Her work contributes to our understanding of 18th-century British imperial history.” —Reviews in History

Roger Jeffery in this book has brought together 10 original, well-researched and well-written essays which bring to life the presence of India in the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh. On the surface Edinburgh is a purely Scottish city: its ‘India’ past is not easily visible. Yet, from the late 17th century onwards, many of Edinburgh’s young men and women were drawn to India. The city received back money and knowledge, sculpture and paintings, botanical specimens and even skulls! Colonel James Skinner, well-known for establishing Skinner’s Horse, brought his sons to Edinburgh for their schooling. Though Sir Walter Scott visited India only in his imagination (and tried to stop his own sons going there) he crafted a dashing India tale involving Tipu Sultan. The money from India helped create Edinburgh’s New Town, Edinburgh’s internationally-renowned schools (whose former pupils careers ranged from tea-planters to Viceroys) and people who came to Edinburgh from India established Edinburgh’s second women’s medical college. There are many such hidden stories of Edinburgh’s India connections. In this path-breaking book they are brought to life, using novel approaches to look at Edinburgh’s past, to see it as an imperial city, a city for which India held a special place. Focusing on the interactions between individual lives, social networks and financial, material, cultural and social flows, leading experts from Edinburgh’s history provide fascinating detail on how Edinburgh’s links to India were formed and transformed. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka