‘Making Black Scotsmen and Scotswomen?’ Scottish Missionaries and the Eastern Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

J. G. Pocock’s famous plea for a four-nation approach to the history of the British and Hibernian Isles has been followed more eagerly by historians of Britain and Ireland than by those concerned with imperial history. Indeed, Empire was supposed to be about the suppression of such separate ethnicities. The very word ‘British’ applied to Empire was intended to convey the allegedly joint overseas project in which the distinct ethnic communities of these isles would be dissolved in global endeavour. The Union, particularly that with Scotland, but to a certain extent that with Ireland as well, was forged as much abroad as at home. The formation and deployment of Scottish and Irish regiments; the activities of politicians seeking bipartisan causes; emigrants abandoning the distress of home countries and pursuing new opportunities; as well as churches aiming for the expansion of Christendom could use empire as a realm of conciliation. That at least was the theory. On the other hand, Seeley’s The Expansion of England seemed to suggest that these ambitions would take place on England’s terms and would ultimately represent the creation of a world-wide English polity. This was a conscious attempt at proposing English exceptionalism, an exceptional history which could first embrace the cultural overwhelming of these islands as a prelude to the global expansion which was theoretically the central defining purpose of English history.