Overview

Scotland’s diaspora, reframed through the Dutch East Indies: the intertwined lives of Highland lairds, Islay farmers and metropolitan merchants who built fortunes, and families, on the island of Java. A vivid group portrait of Scots who embedded themselves in the Dutch colonial world. Centering on the Batavia firm of Maclaine Watson & Co., G. Roger Knight draws on letters, newspapers, government and family archives to trace how sugar, trade and marriage created trans-imperial networks from Mull and Islay to Java, Singapore, the Low Countries and Australia. A fresh, unromantic, sharply observed study of Scottish ambition, mobility and identity across imperial bounds in the long-nineteenth century. From masked balls in Batavia to deer-stalking on Mull, Kin, Kilts and Kolonie follows Scots who made their lives and livelihoods within another European empire. At its heart stands Maclaine Watson & Co., a Batavia merchant house linking Highland clans, Scots ‘glocalisers’, and trans imperial merchants, in a web of kin, capital and commerce. Through families such as the Maclaines, McNeills, Frasers and McLachlans, Knight charts the fortunes of sojourners – men and women who set out to return home richer, and largely did – leaving descendants and investments across Asia, Europe and the Antipodes. Blending intimate biography with incisive economic history, Knight shows how wealth, power and marriage shaped both the Dutch colony and the Scots who thrived within it. Erudite, humane and unsparing, Knight reveals how Scotland’s imperial fortunes were forged far from home – and how their legacies endured long after the ships returned.

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9781914278938

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Reviews

""This intricate analysis of a little-known element of the Scottish diaspora has major import for our understanding of European imperialism and the population movements it generated. Scottish 'sojourners' in the Dutch 'Indies empire' were minority but central players in lucrative exploitation of the colony's resources and people. But Roger Knight's 'actor-centric' focus goes beyond imperial commerce to individuals and families, women's agency, mixed and inter-racial marriages and post-Indies 'afterlives', and raises key questions about Scottish identity, even, for some, a gradual 'shedding of Scottishness', as mostly prosperous returnees settled south of the border and in the Netherlands as well as Scotland. It is a striking contribution to histories of imperialism and the Scottish diaspora."" (A. James Hammerton, La Trobe University, Melbourne - Author of Love, Class and Empire and Migrants of the British Diaspora) ""This book is about the power, money and love that cemented the colonial jet set of Java. We get the most intimate looks into the business deals and matchmaking by Scottish highlanders with Dutch patricians, Javanese princes and Dutch Creoles. The story is about families, about gender and identity, but always with this acute awareness that these relationships undergirded one of the largest agro-industrial complexes of Asia, which flooded the Asian markets with its sugar. A read in one go by this leading scholar on Java's sugar industry and great connaisseur of colonial Java."" (Ulbe Bosma, International Institute of Social History & Vrije Universieit Amsterdam - Author of Being 'Dutch' in the Indies, Indiegangers and The World of Sugar)

Author Information

Born in rural Shropshire, G. Roger Knight has been living and teaching in Adelaide, Australia, since the late 1960s. He gained his PhD from London University’s School of Oriental and Asian Studies, where his mentors included John Bastin and C. D. Cowan. He is an internationally recognised authority on the sugar industry of colonial Indonesia, with many publications to his name. Among the latest is Commodities and Colonialism: The Story of Big Sugar in Indonesia, 1880-1940 (Brill 2013); Sugar, Steam and Steel: The Industrial Project in Colonial Java, 1830-1885 (University of Adelaide Press 2015); and Trade and Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia: Gillain Maclaine and his Business Network (Boydell Press 2015).

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