There are surveys here of Scots in England, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, India, Latin America, and Meiji Japan. Everywhere they thrived. In Latin America, travellers in the nineteenth century discovered them ‘in the middle of a desert in northern Chile, on top of the Andes in Bolivia and in dense jungles in Brazil’. ‘I wonder why you yourself do not come here’, the Scots wrote home. After all, Scotland was not the place it once had been, and whatever affection he had for his native land, the Scot was disinclined to allow it to interfere with his commercial aspirations.

Eric Richards’s ‘Australia and the Scottish Connection, 1788–1914’ is, for an Australian, the most interesting essay in the book and possibly the best. The author of an extraordinarily detailed History of the Highland Clearances in 1982, Richards has been part of the recent tendency to redress the balance for the Scots in Australian historiography. Andrew Lemon’s biography of the King-pin of Victorian Presbyterianism, James Balfour; Paul de Serville’s work on the great pastoralist, John Peter, and his Port Phillip Gentlemen; Malcolm D. Prentis’s The Scots in Australia … ; and D.W.A. Baker’s life of John Dunmore Lang which should spawn much new work, have at the very least formally established that the Scots were as significant as the Irish in Australia and just as perplexing for the historian. Along the way of course, the English have been fittingly rendered less relevant.

Poor Scots – from redundant handloom weavers in the Lowlands to the desperate victims of famine in the Highlands – found their way to all parts of the new world. But the most prominent Scots, the ones most readily traceable, are those of the improved or improving kind who did great works or made great fortunes abroad. They were the ‘victims’ not of the oversupply of labour at home, but of the oversupply of capital. They were men who realised that they could make ten per cent in the New World on capital raised at five per cent in the old – and they were willing to risk it. We should be careful of taking offence at the habit of measuring the Scots in economic terms. The American dynast, Andrew Carnegie, who was the son of a Scots Chartist, measured his own angst in precisely these terms. ‘To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares’, he wrote in 1868, ‘and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make money in the shortest time, must surely degrade me beyond the hope of permanent recovery’.

In the United States the Scots’s self-discipline and industry, their superior level of education, their ‘scientific’ approach and the religious zeal they took to business made them the ‘shock troops’ of modernisation. America, Andrew Carnegie reflected, ‘would have been a poor show were it not for the Scots’.

Australia might have been a still poorer show. The manifestations of Scottish land hunger in Australia comprise a root of the country’s history. The governors, explorers, bankers, merchants, politicians, pedagogues and puritans are legion. They moved with great elan in financial circles and were at home in banks. Scots bankers stood for probity and caution which gave Scots investors confidence. Richards estimates that by the 1880s perhaps one third of all Australian pastoral, mortgage and investment company securities were owed in Scotland. When, in 1893, these investors exercised their own caution and withdrew their funds, the banks crashed. There were some who said the collapse was entirely the fault of the Scots. This was too harsh a judgement, but the Scots’ reputation in banking was justifiably tarnished.

It is trite to say that The Scots Abroad asks more questions than it answers. In fact it doesn’t ask nearly enough questions. Often (though rarely in the essays on Australia and the United States) the book degenerates into a compendium of prominent folk with Scots names. Highland and Lowland, capital and labour, Scotland was two nations twice over (and still it was no nation at all); but several of the authors here continue the tradition of speaking of them as if they were one. To know the Scots abroad we need to know them better at home, and even in their homes. Then we might by-pass some of the clichés and come to realise that the Scots cultural influence was as profound, as subtle and as persistent as the financial one, and that there was more to it than Presbyterianism and Burns nights.

Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances. Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746–1886, Croom Helm, London and Canberra, 1982: Andrew Lemon, The Young Man from Home. James Balfour 1830–1913, Melbourne University Press, 1982: Paul de Serville, Tubbo. The Great Peter’s Run, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982 and Port Phillip Gentlemen, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1980: Malcolm D. Prentis, The Scots in Australia. A Study of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland 1788–1900, Sydney University Press, 1983: D.W.A. Baker, Days of Wrath. A Life of John Dunmore Lang, Melbourne University Press, 1985.