Building the Scottish Diaspora: Scots and the Colonial Built Environment, c.1700-1920

The Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies (University of Edinburgh), in conjunction with the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, is to host a two-day symposium (17-18 November 2017) on Scottish contributions to the built environment of Britain’s empire.

This event will ask questions about Scottish involvement and agency in the creation of the buildings and infrastructure that both facilitated and maintained Britain’s global empire.

The symposium will take as a point of departure, colonial cultures of Scottish entrepreneurship operating and building in the hemispheres of the Atlantic and the India-Pacific from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In most accounts of British imperial and colonial architecture little or no effort is made to distinguish Scottish from English, Irish, or Welsh agency; nor is it ever asked how, if at all, Scottish building culture and practice consequently affects our appreciation of ‘British’ colonial architecture. This is despite the fact that the legacy of Scottish enterprise across the Atlantic and India-Pacific regions includes a substantive material presence in architecture (civic, ecclesiastical and domestic) and building (wharves, stores, mills, factories, agricultural infrastructure etc.) that spatialised that involvement. Together, these buildings can be understood as elements in a global and imperial arrangement of corporate and private acquisition, speculation and investment spanning Europe and the Americas, India and Australasia, the Pacific and beyond. This symposium will consider the nature of Scotland’s contribution to this environment, and ask how we might understand it in a geographically continuous and expansive capacity.

Call for Papers

We are interested in research that maps diasporic networks—familial, professional, entrepreneurial, religious etc.—and their material presence with a view to better understanding the significance of Scottish modes of operation, particularly (but not exclusively) those that demonstrate their achievement as entrepreneurs in a networked, international environment. Contributions are invited that explore Scottish traders, merchants, agents, missionaries and others influential in colonial arenas of the Atlantic and India-Pacific ‘worlds’, especially within the analytical frameworks of regional, oceanic, and World/Global historiography, methods of cultural and historical geography, as well as economic and business history.

For further information on the symposium, and how to submit paper abstracts, please visit the symposium's website:

https://buildingscottishdiaspora.wordpress.com/