John M. MacKenzie

The New Zealand Scots in International Perspective: An Introduction

In the nineteenth century the British liked to suggest that they were, at least in cultural and political terms, homogeneous. This contrasted with the indigenous peoples of empire, who were ‘tribal’ and consequently highly heterogeneous. Even ancient cultures like those of India were allegedly marked by a great profusion of peoples, languages and religions. Such a contrast became one of the justificatory myths of empire. The British were capable of ruling precisely because they had created a state system which had supposedly dissolved all the peoples of the British Atlantic archipelago into successful joint action on the world stage. We now know that this great myth concealed the realities of a highly heterogeneous Britain. It too had a variety of ethnicities, each with different histories, a multiplicity of cultural icons, a range of Christian denominations, and even a mixture of languages. It was also a land of minorities, particularly if we divide up the English into different regions with their own traditions and dialects. From the perspective of the twentyfirst century, it is clear that ‘Britishness’ (or even ‘Englishness’, so often used as a synecdoche for the whole of Britain) was merely a mask, that empire, far from dissolving the identities of the multiple ethnicities of the British and Hibernian Isles, may actually have served to facilitate their survival. This process was of course highly contested in the case of the Irish, complicated not only by the conflicts of nationalism and unionism, but also by the presence of large numbers of Irish troops in the British army and the high visibility of Irish migrants around the British Empire. In the case of the Scots and Welsh, each ethnicity prided itself on finding a global significance through empire, a worldwide incidence which somehow confirmed and enhanced their cultural identities. Ethnic analyses have long been relatively common in migration studies, not least because the recording of the statistical data of migrations, as well as census records in the territories of settlement of the British Empire, helps to make them possible. But in recent years the historiography of the dispersal

Scots in New Zealand and Elsewhere in the British Empire: An International Perspective

Why have Scots so often clung to the outward symbols of their ethnicity over the past 200 years? This article examines some aspects of Scotland and Scottishness in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the manner in which distinctive characteristics fed into the self-perceptions of the Scots as they migrated to so many parts of the world. Drawing upon examples from North and South America, from Africa and India, as well as Australia and New Zealand, it considers parallel cases of Scottish involvement in political and press controversy, questions of land policy, relations with indigenous peoples, missionary activity, and the founding and maintenance of Scots educational institutions, cultural societies and military regiments. The manifestations of these ethnic survivals are surveyed down to the early twenty-first century and placed in the context of multiple interactions between Scotland itself and the many places where the Scots settled.