This is a new kind of microhistory, which traces the lives of a Scottish family of eleven siblings (seven brothers and four sisters) and their spouses, servants, and intercontinental connections during the eighteenth-century era of escalating imperial activity in the Americas and Asia. The study benefits greatly from the author's previous work on enlightenment thought, especially on political economy. The adoption of current economic terminology to show, for example, the ‘multiplier effects’ of involvement in empire gives a contemporary relevance. Yet, at first sight, a shift from the renowned Scottish literati such as Adam Smith to concentrate instead on the Johnstone family might seem unpromising. The book proves otherwise. Certainly their beginnings seemed inauspicious. For, belonging to the ‘unprosperous professional classes of lowlands Scotland’ (p. 15), and based on the rural periphery of enlightenment influences, this family contributed little more than political ephemera to the stock of world literature. Nevertheless, although their inherited estates at Westerhall on the Scottish Borders yielded little income and their father was always indebted, his sons set out in turn to redress the extended family's financial situation through service and initiatives in the army, the navy, and overseas commercial enterprises. These routes took all but one brother to the Caribbean, the North American mainland, or India, and, despite many setbacks, several returned with gains sufficient to invest in property and political advancement in Britain and to purchase plantations and slaves in the Americas.
The book has an unusual structure, reflecting the problem of following simultaneously the fluctuating fortunes and ‘inner’ as well as ‘outer’ lives of eleven siblings whose incessant personal correspondence over nearly a century is still remarkably extant. Thus the first three chapters provide the ‘micro’ details of their lives, divided into chronological phases. The ensuing chapters focus analytically on what these lives contribute to understandings of some of the ‘macro’ issues usually essociated with the enlightenment age, notably economic and legal thought and processes, slavery, the percolation of enlightenment ideas to just such provincial Scottish families as this one, and, methodologically interesting, how far the recovery of the inner life of such ‘minds’ can now be transformed by utilizing non-traditional methods of investigation, notably through electronic retrieval processes.
Given such embarras de richesses, three foci seem particularly significant. First, this study complements other recent works that have extended the reach of the ‘Scottish enlightenment’ beyond the literati of Edinburgh and Glasgow to include some provincial, even rural, centres of intellectual and scientific activity. Westerhall might now be added. Library collections in this remote family home, book orders from Bengal and Florida, and citations in their letters, show that several of the siblings were familiar with many recent advances in thinking. Not only that, but placed only ‘at the edges of the enlightenment’ (p. 210), and certainly not scholars themselves, this family developed some close links with members of the literati, including Adam Smith, David Hume, and especially Adam Ferguson, and also with a number of leading chemists, geologists, and medical men. The Johnstones’ patronage then created local intellectual ripples. For miners employed on the family estate established a Westerhall Miners’ Society, whose records show the purchase and borrowing of Hume's History of England, Smith's Wealth of nations, and Robertson's histories of both Scotland and India, transforming this hitherto bleak region ‘into the very microcosm of an enlightened industrial society’ (p. 109).
Interest in those who served the family in middling and menial capacities is at the heart of this study. They include some workers brought back from India and the American plantations who appear in the records as slaves and servants. Two receive particular attention. Bell (or Belinda), a Bengali woman, was brought home to Scotland by John Johnstone, the fifth brother. After her baby was found dead, Bell, accused of murder, was finally transported to slavery in Virginia. Joseph Knight, so-named after his first owner, was bought in Jamaica by a Johnstone son-in-law and brought to Scotland. Clearly literate, Joseph then read in a Scottish newspaper that a recent epoch-making case in London had resulted in the declaration that slave status was illegal on English soil. His attempt to claim similar freedom was challenged by his owner but finally succeeded. In spite of the Johnstones’ failure to mention these slaves/servants in their voluminous correspondence, their trial records provide an insightful exercise in the reading of ‘minds’ such as Bell's and Knight's in order to hypothesize about their ‘inner lives’.
The disparate and changing stances of the Johnstone siblings on wider issues concerning slavery have also been carefully tracked. Six of the seven brothers owned slaves, but varied in their professed attitudes from one outright anti-abolitionist to another who, a slave-owner himself, nevertheless criticized others for the ill-treatment of slaves. Such ambiguous, often hypocritical stances on slavery were of course common in the early phases of the abolition era. But the nuanced treatment that slavery receives here is one of several issues showing considerable flux over the lifetimes of individuals in the spheres of ideas and ‘sentiments’ as well as of material matters.
The life of the ill-fated Bengali woman, Bell, is reconstructed particularly insightfully, but a feature of the entire study is the attention paid to all the females connected to this family. Proactive sisters included Margaret, a Jacobite, who, having joined ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ in 1745, escaped from incarceration in Edinburgh castle only to suffer an early death in France. Stay-at-home Betty, in contrast, revealed as the ‘family's continuing source of information’ (p. 19), outlived the rest into her mid eighties. The information that she redirected between her far-flung siblings constitutes a major source for the entire study. Even Betty defies some now outmoded views about pre-twentieth-century middle-class women's limited horizons, for, having buried her parents, she established herself in single state in rented accommodation in Edinburgh. Another intriguing episode concerns the bride of one of the brothers who, after publishing, at the age of fourteen, some translations of Ovid and Horace, later sailed to India with only a sister for company and no certainty of a welcoming party. A petty exception to the usually very supportive relationships between such Scottish kin, almost always ready to assist other family members in their frequent adversities, was a prolonged family quarrel over a parcel of Indian muslins from a brother in Calcutta that severed relations between mother and daughter, resulting in Betty's leaving home for two years before admitting she had been in the wrong.
The clarity of this complex yet thoroughly engaging study is partly achieved at the expense of relegating to 150 pages of endnotes much necessary detail that would usually be found in the body of a text. All the archival and secondary sources are embedded, meticulously, in these endnotes, along with much additional useful comment. It is difficult, however, for the reader to retrieve a particular source reference once the relevant page has passed, for there is no consolidated list of either archival or secondary literature. Absent too (except on a dustcover that most libraries prefer to jettison) are any of the family portraits by Gainsborough, Romney, and Raeburn, whose inclusion would surely further elucidate the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ identities that are at the heart of this study. That said, this is a path-breaking, highly original study of empire through the lives of an ‘extraordinary’, yet in many respects ‘ordinary’, family, which the author perceives, in spite of some spasmodic economic successes, to have had a ‘tendency to be on the losing side of the history of the British empire’ (p. 141).
