Scotland, Europe and the English ‘Missing Link’

2018

J. Br. Stud.

Immigration and its consequences is one of the most contentious issues in the contemporary world, and historians are engaged in this debate by offering a longer-term perspective. In recent years, research on the United Kingdom's population has placed greater emphasis on population movement in shaping Britain's story, identifying waves of migrants from elsewhere alongside migration within Britain. One neglected aspect of this narrative, however, is the migration of Scots to England, particularly in the age of the regal and parliamentary union, when the changing political relationship between the two kingdoms had an impact on the scale, geographic spread, and opportunities and obstacles of that migration. While a minority of Scottish migrants were unwelcome, or chose to return home, the overwhelming weight of evidence is for those migrants who remained in England. The focus in this article is on that majority group for whom migration was a positive experience, thus raising questions about why these Scots were so successful and why they faced so little native opposition. That process of segmented assimilation offers an insight into the formation of Britain and the shifting ground of national identity associated with the emerging British state. The Scots, moreover, provide a model for “successful” migration, suggesting that a range of factors—principally, an educated, culturally malleable, and economically responsive migrant population, alongside an institutionally and attitudinally flexible host community—need to be in place in order to optimize the chances of migrant assimilation.

Land of Opportunity? The Assimilation of Scottish Migrants in England, 1603–ca. 1762

Brown¹,

2018

J. Br. Stud.

“Their Maxim is Vestigia Nulla Restrorsum”: Scottish Return Migration and Capital Repatriation from England, 1603–c.1760

Brown¹,

Journal of Social History

2017

The return of migrants to their places of origin has been subject to significant theoretical enquiry in recent decades, but testing the resulting modelling against historical data has so far been limited and reliant mainly on nineteenth-and twentieth-century evidence. This article builds upon these foundations by offering detailed analysis of the process of return migration as it affected Scottish migrants to England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Utilising both theoretical insights from social science and a broad range of empirical evidence to explore the mechanisms and motivations of return, the article offers a sixcategory typology, involving: circular, self-improving, retirement, employment and failed returnees, as well as those returning from forced exile. Yet the article concludes that the individual stories incorporated within this framework did not add up to a meaningful overall trend, and that, in general, Scottish migrants were more likely to settle permanently in England than to enact returning strategies. The article contends that this patterns sheds significant light on the process of Anglo-Scottish integration in the early modern period, since in tending to settle rather than return home, Scottish migrants demonstrated the relative openness of English society to certain incomers, while also, perhaps paradoxically, highlighting the firmly Anglicized idiom of the emergent British state.

Assimilation Aborted: Henry Clerk and the Limits of Anglo-Scottish Integration in the Age of Union

Brown¹,

J Scottish Historical Studies

2018

This article deploys micro-historical analysis to understand an example of abortive diaspora among Scots who failed to make it as immigrants in early modern England. Henry Clerk was the son of a middle-ranking Midlothian baronet who made a doomed effort to build a new life for himself in London between 1698 and 1702. A series of dozens of surviving letters between Clerk and his family members in Scotland allow us to trace his migration experience in unusual detail. This evidence makes his case an excellent candidate for micro-historical reconstruction, and in undertaking such an exercise this article seeks to ask what the nature and circumstances of his failure can tell us about the wider process of migrant assimilation in early modern Britain, as well as the challenges confronted by individuals seeking to make a new life in a new location.