Building the Scottish Diaspora

This thematic section of ABE Journal considers the contribution of Scotland and “Scottishness” to the built environment in the wider British empire from the late eighteenth through to the early twentieth century. It focuses in particular on how a better understanding of Scottish diasporic networks (familial, professional, entrepreneurial, religious, educational etc.), and their material presences through cultures of architecture and building, complicates how we interpret or indeed label such architecture as “British”. The underlying contention is that while the terms “Britain” and “British” have their uses, they are often employed in rather crude if not confounded ways with respect to the built environment, thus failing to acknowledge its many complexities and contradictions. These concerns are set here in the context of recent developments in cognate fields of scholarship, including Four Nations and New British history, which have made significant strides in disaggregating and problematizing the idea of Britishness in relation to empire over the past two decades. Scottish agency emerges in these papers as both an identifiable and influential factor in the construction of the colonial built environment