Appropriating Empire: Scottish Sojourners in the Atlantic World

Empires in the Atlantic World were delimitated from one another by more than political boundaries. Those who lived in the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish empires in the Americas understood that material life within these imperial spaces was tangibly different as well. These discrete colonial realms featured their own architectural preferences, foodways, or religious practices, which were often shaped as much by their metropolitan culture as by their geographic location. Few people in the Atlantic World were better placed to appreciate such differences as sojourners or interlopers between empires, like seaborne merchants or itinerant ministers. By crossing imperial boundaries, such folk could bear witness to the particular cultural contribution that each empire made to material life in the Atlantic World. Yet they were also well-placed to see each how Dutch, English, French, and Spanish proclivities influenced material culture in the rest, and were among the people most likely to embrace hybrid materialities that appropriated the goods, styles, and tastes of one empire to advance their own interests in another.

This paper examines Scottish merchants and ministers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic World as examples of such imperial boundary-crossers. It argues that Scots primarily occupied Dutch and English imperial spaces, and appropriated goods and practices from each to advance their interests in the other. In Dutch Curacao and Suriname, Scottish merchants acted as interlocutors who shipped English religious literature and luxury goods like tobacco and sugar into these places, while Scottish ministers embraced field preaching – already popular among early English evangelicals – to proselytize enslaved Africans in Dutch colonies. In English America, Scots appropriated Dutch ship designs to carve out their niche as tramp traders between colonies, and pushed for Dutch-style mixed Calvinist ceremonies in colonies where predominant faiths – Puritan or Anglican – dominated religious practices.