This study shows that young Scots were as single-minded in their quest for fortune as any conquistador. Just like their predecessors, few found fortune or even the ability to return home, and many failed to achieve success by their own or any other standards. These middle-class, well-educated Scottish professionals who migrated to Jamaica and the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland were generally lowlanders from Scotland’s east coast south of Aberdeen and Ayrshire and the counties around Glasgow. They sought economic independence and upward social mobility through temporary migration. Although he has been able to identify only 406 individuals, Alan Karras estimates that between nine and ten thousand sojourners left Scotland for Jamaica and the Chesapeake colonies during the 60 years between 1740 and 1799. Slightly less than two-thirds of his sample went to Jamaica and the remainder to Virginia and Maryland.
After establishing the major parameters of his topic, the author continues his analysis along roughly parallel thematic lines. Based on correspondence in British repositories, record offices, libraries, and private collections, he reveals much about the sojourners’ careers and aspirations. Their decisions and actions, he argues, were based on firm intentions to return home. He also claims that sojourners may not have traveled to other colonies where availability of land proved more attractive to the lower classes. In Jamaica a diverse group of lawyers, bookkeepers, physicians, and merchants sought, by practicing their professions and by estate management, to accumulate sufficient wealth to acquire an independent living back home. The Chesapeake colonies provided a narrower spectrum of opportunity, for the sojourners there were almost all tobacco factors. Karras also explores three special features of sojourner behavior: their activity in webs of patronage, the Chesapeake sojourners’ loyalism, and measurements of material success. He has interesting and insightful things to say, but whether they are always convincing is open to question.
In both regions, enterprising Scots worked hard, acquired wealth, and encountered a wide range of problems that made it difficult, if not impossible, to realize their assets and move out of the colonies. But if all their actions were governed by intentions to return home, why did they so often fail to understand the nature of the problem? For rather than transfer earnings to Britain as rapidly and continuously as possible, sojourners tended to invest in their colony of residence.
This stimulating study leaves a host of unanswered questions that follow from the treatment of the topic. The methodology may be the only one available to enable the quantitative data to appear, but the sample is so small or the overall estimate so large as to bring into question the method’s usefulness. The author fails to convince his reader that there were no sojourners elsewhere in British North America. Fortunately, his use of the rich personal sources he has uncovered balances the uneasiness. Allowing the sojourners to speak for themselves is one of the book’s strengths. Still, a few difficulties remain. Although no documentation survives, the author asserts that the English refused to accept Scots. Discussing patronage in Maryland and Virginia, where sojourning largely ended at the beginning of the American Revolution, social theory appears to predominate over historical explanation. Accounting for Scottish loyalism in terms of ethnicity is curiously disconnected from the tobacco economy. As sojourners were invariably creditors, it is curious that debt collection is ignored in favor of ethnicity as the glue in the sticky relations between sojourners and colonists. Commerce lay at the heart of sojourning, but sometimes that factor gets laid aside here in the concern for the ethnic behavior of Scots.
This said, it should also be noted that this is an original, well-researched, scholarly blend of quantitative description and analysis and qualitative biographical sketches. It addresses a topic of growing importance, and it should encourage others to join in broadening the research and refining the conclusions about early transient migrants to America.
