Global Routes and Imperial Spaces: Burnfoot, Eskdale and the Creation of East India Company Servants, c. 1790-1850 Ellen Filor, University of Warwick [email protected] Few ken to whom this muckle monument stands, Some general or admiral I’ve nae doot, On the hill-top whaur weather lang syne Has blotted its inscribed palaver oot.1 Hugh MacDirmuid’s 1929 description of the nineteenth-century monument to Sir John Malcolm that stands on a hill above Langholm demonstrates ably the physical effacing of Scotland’s imperial past over the past century. But another, less explored point adumbrated in his verse is the effect on the landscape that imperial service could have in making and remaking the physicality of the Scottish Borders themselves. Scottish landscape has often been defined in terms of a romantic and antiquarian past and this necessarily static reading of the landscape ignores the imperial aspect of this geography. The landscape of Scotland is a reference point that repeatedly resurfaces both in the letters and poetry of those in India and those at home. But to shift the focus to the frontiers of India in Scotland is to seek to disrupt this static, parochial reading of the landscape. Using the ‘collage’ of letters, diaries, poetry and sketch books in the Malcolm of Burnfoot archive held at the National Library of Scotland this paper will map the geographies of the Malcolm clan. By drawing heavily on James Clifford’s insight that the meanings of place are not rooted in place but rather formed through the routes through them, the impact of the global on these relatively provincial areas will be illuminated. Further, Clifford’s insight allows a far more fluid understanding of space than previous scholarly studies of the Scottish Borders have acknowledged. Clifford has argued for a reconfiguration of anthropology, which has previously been based on studying (fictionalised) rooted, bounded localities. Using the figure of the traveller, Clifford points to the ‘practices of crossing and interaction that troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture’.2 Looking at the routes that pass through a locality challenges how space is conceived by scholars and the implications for how the ‘natives’ who live within such localities are conceived. While Clifford’s focus is on the twentieth century, his conclusions merit wider attention from historians of other periods. They are particularly valuable in relation to the imperial sphere, challenging the conception of a ‘native’ 1 Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Monument’, Stony Limits and Other Poems (London, 1934), p. 13. 2 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (London, 1997), p. 3. 1 both in the metropole and the colonies. This is not to blindly follow Clifford’s conclusions: his nods to gender are somewhat abortive and the implications of routes on those who do not travel are never fully explored in his text. Indeed, this will be a main contribution of this paper: resituating those who did not travel as active agents in the colonial sphere and creators of imperial space. Anthropologists of the Scottish Borders have largely been part of the localised approach that sees space as bounded — precisely the approach against which Clifford has argued against. James Littlejohn’s study of the antagonism of social class and the lack of kinship networks in his 1963 work on Westrigg saw him question ‘how far the parish is a “rural community”: the term normally implies some sort of unit with a social life of its own, an “area of common life.”’3 But the impact of interactions with outside communities is limited in Littlejohn’s study to a discussion of ‘The Parish and the Town.’ More recently, John Gray has argued against the academic marginalisation of the farms of the Borders and utilised the post-colonial theories of Bhabha and Appadurai to craft an impressive sense of how Borderers are ‘at home in the hills’.4 But it is an argument that is based on the exclusion of movements, with little consideration of the fifty per cent of those born in the Borders who leave the area. There are, however, hints that this bounded, localised approach is inadequate. Gwen Kennedy Neville notes of an abandoned graveyard in Colmonell, Ayrshire: ‘This pattern of gathering and dispersal is further attested to in the gravemarkers … for example, one might read “Stuart Henderson/Born at Colmonell 1905/Died at Colmonell 1970/Sometimes of Bombay.”’5 The reference to ‘Bombay’ on the gravestone offers a tantalising, fragmentary glimpse of the role imperial service could have on an individual’s life. In the above anthropologic accounts, the traditions and celebrations of the Borders are situated historically in the frontier conflict between England and Scotland of the sixteenth century.6 This paper seeks to unsettle this comfortable narrative, opening up instead the now forgotten and overlooked spaces forged by imperial service during the nineteenth century. It therefore stands as an attempt to answer Doreen Massey’s question ‘What if we open up the imagination of the single 3 James Littlejohn, Westrigg: the Sociology of a Cheviot Parish (London, 1963), p. 63. 4 John N. Gray, At Home in the Hills: Sense of Place in the Scottish Borders (Oxford, 2000). 5 Gwen Kennedy Neville, ‘Community Form and Ceremonial Life in Three Regions of Scotland’, American Ethnologist, 6 (1979), pp. 93-109, p. 100. 6 Gray, At Home in the Hills, pp. 22-45. Neville, Gwen Kennedy, The Mother Town: Civic Ritual, Symbol, and Experience in the Borders of Scotland (Oxford, 1994). For an exception to this approach, see geographer Susan J. Smith’s work on the Beltane festival at Peebles that highlighted the practice of wearing golliwog costumes and the charge of racism in 1991. She wrote in conclusion ‘the very inclusion of a golliwog image is testimony to the extent to which the Beltane is inseparable from a colonial history in which Scotland is implicated, and from a global Geography to which Scotland is linked.’ Susan J. Smith, ‘Bounding the Borders: Claiming Space and Making Place in Rural Scotland’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18 (1993), pp. 291-308, p. 303. 2 narrative to give space (literally) for a multiplicity of trajectories?’7 Historians have scarcely been more responsive to this construction of a localised conception of Scotland. Tom Nairn, reviewing Tom Devine’s To the Ends of the Earth, wrote only last year of the ‘outward-looking mind-set’ of Scottish traders and that ‘the obverse of that mentality was an equally remarkable parochialism at home.’8 Where historians have engaged with the impact return from empire had on the landscape, it has largely been configured in terms of the meta-narratives of industrial revolution or agricultural improvement.9 Rosalind Mitchison has written that ‘the carved elephant on the gate-post of the Dundas house of Arniston is a reminder of how much the big houses of south-east Scotland relied on the East India Company for careers and wealth. It was from England that the fashionable enthusiasm for better farming and higher profits got its inspiration.’10 While Mitchison acknowledges the economic impact of India, the shifts in the landscape are configured exclusively in terms of the relationship with England. However, beyond these more traditional economic approaches, there remains a need to look at the impact on the Scottish landscape of the cultural and imagined frontiers of India.11 Through acknowledging these routes that service in India forged through Scotland, the parochial, static reading of the Borders landscape and its ‘natives’ can be disrupted. Burnfoot estate and farm was relatively isolated and rural with the nearest large town being Langholm some four miles away (see figure one). Described as a ‘cottage’ (see image one), the large farmhouse nestled in the hillside and fits within the conventions of the picturesque as it was conceived of during this period.12 The most successful of the imperial Malcolms raised at Burnfoot were Sirs John, Pulteney, Charles and James Malcolm. However, rather than focus solely on the ‘great men’ that have traditionally dominated Scottish imperial historiography, these figures will be placed within their wider kinship and 7 Doreen Massey, For Space (London, 2005), p. 5. 8 Tom Nairn, ‘Why Did They Go?’, Scottish Review of Books, 7 (2011), p. 8. 9 An illustrative example is M.H Beals recent work on the impact of emigration to America on the Scottish Borders, opening with a chapter that discusses ‘Agricultural Improvement’ and ‘Industrial Development.’ M.H. Beals, Coin, Kirk, Class and Kin: Emigration, Social Change and Identity in Southern Scotland (Oxford, 2011), pp. 17-54. See also, George McGilvary, East India Patronage and the British State (London, 2008), pp. 184-202. 10 Rosalind Mitchison, A History of Scotland (London, 2002), p. 347. 11 On the frontier and Scotland see John M. Mackenzie, ‘Scots and Imperial Frontiers’, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 3 (2009), pp. 1-17. 12 As A.A. Tait has written on the influence of the picturesque in Scotland ‘It was, after all, the home of much that was to be admired in this way from the time of Gray and Gilpin … the picturesque in Scotland was, as elsewhere, associated with a variety of architectural forms … This combination of building and setting constituted the real achievement of the picturesque.’ In terms of its physical position, Burnfoot fits within his description. A.A. Tait, The Landscape Garden in Scotland, 1735-1835 (Edinburgh, 1980), p. 93. 3 Figure one: Burnfoot located on map Figure two: Drawing of Burnfoot Cottage, pre-1850. Copy held National Library of Scotland, Acc. 11757 4 friendship networks.13 Brothers of the Malcolms, their sons and nephews were likewise born or sent to India, and the family home and landscape of Burnfoot looms large in all of their letters from India.