On 6 April 2018 a colloquium to inaugurate the St. Andrew's Society/McEuen Scholarship Foundation Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies was held at the McGill University Faculty Club. Co-sponsored by the Canadian-Scottish Chair and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, the event featured talks on diverse topics related to the Scottish factor in northern North America. Here is a brief account of the proceedings.
A photo gallery of the colloquium may be viewed here.
Session One: Communities, Identities, and Ideologies
Heather McNabb, McCord Museum, Square Mile Scots and All the Others: The challenges and the potential of research in the Museum and Archive
McNabb examined the difficulties involved when collecting and exhibiting objects and textual material within the museum, and their impact on how scholarly research is conducted to produce new information. She concluded with a brief mention of some of the recent developments in technology which have enabled a change in the way that museums and archives operate, increasing the potential for more historical scholarship on the ties between Scotland and Canada.
Gillian Leitch, CDCI Research Inc., Exploring Montreal’s Scottish communities in the 19th and early 20th century through their associational life
While Montreal's Scots are normally characterised as an elite and cohesive group, they were in fact a diverse population. Through their associational life it is possible, Leitch explained, to see a diversity of Scottish identities forming and re-forming through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along the lines of county, region, cultural activities, and economic interests.
Michael Vance, St. Mary's University, A Communist, an MP, and a Domestic: Immigrant Scots in Interwar British Columbia
This talk focused on three individuals in order to highlight broader points about the influence of Scottish immigrants in early twentieth century British Columbia. The advocacy on behalf of First Nations communities in the province by Canadian Communist Party leader Tom Ewen highlights the disproportionate role that immigrant Scots played in the radical politics of the inter war period, while the Comox-Alberni MP Allan Webster Neill’s anti-Asian pronouncements reflect the significant role of immigrant Scots in promoting the racist politics of the period. The community response to the death of Perth-born housemaid Janet Smith in 1924 also illustrates the underlying racism shared by many immigrant Scots as well as serving to highlight the migration of significant numbers of unaccompanied Scottish women to urban Canada prior to the Second World War. Together the three biographies reflect immigrant experiences often overlooked in studies of the Scots in Canada.
Session Two: Empire and Economic Life
Don Nerbas, McGill University, The Scots and the Industrial Empire of the St. Lawrence
This paper explored the Scottish factor in the making of an industrial economy in northern North America during the nineteenth century. Substantially organized around the metropolitan influence of Montreal, this emerging Canadian political economy was significantly shaped by commercial networks and cultural attitudes associated with the Scottish diaspora. Yet, rapid industrialization often eroded older ethnic solidarities in the face of emerging class divisions.
Elizabeth Elbourne, McGill University, Scottish migration and the British empire, 1770s-1830s: Conflict, community and capital at the workface of colonialism
Drawing upon examples from North America, the Caribbean, India, New South Wales, and South Africa, Elbourne examined the history of Scottish migration to the British Empire from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Emphasizing the empire-wide perspective, Elbourne offered comparative perspective on key questions associated with the impact of migration from Scotland and the Scottish experience in the formation of settler societies.
Session Three: Scottishness and the North American Context
Elsbeth Heaman, McGill University, Scottishness and Subaltern History in Canada
If one were to look for a subaltern history in Canada, one might usefully look for it around self-conscious expressions of Scottishness. Heaman instanced the double celebrations, patrician and plebeian, of the St. Andrew's Society in Montreal and the historical reflections voiced at the centenary Burns dinner in Toronto in 1859.
Jason Opal, McGill University, First the Clans, then the Colonies: How 1745 in Scotland shaped 1776 in North America
Why did the American Revolution happen? The many-sided crackdown on the Highland Scots who had supported the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 offers new insights into this classic question. When British authorities tried to draw the North American colonies more firmly into imperial norms in the 1760s and 1770s, many Scots saw a repressive history repeating itself—and resolved to break away from the Crown.
Denis McKim, Douglas College, Presbyterianism, 'Scottishness,' and the Plasticity of the Past
McKim's paper examined the complex coexistence of British imperial patriotism and Scottish nationalism within the Presbyterian community of nineteenth-century Canada. While the denomination was far from homogeneous, its members frequently invoked both of these sentiments in articulating a sense of communal identity in Northern North America.