Book reviews: A Private Empire by Stephen Foster | The Inner Life of Empires by Emma Rothschild

Published on Monday 4 July 2011 16:35

A PRIVATE EMPIRE By Stephen Foster Pier 9, 400pp, £14.95 THE INNER LIFE OF EMPIRES BY Emma Rothschild Princeton, 496pp, £24.95

Everyone knows about family history. A small army of researchers pursue their ancestors in every archive, on-line resource, kirkyard and cemetery. Some communities (like the one where I live in Perthshire) have family history projects to help people on a local basis. It is a great modern fascination, one further inspired by seeing celebrities encountering unknown ancestors in BBC1's popular Who Do You Think You Are?' All this can be important for individual identity, but sometimes the activity can have a much wider significance.

These two books are professional versions of family histories, locating families that are not particularly celebrated, but offer striking insights into their times. Both families revealed here, the Macphersons and the Johnstones, were (and are) Scottish, both had close connections with the British Empire, and both left lots of traces in documents, letters, official reports, and much else. There are even common figures between the two stories - James "Fingal" or "Ossian" Macpherson for example, who was a kinsman of the Macphersons of Cluny and Blairgowrie, and who was acquainted with some of the Johnstones. We shall hear more of him anon.

But there are also differences between the two books. Stephen Foster's history of the Macphersons runs through several generations from the 18th century to the 20th and climaxes with one of its most notable members, Sir William Macpherson. He is the English High Court judge who chaired the Macpherson enquiry into the tragic Stephen Lawrence murder in London, producing in 1999 a report which was a masterpiece of its kind, its hard-hitting conclusions including the accusation that the Metropolitan Police were "institutionally racist".

Rothschild's history of the Johnstones is located in the 18th and early 19th centuries, concentrating on the remarkable four sisters and seven brothers among the Johnstones of Dumfriesshire, with only a relatively slight glance at their descendants.

Foster's is also much the more readable of the two, while Rothschild's constitutes a heavyweight intellectual account of the Johnstones, more extensively footnoted than almost any book I have read. Both are superbly researched and wonderfully revelatory.

Perhaps the Brooke family, the celebrated Rajahs of Sarawak, are the most visible of British imperial families. The last of that family, Anthony Brooke (who lived at one stage in a New Age commune in Findhorn), died very recently. But of course, there were any number of imperial families, many of them Scottish.

The Macphersons are a classic case in that they were Jacobites who set out, as many did, to recoup their fortunes through the empire. There are echoes here of another family, the Wedderburns, who have reached a wider audience through James Robertson's excellent historical novel James Knight (and both master and slave in that tale have bit parts in Rothschild's book because the Johnstones were involved in another slave court case, that of Belinda or Bell, who was accused of infanticide and was the last person to be acknowledged as a slave in a Scottish court).

The Macphersons were also to be involved in slavery, at least in the second generation of this story. They were, however, determined not to be English slaves. The original Allan Macpherson (1740-1816) allegedly threw stones at Cumberland's troops in 1846 when scarcely more than a toddler.

He had good reason, for the soldiers had just set fire to the mansion of the chief of the clan Macpherson. He subsequently turned his combative instincts elsewhere, joining the Black Watch in 1757 (as a private) and serving in the Seven Years War in North America and the Caribbean before joining the East India Company's forces in 1764, eventually becoming quartermaster general of the Bengal army.

His son, William, became a planter in Berbice, subsequently part of Guiana, in the early 19th century, but later moved to New South Wales where he became the clerk of the (legislative) councils. In Berbice he fathered children with a slave woman, children whom he acknowledged and whom he subsequently took to Australia with him (but not their slave mother, although she was freed) where their descendants still live. Thus the author of the Macpherson report has distant mixed-race relatives.

A son in the third generation, another Allan, became a squatter in northern New South Wales before having a brief and highly turbulent period as a member of the legislative assembly in Sydney. He actually horsewhipped a fellow member in the Legislative Council, for he was a man of wild passions who felt strongly, to the point of violence, on every issue of the day.

The imperial wheel turned full circle geographically when his son, William again, joined the Indian Civil Service and became a senior revenue officer in India, serving the Raj until 1911.

Throughout all these imperial adventures, marked by involvement in military campaigns and in political and other controversies connected with various governors and senior officials, the family maintained its links with Scotland, repeatedly returning to the estate in Blairgowrie bought by the original Allan.

The first three generations hoped to make a fortune out of empire and, strikingly, each generation failed. Colonel Allan made a lot of money in India, but he faced the usual difficulties in transmitting it back to Britain. He was even swindled out of the sums he did get back by his kinsman James "Ossian" Macpherson, who not only notoriously fabricated his translations of alleged Gaelic sagas, but also successfully embezzled a considerable fortune from his relatives.The second-generation planter tried to make money out of slave-grown cotton, but was defeated by the climate of Berbice and the rapid decline of slave culture. The third-generation squatter imagined he could make a huge fortune out of sheep on a vast "run" in the north of New South Wales, but he too was defeated, by a combination of the climate and Aboriginal hostility. Each generation discovered that it was better to make a steady living from official positions rather than gamble all on fortune-seeking ventures.

The Macpherson family history is thus interwoven with the wars of empire, with the efforts to turn overseas lands into some kind of personal El Dorado, with raw material production, with settler politics, and with relations with indigenous peoples on three continents - including sexual exploitation, land dispossession, violence, and the supposedly high-minded administration of the ICS (the fourth generation). Yet its imperial adventurers never reached the highest levels of service or made that elusive fortune. The estate at Blairgowrie remained heavily mortgaged throughout its history until it was largely sold off in the 20th century.

How curiously appropriate, then, that its highest-flying member, Sir William the judge, should have been called upon to investigate a serious case of interracial violence and the murder of an innocent and promising member of Britain's new multicultural society.

Rothschild's Johnstones had connections with North America, with the Caribbean, with the Cape and with India. Some were adventurers overseas; some stayed at home. They were involved in all the great issues of the day and they notably took different sides, sometimes slave owners and passionate upholders of the system, while others were abolitionists.

Some members were in the military, some were government officials, others became politicians.

All corresponded at length with each other (not least the sisters) and no matter was too trivial, or for that matter too grand, to escape their attention. They were concerned with law, trade, social issues and money-making.

Like the Macphersons, the East India Company is important in their story and they were similarly mixed up in the turbulent politics of 18th-century Scotland, its relations with England, and of course with the Empire. They were acquainted with all the great figures of the age, including Adam Smith and David Hume and their mentalities were very much framed by the Scottish Enlightenment. This is where Rothschild's book is most valuable. We are accustomed to study the Enlightenment through its great figures, their ideas, and their connections with their intellectual contemporaries in Europe and elsewhere. The Johnstones were a family who looked at Enlightenment ideas from below and from the sides - what Rothschild calls "middle" rather than "high" Enlightenment - but whatever their perspective they were passionately interested, as their correspondence reveals. The "inner life" of the title reflects the Johnstones' thoughts on all the great issues of the age, the "sentiments" that formed them and developed their concerns and outlook on their world. But they also lived domestic lives which cast considerable light upon their age, whether in Scotland, England or overseas. This is where Rothschild's book has considerable authority.

Although she sees her work as contributing to "microhistory", the close study of an individual family, in fact it makes major contributions to the "macro", to the grand narratives of 18th-century history.

Both authors follow these threads of family history, in and out of the imperial ventures of their times, with considerable acumen and verve. Both reveal the manner in which soldiers, settlers and officials could maintain their ethnic identities and continue to interact with people and place at home. Both demonstrate that the influence of empire penetrated far into the interior of Scotland.

Both these books, in their different ways, add many new and notable dimensions to the grander narratives and theories of imperial history. Neither should be pushed into some Scottish history ghetto, for both have much to say about British and Empire history. Nevertheless, readers in Scotland will find that both illuminate the remarkable role of Scots in a wider world. The Macphersons and the Johnstones offer passports to their eras. These are family histories at their very best.

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