Scottish Highlanders In Colonial Georgia The Recruitment Emigration And Settlement At Darien 1735 1748

Between 1735 and 1748 hundreds of young men and their families emigrated from the Scottish Highlands to the Georgia coast to settle and protect the new British colony. These men were recruited by the trustees of the colony and military governor James Oglethorpe, who wanted settlers who were accustomed to hardship, militant in nature, and willing to become frontier farmer-soldiers. In this respect, the Highlanders fit the bill perfectly through training and tradition. Recruiting and settling the Scottish Highlanders as the first line of defense on the southern frontier in Georgia was an important decision on the part of the trustees and crucial for the survival of the colony, but this portion of Georgia's history has been sadly neglected until now. By focusing on the Scots themselves, Anthony W. Parker explains what factors motivated the Highlanders to leave their native glens of Scotland for the pine barrens of Georgia and attempts to account for the reasons their cultural distinctiveness and "old world" experience aptly prepared them to play a vital role in the survival of Georgia in this early and precarious moment in its history.

This book tells the story of Ebenezer, a frontier community in colonial Georgia founded by a mountain community fleeing religious persecution in its native Salzburg. This study traces the lives of the settlers from the alpine world they left behind to their struggle for survival on the southern frontier of British America. Exploring their encounters with African and indigenous peoples with whom they had had no previous contact, this book examines their initial opposition to slavery and why they ultimately embraced it. Transatlantic in scope, this study will interest readers of European and American history alike.

In nineteenth century paintings, the proud Indian warrior and the Scottish Highland chief appear in similar ways--colorful and wild, righteous and warlike, the last of their kind. Earlier accounts depict both as barbarians, lacking in culture and in need of civilization. By the nineteenth century, intermarriage and cultural contact between the two--described during the Seven Years' War as cousins--was such that Cree, Mohawk, Cherokee, and Salish were often spoken with Gaelic accents. In this imaginative work of imperial and tribal history, Colin Calloway examines why these two seemingly wildly disparate groups appear to have so much in common. Both Highland clans and Native American societies underwent parallel experiences on the peripheries of Britain's empire, and often encountered one another on the frontier. Indeed, Highlanders and American Indians fought, traded, and lived together. Both groups were treated as tribal peoples--remnants of a barbaric past--and eventually forced from their ancestral lands as their traditional food sources--cattle in the Highlands and bison on the Great Plains--were decimated to make way for livestock farming. In a familiar pattern, the cultures that conquered them would later romanticize the very ways of life they had destroyed. White People, Indians, and Highlanders illustrates how these groups alternately resisted and accommodated the cultural and economic assault of colonialism, before their eventual dispossession during the Highland Clearances and Indian Removals. What emerges is a finely-drawn portrait of how indigenous peoples with their own rich identities experienced cultural change, economic transformation, and demographic dislocation amidst the growing power of the British and American empires.

'The Scots have always been a restless people', says leading Scottish historian Marjory Harper 'but in the nineteenth century their restlessness exploded into a sustained surge of emigration that carried Scotland almost to the top of a European league table of emigrant exporting countries.' This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of that 'Great Exodus'. In many ways it challenges the popular belief that the Scottish Diaspora were reluctant exiles. There were indeed those who went unwillingly through clearance, kidnapping or banishment. Orphans, and (frequently against their parents' wishes) children of destitute parents were exported into domestic service by well-meaning institutions. But there were also adventurers, many with fortunes to invest, who went full of hope - and many who left as a response to famine or destitution did so willingly, in the belief that they would improve their lot. There were temporary emigrants too, off for a season's railroad building or a stretch in the East India Company. ow were these people recruited? Where did they embark from, what was the voyage out like? Where did they go? And what happened when they got there? From the Highlands, Lowlands and islands to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Ceylon and India, Harper brings alive the experience of the Scottish emigrant. rawing and quoting from a vast range of contemporary letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines (some examples are attached), this rich, immensely detailed and hugely rewarding book tells the stories of emigrants from diverse backgrounds as well as looking at the wider context of restless mobility that has taken Scots to England and Europe from the middle ages on.

The early modern period (c. 1500OCo1800) of world history is characterized by the establishment and aggressive expansion of European empires, and warfare between imperial powers and indigenous peoples was a central component of the quest for global dominance. From the Portuguese in Africa to the Russians and Ottomans in Central Asia, empire builders could not avoid military interactions with native populations, and many discovered that imperial expansion was impossible without the cooperation, and, in some cases, alliances with the natives they encountered in the new worlds they sought to rule. Empires and Indigenes is a sweeping examination of how intercultural interactions between Europeans and indigenous people influenced military choices and strategic action. Ranging from the Muscovites on the western steppe to the French and English in North America, it analyzes how diplomatic and military systems were designed to accommodate the demands and expectations of local peoples, who aided the imperial powers even as they often became subordinated to them. Contributors take on the analytical problem from a variety of levels, from the detailed case studies of the different ways indigenous peoples could be employed, to more comprehensive syntheses and theoretical examinations of diplomatic processes, ethnic soldier mobilization, and the interaction of culture and military technology. Warfare and Culture series. Contributors: Virginia Aksan, David R. Jones, Marjoleine Kars, Wayne E. Lee, Mark Meuwese, Douglas M. Peers, Geoffrey Plank, Jenny Hale Pulsipher, and John K. Thornton

More than 12,000 soldiers from the Highlands of Scotland were recruited to serve in Great Britain’s colonies in the Americas in the middle to the late decades of the eighteenth century. In this compelling history, Matthew P. Dziennik corrects the mythologized image of the Highland soldier as a noble savage, a primitive if courageous relic of clanship, revealing instead how the Gaels used their military service to further their own interests and, in doing so, transformed the most maligned region of the British Isles into an important center of the British Empire.

The only multivolume encyclopedia covering all aspects of North American colonial warfare, with special attention paid to the social, political, cultural, and economic affairs that were affected by the conflicts. Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775: A Political, Social, and Military History is the first multivolume resource on the full range of combat and confrontation in the New World prior to the American Revolution—not just rivalries between European empires but Indian conflicts, slave rebellions, and popular uprisings as well. Organized A–Z, the encyclopedia covers all major wars and conflicts in North America from the late-15th to mid-18th centuries, with discussions of key battles, diplomatic efforts, military technologies, and strategies and tactics. Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775 explores the context for conflict, with essays on competing colonial powers, every major Native American tribe, all important political and military leaders, and a range of social and cultural issues. The insights and information contained here will help anyone understand the genesis of North American culture, the plight of Native Americans after European contact, and the beginnings of the United States of America.

Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.