The Roots and Fruits of Scotland’s Global History - Professor Murray Pittock - 28 January 2026

Murray is a senior figure in this university. He's a pro vice principal here and he also holds the Bradley chair of English literature. Murray is a specialist in Scottish history in particular and he was the first professor of Scottish history at an English university uh when he was in Manchester and he's worked at a number of universities. Um He has a number of specialisms and you'll hear about that this evening. He's particularly interested uh in the Jacobites, for example, uh and also uh he's been very instrumental in the uh university's Robert Burns Study Centre. Murray is uh a well-known commentator and really he's kind of a public intellectual. So uh in the sense that he can comment sensibly on many things and uh speak coherently. Uh I hope you're going to see that tonight. Um Murray has published several books uh and his most recent one is called Scotland the global history and it was been extremely well reviewed. The Guardian said that the ebb and flow of Scotland's international experience is described with panache and pace. So you're in for a treat tonight uh with Murray's lecture, The Roots and Fruits of Scotland's global history. Thank you, Keith. Thank you very much, Pat and thank you everybody for taking the time to be here on a cold January evening. Uh it's a pleasure for me to be able to talk to you and um the picture of the book is on the first slide so that I can get the sales pitch out of the way if you actually want to read it. But anyway, my advice is is is is if you do want to buy the book, uh buy the hardback but not because it will get it's it's more money though it's a bit more money but because the print, the spacing, and the illustrations are just so much better. But you need to hear this lecture first before you think even begin to think whether that might be a possibility. Now, I'm going to talk I'm going to talk first of all in general terms about uh about Scotland and Scotland's international drivers. And then I'm going to give three examples. One of them about uh medicine but and botany, one of them about uh technology, and one of them about personal networks. So first of all, Scotland wa- Scotland was from the Middle Ages a very strongly a trading and overseas trading nation. One has to remember that even as late as 1740, it took Lord Lovat 6 weeks to get from Inverness to London by coach. But uh it would take no more than the same number or slightly or slightly higher number of days to sail from Aberdeen to Bergen in Norway. The sea is the fastest mode of transport in the the medieval period. Indeed, the fastest mode of transport for most of human history. Good and then do you think you could use the microphone? My hearing is very poor. All right, so you don't you you'd rather I've got I've got a lap I've got uh I've got um I'm a No, I've got We have We've all got one of those, I think. But, I've got a I've got I've got a lap I've got a lapel mic, but it's okay. I can use it I can use this mic if it's better. Adam, can you to make the switch, Adam? Okay? Right. I hope that's all right for everybody. So, there are a high concentration of Scots merchants in cities such as Gdańsk or Danzig, as it was called at times in the 20th century. And one of the thing the the key elements that Scots habitually under undertook was to control the means. I'll say a little bit more about this. Control the means of export from the ports from which they were importing. In fact, one of the earliest drivers of the Scottish merchants was to be able to provide to be the people who dealt in the merchandise that was exported from a home port to Scotland. And that was very clear from a relatively early stage. So, Scott in a place like Gdańsk, the Scots merchants themselves dealt with huge import orders. Uh 30,000 skins from one Aberdeen merchant in 1650, almost 70,000 m of plaid the same year for Aberdeen, which went from Aberdeen to Gdańsk, and also to the Scots staple, the Scottish uh protected port with with Scottish uh uh some elements of Scots law and Scots religious organization at the port of Veere. In the 1620s, Scotland's Scotland's own imports came 32% from the Netherlands, 22% from northern Germany and the Baltic, 22% from England and 18% from France. So, it's a very broadly spread spread set of trade networks. And one of the key, perhaps by the 17th century, the key net the key network there was the Netherlands. And there was a very strong involvement of there was a very strong involvement of Scots in controlling exports from the Netherlands both in terms of their their export from Rotterdam and also in terms of Scots service in the Dutch marine Dutch civil and military marine and in the Dutch East India Company. This was noticed. I mean, at this stage one has to remember there were three Anglo-Dutch Wars during the reign of Charles II. So, the fact that there were between 1,500 and 2,000 Scots in the Dutch Navy was not necessarily viewed as an entirely friendly activity. Nonetheless, in 1673 James, later James VII and II, then Duke of Albany, gave his personal backing to a plan to create a Scots-Dutch trading network based on Albany in what is now New York State. This is something you may be familiar with the State University of New York at Albany. Scots James, who was interesting and quite sympathetic to Scotland's imperial ambitions abroad about which I'll say more in a minute, wanted to support the Scots and Dutch to create a combination colony through a trading network in the eastern shore of the eastern coast of what became the United States. And Scots the consequence settled in New York and indeed there was a New Jersey settlement headed up by the Earl of Drummond in the 1680s. So, Scots and Dutch were often viewed um as natural allies in this later 17th century period. And part of that comes through uh an idea about the who owns the sea. And different models for ownership of the sea. Again, I'll say a little bit more about this. Mare Liberum and Mare Clausum, the free sea and the closed sea. Generally speaking, empires like to control seas. And you can see that with the interdiction of the Russian tanker in Scottish waters by the United States in the last few weeks. Empires like to control seas. Trading nations who are not empires like free seas for free trade. The Dutch are most strongly associated with the notion of the free sea and the Spaniards were most strongly associated with the notion of the closed sea. Why had this context grown up? Well, the the extent of Scottish experience abroad was historically driven by three main factors. The overproduction of educated men, and they were men at this stage, and the inability of the country to offer scope for their ambition. The impossibility of Scotland expanding territorially domestically because of a disproportionately powerful neighbor. And the Scottish economy, which lacked bullion and required foreign currency to maintain monetary circulation, but also stood in need of a proactive trade policy to secure that foreign currency. If you look at Scottish coin hordes, which have been recovered from the medieval and early modern periods, Scotland is just about the only state in Europe where a majority of the coin is not Scottish. It comes from somewhere else because there simply wasn't enough bullion to maintain the got a economy without importing coin from other countries. And that meant that Scotland had to have a protracted trade policy which didn't just depend on earning money from exports, but actually also from earning money from providing imports, which is one of the drivers for Scottish control, Scots merchants seeking control of the exporting countries in Europe. Scotland's own exports of skins, fish and wool, and some of the high-quality salmon from the Dee and Don bore the Aberdeen kite mark on the barrels from the 16th century onwards. Were ill-matched to a need for greater variety of imports. The wine from France, consumer goods from the Netherlands, timber from Norway, rye and flax from Poland, brandy and by the 17th century brandy, Canary wine, and citrus. Scots tastes were actually much more sophisticated for in in luxury terms than their ability to export. So, they have this problem. And control of overseas export export entrepôts is one way that they solve it. There are others. Scots were especially active in in continental armies, in continental continental religious houses, the clergy, and in trade. Uh They control, for example, in terms of trade, they control not only a lot of the Gdansk trade, but the Bergen timber trade. And as I've noted the as I've noted before, the wide distribution of exports from the Europe to Scotland uh with the are all with the exception of England areas of high Scottish expatriate mercantile activity. For example, colonies of Scottish merchants existed at Bordeaux, Bruges, Campveere, Copenhagen, Dieppe, Elsinore, Gdansk, and Malmö, among other locations. Scots are extremely uh widespread throughout Europe. There are 6,000 Scots merchants in Poland-Lithuania, uh then a then a United Commonwealth. Uh Baltic ports are used channel exports from by Scottish merchants to channel exports to Scotland from the Holy Roman Empire. And Scots uh achieve local civic distinction. For example, Alexander Chalmers from Dyce is four times mayor of Warsaw. But also Scots are frequently educated from Scotland are frequently educated abroad, and that's one of the measures of the greater diversity of Scotland as a society in the late 17th century than we think. Uh between 1676 and 1725, Scots were 6% of students at Dutch universities. 40% of advocates at the Scots bar in the century after 1660 had been educated in the Netherlands for part of their education. And the Netherlands itself provided 20 accountancy places for Scots scholars wishing to study accountancy in the Netherlands from 1673 onwards, which were competed for. Uh and they were largely supplied by people from Edinburgh. And indeed the continuation of that practice led to uh some of the people going to train in the Netherlands from the merchant company schools in Edinburgh, of which the first uh George Watson's belongs to the end of this period. Scots uh oh, sorry, the second George Watson's belong to the end of this period. Scots were widely found in the Dutch East India Company, the Prussian and Swedish Eastern Trading Companies also, and in Russia, uh where particularly Scots expertise in naval uh innovation was valued by Peter the Great, and where Scots continued in the Russian service until the late the mid-late 19th century in the shape of General Robert Armstrong and Alexander Bailey, who were the two last Scottish serving general officers in the Russian Imperial Army. So, the Scots had at this stage, before the Union of 1707, a wide footprint abroad. But, Charles II's government excluded in 16 1660s excluded Scotland from the new overseas markets of the emergent English Empire under the terms of the 1661 Navigation Act, which treated Scots as foreigners and banned their shipping from English colonies, directing that three-quarters of the crew of a ship trading with the English colonies had to be of English nationality. Now, colonial trade was increasingly important both to trading and to territorial empires by the late 17th century and was seen as being globally significant determinant of national success. Even predominantly trading, rather than imperial nations like the Netherlands, however, uh though it became an imperial nation, uh had to have a bit the ability to project significant amount of force to protect their overseas trading interests. Scotland could not project that force by the late 17th century and this, combined with their exclusion from English colonies, remained a real problem. Uh And this struggle is also the struggle between the free and the closed seas. Scotland is desperate uh not just working through the Netherlands, but on their under their Scotland's own steam, to be a trading nation with the ability to project itself throughout the free non-imperial seas, though I mean which were claimed by Spain and even Portugal, Portugal claiming to be the entire Indian Ocean at this stage as their own private fief and property more than they could possibly police. But, nonetheless, Portugal could project quite a degree of power. So, Scots are desperately trying to find a place for themselves in this rapidly changing trading world. And this is a world where um there were also, understandably, where there's a lot of trade and a lot of inability to protect that trade as well as it could be protected, a lot of pirates. And the Scots, the administration of Scotland in the last years of 1707 is very interesting in that it's got very good connections with pirates. Um it's useful not to get yourself attacked if you happen to be unable to defend yourself. Um and it's and contact between Scottish merchants and buccaneers in the West Indies helped to underpin the Darien venture of the company of Scotland, the last big commercial pre-union venture, which depended on the concept of the free sea in its defiance of Spanish claims and its intrusion of a Scottish trading colony at the heart of the Spanish Empire. Um while the Navigation Acts, which I mentioned earlier, was suspended in wartime, the legislation otherwise remained a formidable obstacle which Scots avoided either by uh example, by trading from Newfoundland, which was legally argued to be part of England and not a colony and therefore anyone setting sail from it could be English under the terms of the Navigation Acts, and also employ English front men in Scottish towns to act as agent to act as agents. So, Scots are trying to circumvent, but they're also trying to build. And the last big attempt to build is Darien. Now, in this context, of course, Darien, the Company of Scotland's great great plan for the Indies, and a lot of propaganda is put out to the local population in Darien saying how this is a trading colony. It's completely different from the Spanish Empire. We will deliver you from Spanish tyranny and so on. Scotland is doing this, of course, under the in the context of being in the union the union of the crowns, not yet the union of the kingdoms in 1707. In that sense, it's quite it's it it's part of a polity, a political organization, which was very common in this period. Uh the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania I mentioned. Uh and in later periods, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, Austria-Hungary, and also uh in this period, too, the Holy Roman Empire. And Spain and Portugal also briefly uh politically united at this time. So, it's this is the model called the composite monarchy, and it allows for some uh uh independence of action by the junior partner, unlike after the union of 1707. And it was very it was very evident in that union that the key clause of the union is not one that's normally identified now, but was the key one at the time, which is clause four, access to English markets overseas under the protection of the forces of the crown, which came after uh 80 years during which Scots attempts to develop overseas colonies and trading stations have been frustrated by their own inability to project, finance, and force, as well as by the indifference and hostility of their British neighbors. Scotland had failed as an imperial trading nation, having previously succeeded as a trading nation. Uh but it had laid the foundations for future success. And one of the things uh which is very striking about the way in which Scots were already associating overseas in the 16th and 17th centuries is they were doing so on in terms that remain very familiar in today's Scotland as ways in which social connection is built, association, geography, kinship. Which school did you go to? Where do you come from? Who do you know? Who are you related to? Common Common origin frequently was deployed as a means of claiming the right to enter into a contract between Scots merchants. And adoption, godparenting, and fosterage were common in Scottish mercantile communities so that the family, the family unit, could be extended by people who are not blood relatives. Scots have provided up to 100 governors in Europe in the 30 Years' War, including in Riga, Frankfurt, and Munich. It was a huge network based on these three things, association, geography, and kinship. It was also, certainly by the time that Scotland could no longer project power abroad, power diplomacy, the exercise of soft power in trading, culture, education. It was unlike unlike the Spanish Portugal Union, where Portugal was allowed to control its overseas empire independently of Spain, Scotland, as you've seen, was largely excluded from the English empire and was forced into a pattern of networks and soft power. And to maintain its trading nations, this is one of the 30 ships a day that came into the Scottish trading port of Veere, which actually endured as a separate a separate Scottish entity until the Napoleonic Wars, and performed the last act of independent Scottish foreign policy by declaring neutrality during the American War of Independence in 1779. But when Darien in this last gasp came along, uh the Scots uh were very unpopular not only with the English who didn't support them because they just created a row and a fight with Spain, but also with Spain who talked about um as Don Jose Sarmiento put it in 1699, exterminating the Scottish pirates. And that the Scotland's connections with piracy uh allowed Scots, which I mentioned already, allowed Scots to be presented as pirates by Spain. And also that was increasingly happening in England, which was tightening up uh the issue of uh uh uh privateer contracts, that is ships ostensibly in the in the king's service which were carrying out private missions of their own and effectively creating more pirates. Uh William Kidd uh himself, the famous pirate hanged in 1701, had moved to submit himself to the new government uh the Williamite government in England in the 1690s but had done so too late and lost out. Um and then pirates become part and I'm not going to linger on that, but it's a very interesting little vignette of the Jacobite story when um the Scottish captain Alexander Daile sails under King James's flag in the Agrippa to start a pirate colony on Madagascar, which is then used by Scottish pirates overseas to try and attack the East India the England's East India trade. And indeed one of the last things it does is open this colony does is open discussions with a company of Scotland to secure Scottish citizenship in return for opening up the trade of uh quote African slaves to Scotland. So, not saying these are nice people, but they're interesting they're interesting stories. And right into the period of the 1720s and 1730s, the golden age of piracy, uh, around about a third of all of ships whose names we know carried names associated with, uh, the the Stewarts and Scotland. And that is the poster of the court of directors of the company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, effectively the prospectus for Darien. Now, this all ended with the incorporation of Scotland, uh, into the Union and the British Empire. But did it? Scotland had produced the climate, the infrastructure for creating its own networks abroad and being a fairly effective at doing them. And that's itself a huge story, and I'm not going to be able to deal with it in any great detail. But I'm going to deal with three aspects of it. And one of those aspect two of those aspects are very strongly connected with Scottish innovation in research and education. I talked about overqualified young men earlier on. So, in 1670, based on actually Scottish practice, uh, which had been carried out in France where Scottish gardens were in high demand because they could anything grow in a bad climate, can't imagine how that happened. Uh, a botanic garden in Edinburgh was founded by Sir Robert Sibbald and Andrew Balfour. It was originally 150 square meters. By 1675, it was 5,000. It became the physic garden based in based on a model from Leiden given Scotland's strong Dutch connections used by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1681 and it's it's daughter Edinburgh Medical School from 1726. And eventually these botanical gardens with their links to medicinal treatments the the Edinburgh Botanic Garden is the basis of a standard pharmacopoeia that doesn't go out of print till 1846. Came to all the major Scottish ancient Scottish universities. Glasgow's own garden now effectively lost but round the old college until it was moved in 1870 extended to over 30,000 square meters and many of the conversations of the Enlightenment took place in that now lost garden ground space round the High Street. One of the things that one of the things that this ensured the movement of botanic gardens into medical schools the medical curriculum was that botany became incorporated into the medical curriculum and that therefore many of the people practicing botany who were Scots or of Scottish education had got more social cachet than they would otherwise have had if they'd been an expert in plants. So to take one example I'm taking the example of the earliest botanical gardens. General Robert Melville who was an Edinburgh medical graduate a veteran of the British Army at Culloden and also the Grand Master of the Tropics as he was rather grandly called of the Beggar's Benison Sex Club was obviously a man of many talents took over in 1763 the ceded lands of French lands in the Caribbean following the end of the Seven Years War. He asked his fellow alumnus, uh but alumnus in this case you'd actually gone to Glasgow as well as Edinburgh, and so it was an alumnus of his at Glasgow, George Young, to become the first superintendent of a botanical garden at St. Vincent, which is still uh you can still see today. Young immediately, he got this charge in 1763, became a correspondent with John Hope, who was the chief correspondent based in Scotland of many of the earlier pioneers of botanic gardens and plant collections, and was professor of botany and materia medica, there you see the connection, uh at Edinburgh, and became part of Hope's global information exchange, which uh which stretched from Philadelphia to In- India. Hope was actually, uh this is the uh the old story about the uh he wasn't an Aberdonian, but the Aberdeen schoolboy who's asked to write an essay on an elephant and his trust line of the sen- sentence is, "The economic uses of the elephant are." So, the economic uses of plants were what mattered to Hope. Hope dreamt of diversifying the Scottish economy with uh with cash crop transplants from different countries, and indeed one of Hope's students identified the potential of jute, later to be a huge staple for uh the industry in Scotland and India in the 1790s. This is the St. Vincent Botanical Garden, and that on the other side is Hope inspecting some plants in the botanical garden at uh at Edinburgh, keeping an eye and in discussion with one of the gardeners. It was interestingly the end of the Seven Years War uh that Hope founded the Society of the Importation of Foreign Seeds and Plants, seeing the ceding of territory by the defeated French Empire to the British to the British Crown and the general uh sense that Britain had become the preeminent empire in the world uh which coincided with some of the great exploratory voyages. For example, uh Captain Cook's uh Cook incidentally served haggis made out of a dog aboard the Endeavour in 1769. So, don't invite him to any Burns suppers. Um but uh to to provide a platform for the further commercial exploitation of plants worldwide. And like other professors in the 18th and in the 19th centuries, you'll see Hope seems to have augmented his salary by engaging in business, intensifying the link between pharmacy, botany, and revenue. But, it also gave a strong link to uh relationship between health and the environment because many of these places, not least in the Caribbean, were places of significant uh ill health and huge disease and mortality risk. So, the fact that a significant number of plants came from the Caribbean because and there was a huge death toll in the Caribbean and people didn't tend to survive long, tended to increase focus in uh research in Scotland on the link between health and environment uh particularly in the imperial context. And this founding of botanical gardens, often with uh a medical or quasi-medical mission, goes right across what became the British Empire. Charles Fraser at Sydney, James Hector at Wellington, John Davidson at Vancouver, Francis Masson and the collections of South African flora. Or Aberdonian or the Aberdonians Hugh Falconer, Sir George King, and Sir David Prain, who superintended the development of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Calcutta, and were all and were botany professors there, Prain going on to direct Q. And again there, and this you often they are a very strong association network because all three went to the University of Aberdeen, two of them went to Aberdeen Grammar School, and uh and one of those mentored the other. So, this group of relatively powerful Scottish botanists are themselves part of a very very limited geographical network. Forestry experts such as Alexander the Gibson from Stracathro and Hugh Cleghorn, meanwhile, transformed the landscape from India to New Zealand and were among the first to believe that there was a direct relationship between deforestation, climatic change, and environmental degradation degradation, a case which convinced government and helped to lead to the establishment of the Indian Forest Department in the Raj. So, the impact of plants on environment and and plants and environment on health are very much part of what became an enormously central strand, and it developed into the 19th century with uh with obviously Douglas's Douglas's collections and the plant collect and plant collectors who go on right through toward the end of the Victorian period, but it has its roots in the development of the medical curriculum at Edinburgh in particular and Glasgow. So, I'm going on to the third strand now, which is University uh technology technology and business. Now, John Anderson requested uh obviously the professor here, requested James Watt, an instrument maker, in 1762 to repair the university's model of a Newcomen engine. And allegedly a conversation about the limitations of Joseph Black's condenser happened between the two of them, Anderson and Watt, in the in the gardens, Botanic Garden of the University of Glasgow, which the plaque for which is now on the stage in the Barony Kirk. Black himself was also attempting to devise a bleaching process for linen that was reliable and non-soluble, linen being one of Scotland's significant other exports as it was in Ireland's, too. And these people all were in a the context of creating a network of professors, industrialists, industrialists, financiers, and aristocrats who were involved in complementary ways in developing in industry. And this link, so central to 18th-century Scotland, persisted into the 19th century, not least with the network of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. Kelvin's business interests and the the business interests of 18th- and 19th-century professors are very marked. Included directorships of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, whose business was indeed made possible by his science, and the Kodak Company. One of one of Thomson, Lord Kelvin's students alone founded 46 companies. So, they including Cable & Wireless. So, these people lived in a different kind of educational atmosphere. And one of those the differences in that atmosphere is that professorial assistants, demonstrators, and instrument makers, like James Watt, provided a link between physics and engineering, natural philosophy and as it was called, and engineering as subjects, and their applicability in industry. Napier's yard, which was the probably the most innovative early 19th-century shipping yard, provided a live link with the University of Glasgow curriculum and Kelvin students worked on problems brought by demonstrators from Napier's yard to Kelvin's lectures. At the same time, the idea that the natural sciences were and not simply a much more limited range of subjects such as music and languages were suitable for women was gaining was gaining ground in Glasgow, not here admittedly, but at Anderson's College founded at John Anderson's death in 1796, which I would argue is the ultimate pioneer for women in higher education with 500 women in the physics and chemistry classes in 1796-97, about half the enrollment, and 130 women still registered in natural philosophy even in 1840. And of course, there's a link which I can't go into, but which is quite important, between Anderson's own circle, the foundation of adult education at Birkbeck by one of Anderson's early professors, George Birkbeck, and links and links with James Mill and Mary Somerville, who also ultimately is influenced by Anderson's circle. But that's just one example of the what was at the time a branch line of this enormously strong link between the higher education, the natural sciences, and business. The Scottish educational sector was, I think, far more different than it is today, and I'm not going to be reprising George Davie's The Democratic Intellect, which from my view, though I I I like George a lot and it's a tremendous landmark book, hits a number of the wrong targets as well as the right ones, but there is something very much going on there. So, first of all, some of the changes we've seen in Scottish education, school and higher education are of extremely recent date, even though we now think it's normal. For example, the private sector in Scottish schools was under 2% of all pupils as late as 1967. 1.4, in fact. And Scottish schools by the grammar schools were of very early date compared to most other countries with seven in existence by 1300, five universities by by 1600, and of course Scotland also had the first school for the deaf in Donaldson in Donaldson's by 1760. There's a strong focus on generalism and the passion for ideas what the young James Clerk Maxwell would would voice without understanding the history behind it as he's as he's impulse to know what the go of it was, how things worked. Uh and also and how things work in a practical as well as an academic sense. In the Imperial era, it was Scottish higher education that became the model for the US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. And the links that it had in that period through its strong connections with business and indeed the fact that as late as 1914, one in six of the students at this university came from agricultural unskilled and semi-skilled working class occupations, a figure that uh if that Scottish government policy and uh and uh most deprived postcode area of admissions only surpassed in very recent years indicates that the institutional nature of the culture that was educated to have this global footprint was very different from the one we now think of as normal because I think what one of the lessons of history is that we forget it. And with it we forget the lesson. We normalize what's round us. But the world I'm describing is actually quite different, even though it seems like a continuum with our own as we for example, uh reference or recollect the the 575th anniversary of this university this year. So, following some early uh developments uh and experimentations uh near Dumfries uh for steam travel, the first European steam passenger service, the Comet, Henry Bell's Comet, with a boiler designed by David Napier in Napier's yard, was launched in 1812. There is There is um uh small monument to Bell's Comet at Bowling. Um uh if if you want to make If you want to make your way there to see it, not necessarily this evening. And it was part of a central part of the very rapid development of steam technology in and from Scotland, which helped to transform Scotland economically and significantly yet further in the 19th century, because it was down to steam power and particularly steam power by sea that global trade quadrupled in the 19th century. But the Scottish role in that is enormous and uh also happens in a very concentrated period at the end of the 1830s or much of it does. So, in 1837, David McQueen founded the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and got parliamentary support for it because of McQueen's argument uh that you could uh take military material through commercial steamers without being detected. Um such was the fate of the Lusitania in 1915, much later. But the idea that you could use commercial trans- steam transport as a front for moving military material was first broached by McQueen in his proposals for funding and support. He put up the initial funding from money, I have to say, he got from Caribbean slave plantations uh of all founding the RMSP in 1837. The Canadian 2 years later, the Canadian businessman Samuel Cunard entered into contract with the Napier Yards and a consortium of Glasgow businessmen who provided the capital for the development of the Cunard Line and the first ship, Caledonia, which was launched in 1840. By the time the the the QE2 was launched in 1967, 99 of Cunard's 134 liners had been built on the Clyde. The next year, 1840, Brody McGhee Willcox, Arthur Anderson, and others founded P&O, which later was led by Sir James Matheson and Sir Thomas Sutherland. So when Sir Thomas Sutherland were was both uh chair of P&O and Labour MP for Greenock, he made sure with the attention to ethical procurement which marked the Victorian period that the Greenock Yards got 80% of P&O's orders. This was a period of a a a a different period of buccaneering, a period of the ascendancy and rapid expansion of ship technology, recognized by royalty as when one of the guests of honor to meet Queen Victoria at Aberdeen in 1848 was the White Star Line George Thompson. Uh and also by a technology which was not distinct to the Scottish, it was pioneered in America, was perfected in Scotland, the technology of the clipper. And to this day, the Mopah lies maiden voyage to Australia, uh 60 days, remains the fastest that distance has ever been covered by an unpowered vessel. Long voyages and the need for cargo space to of course increase trade and profit created a demand for technically innovative ships. And uh companies like companies like P&O cultivated face-to-face connections with Clyde contractors such as Todd McGregor and Caird and Company. The spread of the the spread of wealth from these technological developments became a series of concentric circles. Matheson, of course, who became chairman of P&O, was with William Jardine, known as in in East Asia as the iron-headed rat, uh the co-founder of Jardine Matheson. And Jardine Matheson's own clipper fleet was larger than at that point some state navies. 19 intercontinental clippers and hundreds of other ships were involved by Jardine Matheson when it was launched in the late 1830s. When Jardine Jardine faced obs- obstruction through his what the Chinese would call guanxi, which Scots well understand because it depends on association, kinship, and frames of reference such as I mentioned earlier, uh when he found that his attempts to uh wine and dine Cantonese merchants to sell large quantities of opium in the Chinese empire were inexplicably being opposed by the emperor, uh he sent the Jardine paper to Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary, Viscount Melbourne was currently prime minister, to uh which fundamentally recommended waging war on the on the Chinese empire. This led to the securing of Hong Kong in 1842 uh so that a safe base could be provided for the opium trade by from Jardine Matheson. As uh uh uh as Palmerston said, "In China, there's detailed instructions that led to these satisfactory results." So, um Jardine Matheson the the the Jardine Matheson fleet, which incidentally flew the saltire, um became uh one of the most important agents for political change in Southeast Asia. And all of this, as I stressed, is happening in a very brief period of time. So, there is a typical opium trader of the era, and there is uh an ice opium cabinet. It's always nice to keep these things uh in pleasant environment and makes them seem nicer than they are. And on top of it, a typical um bamboo and brass opium pipe. All the furniture of the era. I mean, one has to remember I you know, when people say, "Good good grief, why aren't these guys in Why weren't these guys in jail?" One has to remember that uh the British Medical Journal was recommend the opium as late as the 1890s. The attitude to opium only gradually changed at the end of the 19th century, and a lot of the uh Chinese imperial opposition to opium was uh not exactly driven by health concerns, but by a fear that their merchants uh mer- mercantile class might get too wealthy and challenge imperial power, as indeed they were eventually to do in the first decade of the 20th century. So, onto my last example, and I'm going to move slightly from China to Japan, and it's going to be on networks. And on I suppose a Scott who is I think he's better known now than he was 20 years ago, but still far more famous in in the country he did so much for and adopted Japan than he is in Scotland. So, Thomas Glover was born in 1838 here in Fraserburgh. His father His father could only afford to send uh I think two of his sons to Aberdeen Grammar School and uh Glover wasn't one of them. So, he joined Jardine Matheson as an apprentice in 1856 and was sent out to Japan in 1859. Almost immediately as a young man, Glover spotted a number of things. First of all, the potential of green tea and secondly, the fact that Japan having just not yet opened up to the west, it was still very controversial to be a western in Japan at the end of the 1850s was ripe for massive trading development. So, the economic uses of the elephant. In 1861, the Aberdeen yard at Nagasaki was opened by Glover's associate James Mitchell. The slip dock being again look at the ethical procurement standards constructed by Hall and Company of Aberdeen uh and is now UNESCO World Heritage Site. Two years later, Glover built Glover House, the first western building in Japan, visited by round about 2 million uh a year. And then in the same year, supported Hugh Matheson who uh was uh which who ran one of the related, not exactly subsidiaries, but related companies in the Jardine Matheson empire to smuggle out the Choshu Five. Five prominent young Japanese who might um have been executed had he been known where they were going who were sent to uh Great Britain to learn modern science and technology and to prepare for what Glover was already contemplating as a 25-year-old in a foreign country which was regime change. Um the Choshu Five, four of them went to University College London where they were educated by uh a Scottish chemistry professor who was part of the Scottish scientific network. The The other one went to uh Anderson's College and the Clyde iron. Hirobumi Ito Hirobumi, one of the five, later became Prime Minister of Japan in 1908 and nominated Glover for the Order of the Rising Sun, the highest order honor that can be given to a non-native Japanese. At this time, there was a struggle uh course commemorated as in one of its last spasms in a film like The Last Samurai in 2003 between the shogunate between the shogunate and the rising major dynasty that would embed uh a a stronger version of Imperial and emperor-centered Japan. Glover, of course, um supported both sides with weapons but made sure that the shogunate who were associated with a closed Japan and not open to Western trade received more out of date and less efficient or effective weapons. This was spotted by the British ambassador who uh and led to a contretemps with Glover where Glover basically stonewalled uh the British government. There are a number of examples of this in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's very interesting that the the Scots building a commercial empire abroad often feel relatively little direct loyalty to the home country than the home state and the British Empire. They're enabled by it, but boy, he's not respond he's not responding to the guidance it offers. So, Japan or the Japanese supporters of opening to the West, which include which was strongly associated with the Meiji side in the ongoing conflict, wanted to commission ships. And Glover, of course, could commission ships for them. So, he, again, in this classic uh 19th century style, got his brother Charles to uh and of course one of his brothers had met the Choshu five off the boat in Southampton to um go to Hall and Company, who built the who the fitted out the slipway in the Nagasaki dock in Aberdeen to provide three ships, the Satsuma, the Hoshu Maru, and the Josho Maru. In 1868, as the first ship started to arrive in Japan and Japan started to open up with the victory the Meiji for overseas trade, uh Glover went into the joint development of the Takashim Takashima coal coal mine off Nagasaki for the express purpose of supplying coal to foreign steamers, as Japan opened up, reckoning that people obviously would need refueling in Japan and having a source uh directly adjacent to his dock and slipway uh to enable him to do just that. Hugh Matheson, meanwhile, as Glover's friend and associate, uh was asked by the new Meiji government to advise on setting up the first major Western institution, the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. And Matheson, uh turned first to the profec- to Professor of Engineering Lewis Gordon, who felt he was getting on a bit and recommended uh a figu- uh uh a figure familiar for the history of engineering here, William Rankine. William Rankine, however, being in his early 50s, was not very keen on Gordon was even older on undertaking this himself and in turn recommended his student Henry Dyer. Which is how Henry Dyer, at the age of 25, became head of the Imperial College of Engineering at Tokyo basing its curriculum on the the one that he and Yozo, one of the two one of the Choshu five who'd been educated together at Anderson's College, had experienced. 14 of Dyer's 22 British staff at the Imperial College came from Scotland and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, played a key role in this patronage network. In fact, although the correspondence which can prove it doesn't exist, I'm fair or hasn't been found, I'm fairly convinced that Kelvin was was significantly responsible for the for the Scottish end and supply chain into the network not controlled by but facilitated by and by Glover in Japan in the last quarter of the 19th century. Only one of the examples is to James Alfred Ewing, one of the Tokyo professors who later became director of naval education and worked with Thomson and his Edinburgh professor Fleming Jenkin on the laying of telegraph cables in Brazil in his student vacation. Now, that's what I call a project. Anyway, um and the influence of Japan was beginning in the Japanese in in the presence of Japanese in general in Great Britain, the Japan exhibition in Glasgow in the 1870s and of course later on and again the shipping connection is not coincidental, Bowles' sponsoring of Henry Bowles' artistic visit to Japan in 1893. There's a letter from Glover on the left uh to the captain of the So Choo Maru uh in 1869 explaining that he's going to have to be paid a bit more to bring it all the way into into Japan. It's dated at Nagasaki on the 26th of February in Glover's hand. And there is um a rather more modern date. Thomas Blake Glover as a Japanese, if not a Scottish, cultural icon. The Nagasaki Brewing Company's Thomas Blake Glover's lager beer. Um I haven't actually drunk it, but I have seen an empty bottle. That is there. Now, the last stage of Glover's influence was yet to come. And in 1888 uh Archibald Barr and William Stroud developed as part of the coal ascendancy of shipping technology and connection with practical applications of that technology in Glasgow, the optical rangefinder. Barr was the region became region professor of engineering in Glasgow two years later and formed the company Barr and Stroud three years later in 1893. In 1903, they patented the FA3 rangefinder which had a 5,500 m capacity. And it was ordered almost immediately on Glover's recommendation by the Japanese Navy under his friend Admiral Togo, who Glover had known since the 1860s. At the Tsushima Strait 18 months after it was ordered Togo sank 11 Russian battleships using the FA3. The Oslyabya gained the unenviable distinction of becoming the first modern battleship sunk by gunfire alone. So, quite simply, the FA3 enabled accurate artillery fire to be directed from large ship guns at a distance of more than 5 km. And at that time, no naval sight, certainly no naval sight available to the Russian Navy, could come close to matching that. So, this was a huge, um, a huge technological shift which became a military shift and which placed Japan in the first ranks of imperial powers worldwide as the 20th century dawned. And there, uh, on there's one on one side of it which is which is Glover House and on the other is, um, a picture of the Japanese navy's greatest notables, uh, with, uh, taken immediately after the Battle of Tsushima Strait or shortly after with, um, a certain gentleman in I think it's going to it's going to reach a day it is. A certain gentleman in a top hat and mustache, Thomas Glover, as the only Westerner in the picture. And here in a more a more peaceful, just give you a more peaceful version of Japan. I'm Do do visit this wonderful garden if you don't know it already. Uh, Ella Christie's Japanese garden now restored at Cowden in Clackmannanshire, which is a very restful place to understand the slightly more, uh, introverted and peaceful versions of the Japanese garden and itself is a tribute to an extensive crossover between Scottish and Japanese gardening, which is where we began. But, I'm going to draw to a close now by saying uh, by saying that of course this I talked about, uh, history being dissociated by what we forget and we normalize what we know as if it is as always been so. And this Scotland, I don't know if it's a forgotten Scotland exactly, but it's certainly a marginal one in most people's consciousness. And it belongs to a period, uh, before really predominantly period before the Second World War. Now, um, I'm going to be I'm going to be a say that nobody here, but it's also possible I'm wrong. Nobody here remembers the Empire Exhibition of 1938, the last of the Empire Exhibitions, which had 12 and 1/2 million visitors at Bellahouston Park. But, it had all the characteristics. National self, technology, um pastoral nostalgia, um history, um institutions, global trade, the calling the world poster, uh which had been by the time of the Festival of Britain only 13 years later entirely lost as uh the United Kingdom came to terms, began to come to terms, with being a very different kind of country from the one that had controlled a global empire. And it isn't I mean, I particularly like this uh rather odd uh election poster of Winnie Ewing's from 1967, of her sitting on a globe with of course the legend from that campaign, "Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on." But, I think if I leave you That, in a sense, was a reinscription of what was still the recent past for many Scots, which was an international past and a global past and a and a past of globally linked networks and careers. And I think that by-election, the uh Hamilton by-election took place on the 2nd of November, 1967. And I think it's worth reminding ourselves what a momentous month that was in a momentous 12 months. Because only a few months later, the Mediterranean Fleet was stood down, which had been uh an English and then British fleet since the middle of the 17th century. On the 16th of November, 2 weeks after the by-election, there was uh a massive devaluation of the pound by the Wilson government. 11 days after that, on the 27th of November, Charles de Gaulle vetoed UK membership of the EEC for the second time on the basis that uh the country was too Atlanticist to consider itself properly European. Uh uh on the 30th November, only 3 days after that, uh the British Empire withdrew from Aden, site under Lieutenant Colonel uh Ma- uh Campbell Mi- uh Colin Campbell, Mad Mitch, uh of the one of the last actions of Scottish troops in the British Empire. And in January 1968, uh the all British Empire positions, except for one or two small outposts east of Suez, were withdrawn from. Meanwhile, the collapse of the the collapse of the Commonwealth sterling system was well advanced and had completed itself within a very short period of time after that. So, things which took centuries to build can seem sometimes to disappear in moments. But, what I want to uh historically speaking, what I want to leave you with tonight is a sense of the inner is is a sense of the sources and examples of the development of Scottish innovation and drive, often based on doubtful financial sources, but still there in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the different kinds of universities uh with the different kind of connections and networks in which they took place. History is indeed a foreign country, and although this is our country, it is not one recognizable to us perhaps in our daily lives that I've been describing here tonight. Thank you. Okay, we have time now for some questions. Uh just put up your hand and we'll bring you a microphone. Not working. Oh, there is. Everybody's a bit dumbfounded, I think. Well, thank you. There's Well, there's no one else. But over there there two There's two behind the column as well. Fourth row from the back. Yeah, thank you very much. I just I just wondered if you thought um I know you're talking about the history. Do you think there are any lessons that the the past can teach us for the present? So, um I usually describe it Scotland as a Scot as a Scotland and culture. I mean, Scotland is ne- Scotland is never, I think historically, at its best when it's entirely inward looking and it's got a hugely long history of of international footprint. So, I think that that is that is a lesson about ourselves. I think in terms of the connectivity between universities and industry, I think we're actually improving on that. We're getting The irony is we're actually only beginning to start to get back to a situation that we actually had and effectively they lost. But, it is something that we need to remain aware of and it is a lesson for us that unity and cross cross-sectoral collaboration internally and incentivized to work and project ourselves externally is something which has historically brought out the best and the most successful that aspects as well as some of the some of the less attractive ones of the Scottish character. two behind them. All the characters that you've been talking about, why do you think they were never given enough limelight through history? So, I think that actually if you look at um at British histories of the late 19th and early 20th century, it's not not Glover, I think. Glover was a in a some ways a difficult character because he was a complete freewheeler who did much to actually create a country. Um but, many of them would have got a better a better write-up than they would now get. And I think that there's there is a big movement in the way in which British identity is projected from being a four nations identity with Scotland as the imperial era narrative is fundamentally could be Scottish and British. You can be New Zealand and British. You can be Canadian and British. So it's so the in the era of bifurcated identities that was very suitable and worked for a lot of people a lot of the time. It works much less well in the Festival of Britain and post imperial era where everyone has got to be one thing. And other people from other countries can't be that thing even though actual minority of Canadians still identify as British. That's no longer a recognized doubleness that you can have because fundamentally you're not British. You're Canadian. And that and Scotland profited enormously in terms of opportunity from that ambivalence and ambiguity and it doesn't exist anymore and it's part of the process which has changed the political and cultural climate of modern Scotland from the work from the you know, largely pro imperial pro British stance it had before World War II because there were the opportunities to justify and to support the connection and it was easier to be to have Scottish nationality when across the world St. Andrew's societies and de Caledonian societies existed for no other reason but to put Scots in jobs at the expense of other people. And they were indeed tolerated and welcomed by the British Empire generally. There was no attempt to suppress them. They were but they were agencies for Scottish performance and they were global and I could give an entire lecture on those as well. Thank you very much for the presentation. Under your three themes association, geography and kinship I'm interested in the associations. would you do include with the church because we have a distinct distinctive Church of Scotland and if so would you say it's influence was significant? So I think that the influence of the the influence of the court was significant. Yes, indeed. It so association is very strongly bound with institutions and the court is the major institution. I think there is a I think that actually it's domestic issues not least over land and tenancy which actually start to diminish their influence in the empire because the disruption diminishes the influence. They become various areas in Africa in particular where the free court is dominant or but is fighting the court for supremacy and there's also the issue about repatriated capital. Scottish capital is disproportionately large for for investment by mid-late 19th century. But if you go I mean if you I mean most of them have been resold or repurposed now. If you go to relatively small Scottish towns that had a Kirk of Scotland, a free Kirk, and a UP Kirk. How much money was being spent on an infrastructure devoted to theological disagreements hardly anyone can now remember? So So I think yes, it was really important but the divisions were also important and in another direction. There's one there's one at the back. Thank you. Perhaps daft question but you haven't mentioned anything about Scots military alliances. You were thinking of uh say the way Anglo-Dutch military alliance in 1600s and various other uh English military things. Do you think the fact I mean you haven't mentioned it, maybe there were some, but do you think the fact that the Scots didn't seem to get involved in this apart from battles with the English maybe perhaps helped the development of the Scottish economy? Well, actually I could have it's more about the dimensions of the lecture. So, um a lot a lot of um the the Scottish mercantile interests in the Holy Roman Empire combined with the presence of the king's daughter uh as Elizabeth the Winter the the Winter Queen of Bohemia in the short-lived reign of her husband in Bohemia in 1690 in 16 18 uh which led to the 30 Years' War. That combination of personal loyalty to the Stuarts and also to to Scottish trading interests led to vast uh number of Scots being involved in the 30 Years' War and indeed the whole the whole efficacy of the Covenanters' movement's military wing in the uh in the wars in these islands in the 1630s and 1640s owed its owed itself to the fact that most of Leslie's veterans were veterans of the 30 Years' War and part of the Scots fight Scots fighting forces are usually fighting under the Danish or under the Swedish, though a few of them also uh volunteers for France and even for the empire uh against uh the Protestant interest. So, huge number of Scots involved there, perhaps as many as 100,000, certainly at least 60,000 over the period of the war. And of course there are Scots, there are Scots in the French army from the formation of the Garde Écossaise in 1440 to the dissolution of the last formally Scottish regiment formally Scottish regiments, the Regiment Douglas V and the Regiment d'Aubigny in 1763, though the Garde Écossaise continued. And there are Scots in the Spanish the Scots regiments in the Edinburgh in the Spanish service as well. So, actually one of the great narratives which I haven't touched on, but is there, is the continuation of Scots fighting under other flags during the 18th century principally in favor or either directly or indirectly of the Jacobite cause and against the establishment of the British Empire and the loss of political autonomy of Scotland which went with it. So, yeah, there are many Scottish military alliances and some of them are rather curious and indeed and indeed doubtful to the present day. I think I think in terms of commercial one there's a there's a monument to one of the Ring of Steel merchants, his name escapes me for the moment, in Bremen which we'll see right in central Bremen who was sentenced to six months prison imprisonment in December 1914 for insisting on delivering his shipment of steel to Krupp in Germany in July 1914 because they placed and paid and prepaid for the order that spring. Business is business. Thank you very much. I wondered in your book if you'd mentioned anything about Scottish philanthropy. Um, particularly during the 19th century when I understand it was particularly important. Um, yes, indeed. I mean, there are there are large there are large gifts made by made by Scots. Um, the there are also significant significant I mentioned this in the St. Andrews Societies before Societies before significant funds held not only for the use of Scots, but for the charitable applications or charitable application funded by Scots through the St. Andrews Societies and that's that's a worldwide phenomenon. But, I would have to say that my in in my view, most of what I see in 19th century Scotland is about extracting rather than about than about giving. Um, and sometimes I talked about ethical procurement. Sometimes as with the Pacific Railroad scandal, that actually brought down the Prime Minister of Canada because he was using his Scottish network to effectively um, get all the contracts for the Pacific Railroad and that is the I I I have to say that is the more that is the more common story, which is not to say that there wasn't a great deal of philanthropy, too. Perhaps, um, I could just ask you a question. Murray, at the beginning of your talk, you you spoke a lot about people leaving Scotland, spreading across Europe, going right across to Russia. As a country that that people moved from, did they come back? And what happened to those that left were left behind. So, um they tended uh one of the interesting things about Europe there it's it's a big question. Like I So, one of the things about about European diaspora Scots is that they don't necessarily tend to come home. But, what they do is they send their children their sons, but also sometimes later on their daughters home to be educated. Um so, they So, when um I'll go back to to um Mary Somerville when Mary Somerville's first husband Greg, who's the daughter of an expatriate Scottish naval officer his tutor is Adam Armstrong who's Sorry, he's Adam the son of Adam Armstrong who's married to who's mar- who's married to uh a daughter of a neighboring parish to Somerville's comes back to Edinburgh that's when he meets Mary Somerville and they and they get married. So, they would send their people they send people back, but they didn't come back themselves on the whole. In the empire it's rather different. They're more likely to be sojourners. They are more likely to come back when they've got enough cash. And um they are also more likely in this for example, the big the big rubber planters Guthrie, they would send out people they would come back to the northeast of Scotland. In Malaya Malaysia, they would send them out and come back and come back and they would spend their retirement there, but a new generation would come out and they were recruiting in northeast Scotland in their home in the in the towns and the farm the farm tunes that their people had originally come from as late as the 1950s and 60s, they were still drawing their employees from their home region while they themselves were spending a life out in in Malaysia coming back and then the next generation will be taking over the plot the the the rubber plantations. So, more complicated story but tendency more greater tendency to come back from the empire. An interesting sideline there is that um quite a number of pupils in Scottish schools in the 19th century can trace are actually the children of um planters in the Caribbean elsewhere and by no means all of them are white. So, there is a there's a significant sending back of children even in mixed even in mixed-race background to Scotland to be educated. I thought that that Britain was Well, there's many Scots were getting established in other European countries in different parts of the establishment whether it was the military or in in trade or even that example of a becoming the mayor of Warsaw. Was it a one-way process or was there as there examples of like Polish people becoming established in Aberdeen or Lithuanians becoming established in Edinburgh or was it only Scots being exported? It's very very heavily Scots. So, more than one European city has a Schottendiek. Um and uh Schottenfeld. Uh So, there are there are mercantile communities particularly from Flanders in Scotland and they're allowed um where they're large and in Aberdeen they're one of the largest uh Flemish communities. They're allowed to have some of their own laws and own customs but they don't and they're they're actually facilitating two-way trade as well. So, you can see the example working the other way, but in terms of the footprint, the Scottish footprint in the Scottish footprint is very large indeed. And um it is from a relatively early early stage a mercantile and military footprint on on uh and indeed a clerical footprint on uh uh a very large scale. So, um Scots uh uh Scots provided the heads of uh at one point or another all the Huguenot colleges, the 12 or 13 Huguenot colleges uh in France. Um Scots being were uh bachelors at the University of Paris from the 13th and 14th century on. Um it is and I use Chalmers as an example, but there are multiple examples. The Swedish East India Company was start was co-founded by a Scot. It's it it it is um a very different diaspora from most exporting countries because it tends to export from a relatively early stage, not just but certainly elites. It is exporting elites. And that's really interesting because most elites stay at home. And people who are poor leave. Of course, plenty of people who are poor have left Scotland, but an awful lot of people Scotland exported were not poor. And certainly weren't by the time they were finished. Now, exporting people, what did what effect did that have in Scotland? So, it's So, there's a there there is an there is um a very positive effect, for example, in a in a root about in enlightenment in a smart city in particularly in Edinburgh where there's a very large there's a very large population with a with diversity of education and spent time abroad being educated abroad. Um Scotland it's Scotland itself uh certainly doesn't suffer by by large-scale export of people in the 18th and early 19th and early 19th centuries. Perhaps by the end of the 19th is beginning to to suffer slightly. But the major problem the major problem in the modern era remains the creation of overcapacity for to support World War I and then the concealment of the losses arising from the overcapacity which led lead to increasing state direction of um large-scale Scottish capital in the 1920s and the and the repatriation of a lot of Scottish capital from overseas to buy British government debt. That's another that's another part of the story. In the earlier period um living standards are falling in Scotland which is I wouldn't say it's part of the reason for the reformation but Scotland had a lot of very well endowed uh so that's part of the reason for the reformation. Well endowed Catholic churches which by the 16th century was very hard for it to afford because the climate was not as good as it had been in the 14th century. And so exporting people became an absolute necessity. But in so far as ex- the exporting people led to um conflict and it certainly it certainly fed into the religious conflicts of the 17th century. It wasn't a good thing but that was because it fed conflict not because um migration out-migration was itself a bad thing or bad for Scotland. It created a lot of opportunities uh and it was basically in the 15th and 16th centuries a necessity because of Scotland's contracting uh uh uh uh contracting economic position in relative terms because of climate change which led to a you know a huge diminution in the influence and modernity for example of the kingdoms of Sweden, Norway and Denmark at the same time. It's not a unique to Scotland, but they didn't have that that capacity and institutional capacity to drive exports and overseas merchant mercantile development. Okay, I think we're more or less run out of time. Um I think Murray has well for me anyway painted a rather uncomfortable picture of Scotland. Um especially in the 17th and 18th centuries a a nation that people spread out from uh became merchants, mercenaries, pirates, buccaneers uh being innovative and opportunistic uh a nation of chancers one might say. Uh and nothing like that now uh extracting primarily and not giving. And the phrase a parcel of rogues in a nation uh came to mind. Yet there was also education, there was enlightenment. And I think these people who spread out took a bit of Scotland with them and planted it and left it there which is why we see so many Burns suppers and all these Scottish things around the world. Um so uh I'm going to thank uh Murray and I'm going to present him with a medal in a moment. Before I do that, I just want to remind you of our next talk, which is on the 11th of February, being given by Professor Lisa Orton Jenner. And the title is Greenland, what next? So, you can't you can't accuse us of not thinking ahead and being uh topical. So, uh two things I have to do here now. Uh we're presenting Murray uh if I can get the case open up uh with the society's Glasgow medal. And then, we're also of course, presenting him with a future fossil, as it was described uh at the last talk, uh the society paperweight. So, join me, please, in thanking him.