GLOBAL MIGRATIONS LOOKS OUTWARDS from Scotland, searching across four centuries of endeavour. And over this horizon, as so many of the contributors attest, there is a uniting inspiration of the work and example of Tom Devine who has long reached beyond Scotland for wider perspectives. Scotland probably interacted with the outside world, near and far, more than most. It has been a global player for a quarter of a millennium and this basic fact has shaped its evolution and its destiny. But, as Devine himself stresses, most countries claim to punch above their weight, and assertions of historical ‘exceptionality’ and ‘ethnic conceit’ are less helpful than the systematic quest for underlying explanations of the current condition of the nation.

In 1966, the English historian Keith Thomas declared chillingly that his own profession, for all its traditional scholarly virtues, had explained remarkably little about the workings of human society. He urged a thoroughgoing infusion of the techniques and theories of ‘the social sciences’ into historical methods. The subsequent career of both history and the social sciences has been decidedly chequered, and not only in England. In Scotland the challenge was taken up mainly by economic historians and historical demographers; meanwhile historians of Scottish ethnicity and identity have taken over much of the running and there is some tension in the historiography, some of it displayed in these contributions – especially where the urge to measure is met with a counterbalancing emphasis on the incalculable claims of experience and emotion.

The very word ‘diaspora’ releases hares in all directions, not least on questions relating to the reciprocations of emigration in the form of remittances from abroad, returning migrants to the home country, by investment, trade and human reproduction and most of all in the flows of cultural values and the pervasive matter of ‘identity’. John MacKenzie stresses the multiplicity of diasporas in Africa and the rival definitions of ‘diaspora’. The re-assertion of Scots identity, especially among the distant peripheries of the Scottish world, has been a feature of recent decades and was probably influential in the nationalist case promoted in 2014–15. The vigour of modern Scottish historiography has, wittingly or not, fuelled the political debate and raised its temperature, and cast an influence over the 2014 Independence Referendum. It is noticeable that the most questioning voices in this volume come from an ‘Irishist’ and an Australian historian.