THIS ATTEMPT TO RETHINK how early modern Scottish emigration might be conceptualised began life as part of a conference which explored the theme of whether the movement overseas of its people worked to Scotland's profit or to its loss. Leaving aside for a moment the entirely legitimate concern that such a complex human phenomenon cannot be so easily reduced to a simple dichotomy, there is little doubt that contemporaries understood the significance of the migrations which seemed such a recurrent feature of Scottish society between the 1603 and 1801 unions. If many commentators at the time wrestled with what to make of the propensity of Scots for mobility, it is unsurprising that some chose to emphasise the positive or negative consequences. In this sense at least, framing the topic in terms of ‘profit’ or ‘loss’ is perhaps less anachronistic than might at first seem the case. Take, for example, the sentiments expressed in a pamphlet published in Edinburgh in 1695. Ostensibly, the tract concerned itself with recent trends in the lucrative Europe-to-Asia trades. In explaining Scotland's international standing, the author offered a blunt assessment of the kingdom's experience of emigration since the uniting of the Scottish and English crowns. The conclusion was unequivocal. Despite the migration since the early 1600s of tens of thousands to Ulster, the Scandinavian kingdoms, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Dutch Republic, England and her Atlantic colonies, Scotland had not prospered – the opposite in fact. The pamphlet's preface concluded: ‘we had some who raised their fortunes … yet still we have been hitherto advancing our neighbours, but securing no colonies, or settlement for ourselves … as hewers of wood, and drawers of water.’

The powerful biblical image drawn from Joshua 9:23 of a faithless people cursed to be forever slaves to others chosen by God would have been immediately clear to any Scot capable of reading the pamphlet in the first place. The laying down of a profound spiritual question mark over a society forced into the large-scale dispersal of its people points to the need to better recapture the religious and rhetorical discourses, alongside the better known socio-economic explanations, by which Scots sought to make comprehensible the departure of so many.