This chapter focuses on the successful Scots, charting the ways in which key professions were often dominated by those who were educated in Scotland. In migrating to southern Africa, they invariably aspired to positions of power and influence that might have been beyond their reach in Scotland itself. The Church and education is examined.

This chapter focuses on the scribal and printed circulation of the farewell sermons of the departing Bartholomean clergy, outlining the putative chronology of the translation of the Bartholomean manuscripts into print and examining how and why specific preachers came to be selected for publication. It evaluates whether Restoration authorities were successful in repressing circulation and argues that the natural disasters of 1665 and 1666 helped ensure that publication of the farewell sermons would not resume until the eighteenth century.

Nineteenth-century institutions lasted a long time in Ireland. Reformatories and industrial schools still operated in the 1970s. Psychiatric hospitals began to experiment with ‘care in the community’ in the 1960s and 1970s, but many of the features of the old lunatic asylum remained until much later. Magdalen asylums lasted until the 1980s. The hated workhouses were more or less abolished after independence, though the more benign county homes which replaced them continued to house some homeless people until long after that. And in Ireland, as elsewhere, the founding principles of the nineteenth-century prison still inform judicial punishment in the early twenty-first century. The workhouse was deliberately designed as a joyless place where the destitute would not linger. Whether an institution ended up as a welcome refuge or as a grim prison depended on the power enjoyed by those running the institution.

The experience of Scots missionaries on the Eastern Cape frontier was an extraordinarily ambivalent one. They arrived with a number of convictions: that Christianity was the essential concomitant of civilisation; that their message was so overwhelmingly liberating that it would blow down ‘barbarism’ like the walls of Jericho; and that, in the process, they would free women from drudgery and oppression, men from warfare and violence, as well as create enlightened agriculture, introduce the elevating forces of the market, and use science and medicine to free Africans of ‘superstition’. The landscape would be domesticated through the use of Scottish names, and the planting of trees and gardens. The reality was very different. The Scots missionaries encountered hostility from those they had come to ‘save’ as well as from the colonists who were supposedly their co-religionists, and were frequently overcome by war, frustrated by official policy and intimidated by an intractable environment. Many experienced geographical, meteorological and ethnic dislocation, which helped to compound their isolation, melancholia and depression.