The Great Affair is to Move: Travel and Topography at the Signet Library

The WS Society Annual exhibition 2021

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Room 3: War, Colonialism and Empire

The historiography of the British Empire is the centre of debate, study and research today as it has not been in decades: every aspect of Empire and its impact on the lands and peoples of the world and on the people of Britain alike is being re-examined and re-evaluated. In Scotland, the story of Empire is enmeshed in other narratives - those of war and emigration. The Great War of 1914-1918 hit the Signet Library particularly badly, and here we have the telegram home informing the wife of future assistant librarian John Robertson that her husband was in a military hospital fighting typhoid. Signet Library staff were among the many ordinary Scots who left for a better life in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other places, reflected here by the changes in the address book of Assistant Librarian Alexander Mill. How was colonial settlement - this non-elite aspect of Empire - presented to those about to undertake it? Material from the Signet Library’s large pamphlet collection offers some answers - and reveals that not every European took a sanguine view of the continent’s growing domination of the world. From the Signet Library’s important collection of maps, we have the quixotic and oversized Howard Vincent Map of the British Empire, named for a prominent pro-Empire trade protectionist in the Imperial Federation League and perhaps representing an ossifying of the elite view of Empire over the course of the later part of the nineteenth century.

france! Emancipate your colonies!

Canada. Emancipate Your Colonies [London: Effingham Wilson, 1838]

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher and social reformer.

A posthumous edition of an address given by the English reformer Jeremy Bentham to the French National Convention in 1793. Bentham’s argument, calling for the voluntary dissolution of the French Empire in the name of republicanism and freedom, takes a view based on rights - or the lack of them. The French had no right to rule these distant lands and faraway peoples, and colonialism was a thing of monarchies and tyrants.

the truth about life in the australian colonies

The Truth: Consisting of Letters just received from emigrants to the Australia Colonies

J.G Johnston, 1839

The author offers an unsympathetic account of a home sick Scot who bitterly regretted leaving the Highlands for Australia. He also has some further insensitive advice to offer wives telling them not to be ‘perpetual drags and vexations.’

THE HOWARD VINCENT MAP OF EMPIRE

The Howard Vincent Map of the British Empire, W.AK Johnston, 1886

The Johnston map of empire came to light as part of a project between the University of Edinburgh’s School of History Classics and Archaeology and the Signet Library. The project considered the physical building and its collections to evaluate where they may be used in undergraduate learning and teaching. It also assessed where long-term collaborations may be possible. The project will soon be unveiled to members of staff within the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.

The Howard Vincent Map of the British Empire offers not only a striking visual representation of the scale of British imperial expansion during the nineteenth century, but highlights the pride and the spoils offered to Britain by empire. The breakdown in the corner of the map showing the commodities each area offers to Britain as well as the total economic output is quite staggering. The impractibility of the map combined with the story it tells of exploitation and domination of foreign societies combine to make this one of the most uncomfortable and yet extraordinary relics of Empire in the Signet Library collections.

a telegram and an address book

Items belonging to John Robertson, (c.1890-1952,) and Alexander Mill (fl. 1855-1940) former Assistant Librarians of the Signet Library.

Telegram from the British Army to Mrs John Robertson, 22 December 1915.

This telegram was sent to the wife of James Robertson to alert her to the fact that her husband has been hospitalised with typhoid after serving in the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It illustrates the distances that soldiers would travel during the First World War. Robertson joined the library after the First World War and remained an Assistant Librarian until his death in 1952.

Address book of Alexander Mill

This address book is a perfect illustration of the impact of emigration to the British Empire in the twentieth century. Mill has addresses listed in his notebook to locations in Australia and Canada. There are also addressed from America and the rest of the United Kingdom. Among the many emigrants amongst ordinary Scots at this time was another assistant librarian, Andrew Main, who left for Canada in 1906.

A year in New Zealand, 1839

Twelve Months Resident in New Zealand... by John Walton, 1839

New Zealand in the first half of the nineteenth century would be an especial recipient of ordinary Scots emigrating abroad, and this selection of pages from John Walton’s 1839 account presents colonization as the outcome of inequality, political oppression and bad government in the “Old Country” rather than as any desire to extract resources from the new. The New Zealand Wars, in which the British colonial power believed itself confronted by full-scale resistance from the existing inhabitants after its land grabs got out of hand, still lay in the future.

information relative to new zealand for the use of colonists

Information relative to New Zealand, for the Use of Colonists 1839

“The plantation of a Colony”, this pamphlet says, “has been called a heroic work”, and “systematic colonization” was “emphatically the want of our age.” Colonization, it concludes, “is.. a means of adding largely to the happiness of our race, both in the present generation, and in those that are to follow.” The aftermath of the New Zealand Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, which saw large-scale seizure of Maori land (seizures that still echo in New Zealand courtrooms in modern times) show how limited that happiness could be, and its consequences will continue to unwind for centuries to come.