Scotland diaspora, was there social justice for the failed immigrant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The Scotland diaspora, was there social justice for the failed immigrant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries project at University of Dundee will be rooted in the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries and will examine Scottish immigrant communities in America, or Canada, or Australia, or New Zealand.

This Scotland diaspora, was there social justice for the failed immigrant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries project at University of Dundee will make a major intervention in diaspora studies through the examination of those who strove for social justice in a new land.

Context

The objectives of St Andrew’s societies can be traced back to the philanthropic work of guilds, trade incorporations, and Corpus Christi societies of the seventeenth century. That range of social action then broadened in the enlightenment phase into music, cultural and social activities, the Oddfellows, as well as, in the case of the beggar’s benison, sexual pleasures. The Burns supper has its roots in the ceremonial and fellowship practices of the eighteenth-century Masonic lodge. We know much about those who came to lead these philanthropic and cultural agencies, but much less about the marginalised sections of Scotland’s diaspora who sought relief from endemic poverty.

The aim of this project

• explore the agency of those who received help from societies committed to relieving want and distress

• Attention falls not on the great and the good, the so-called ‘Scots who invented the modern world’, but on those who received charity and other forms of philanthropic help, and those who fell into destitution and criminal ways, or simply ‘failed’ to settle