Edward J. Cashin (1927–2007)

A while back I was spending evenings trying (and failing) to stop a "new town" (actually a satellite suburb) being built in the neighbourhood, in the house in which Lachlan McGillivray wrote his will and to which he had retired, by the Water of Nairn, dominated for the past century or so by an immense railway viaduct. It's a modest enough country house , but sitting in his dining room - one of many Highland colonial retreats - for former Indian army officers, Caribbean and North American planters and slave merchants, many of them younger sons of small to medium lairds reminded one only too insistently of the dependence of eighteenth century Highland society from top to bottom on British imperialism. At the time I had just come to the end of a quarter of a century's history teaching in a local secondary school. For the whole of that time the curriculum we taught avoided (except as a source of exciting narrative) any discussion of any British, let alone Scottish, imperialist society. Fighting the French was OK, but only over Europe - yet one of Prince Charlie's most effective backers for the Forty-Five (we taught Culloden, which was just up the hill, a mile or two away) had been an Irish Nantais slave trader who made his money in the West Indies, as did many London tax-payers who paid for the Redcoat army which defeated him. And whose Bristol partners had also financed Lachlan McGillivray. So this biography - our best source for this towering figure in the history of Georgia - is the work of an American historian who has also written about Charleston South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. His books are literally ground-breaking, and this one is as good a guide to the post-Culloden Highlands as it is to South Carolina. As a single example of Lachlan McGillivray's local impact, consider this. He and his cousin, Col John McGillivray both backed the British against the American rebels of the 1770s (though their kinsman and former chief had died fighting for the Jacobites at Culloden). They had between them a decisive influence of the development of South Carolina, Georgia, and what was then known as west Florida (where John McGillivray had major trading interests in Mobile and operated the trading link between it an Augusta, Georgia. At the war's end, they had combined their interests, and John, who had been building up a possible interest in Jamaica once it became clear how the war was going, claimed compensation for the lost assets of both men. The rate was not generous, but out of it he funded a retirement income for Lachlan and made the founding donation for a new school, Inverness Royal Academy, which opened in 1792 and still exists, only one of the many transatlantic sources of funds for Highland development. Cashin provides answers to a great many questions about Highland history. I had to persuade the local library to get a copy when it first came out...… (altro)