It is well known that the Empire mattered a great deal to the Scots, who liked to claim that they had ‘made’ the Empire, and Glasgow proudly saw itself as ‘the second city of the Empire’. Large numbers of Scots, more or less as many as came from the more populous England, had made their way to Canada. By the mid-years of the nineteenth century emigration to South Australia and to New Zealand was increasing rapidly. Such Scots were seen as part of ‘a race of Empire builders’. They were people administering the Empire, educating the Empire and running its businesses, and as John Mackenzie has argued, they saw themselves as transmitting distinctly Scottish characteristics and a Scottish ethos to their fiefdoms. Local newspapers assumed that many of their issues would make their way to the Scots abroad, and from the evidence of letters in the newspapers this was indeed the case. The occasional editor was recruited from India, and a spell on the China Mail was a career option for others.

The idea that there were hardy Scots in all parts of the globe was a recurring theme. But, for most, the idea of Empire was essentially the areas of settlement in North America, Australia and New Zealand, with southern Africa from the 1880s beginning to pull in more people. The papers were full of regular advertisements from shipping lines offering weekly services to New York, with cheap train travel on to Boston, Baltimore, Quebec or Manitoba. In the case of Canada, this included assisted passage for farmers, mechanics and domestic servants, and various journalists, from Alexander Campbell in the 1850s to John Oliver in the 1880s and 1890s, were paid by Canadian railway companies to encourage settlement in Canada. It was largely seen as an empire of settlement rather than an empire of expansion, but from the 1880s attitudes changed.

India was different but also hugely important to Scots. For two centuries work for the East India Company had brought wealth to a number of Scots. At the end of the eighteenth century, Henry Dundas, as President of the Board of Control over the East India Company, had ensured that Scots played a disproportionate role. Many had been able to return as wealthy ‘Nabobs’ and further spread the lure of empire.