Join us Tuesday, December 12th, from 4-5 p.m. ET for a hybrid Fellow’s Forum with Jim Ambuske, Historian and Senior Producer at R2 Studios.
Attend in person: Berkeley Conference Room, the Jefferson Library
Preregistration is not required to attend. Zoom link will become active December 12th.
Join via ZOOM »
About the Presentation
Could the British government restrict the movement of free British subjects throughout George III's dominions in the revolutionary Atlantic world? That was the central political, legal, and constitutional question that leading lights of the Sottish judiciary and British political establishment confronted as they contented with what the author Samuel Johnson called the "epidemical fury of emigration" from Scotland in the late eighteenth century. Between the end of the Seven Years' War in North America in 1760 and the outbreak of the War for Independence in 1775, perhaps as many as 40,000 emigrants sailed from Scotland with the intention of resettling permanently in the American colonies. What began as an exodus predominately from the Highlands in the 1760s to New York, North Carolina, and Georgia intensified in the early 1770s, as weavers and tradesmen left the Lowlands for the mid-Atlantic colonies. In an era in which social theorists and political economists argued that "the strength of a country consists in the number of its inhabitants," the departure of so many men, women, and children from Scotland - of agricultural laborers, skilled tradesmen, and potential soldiers - frightened Highland landlords and government officials alike, who argued that Scotland's depopulation would embolden the American colonies and weaken their dependence on Great Britain. This talk will consider how Thomas Miller Henry Dundas, two senior Scottish jurists, created a legal framework for surprising emigration in the opening months of the War of Independence.
About Jim Ambuske
Jim Ambuske is a Historian and Senior Producer at R2 Studios. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, he received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is the author and co-author of several publications on the American Revolution, transatlantic legal history, and King George III, including “The law of loyalism: The Campbell family, the court of session, and the price of loyalty in the revolutionary Atlantic world” (Atlantic Studies, 2023), and with Randall Flaherty, “Reading Law in the Early Republic: Legal Education in the Age of Jefferson” in The Founding of Mr. Jefferson’s University (2019). He is currently at work on a book entitled, The Fury of Emigration: Scotland, The American Revolution, and the Fate of Empire.