Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia: The Recruitment, Emigration, and Settlement at Darien, 1735-1748

Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia: The Recruitment, Emigration, and Settlement at Darien, 1735-1748. By Anthony W Parker. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. xvi, 182 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8203-1915-5.)

Very little research or writing has focused on Highland emigration, especially that of a voluntary nature, to British North America in the first half of the eighteenth century. Most studies assume that criminals, political exiles, and the odd individual or family constituted virtually all the Highlanders transported to the New World before the arrival of Highland regiments to fight in the Seven Years' War during the 1750s. A few recent works have recognized the beginnings of voluntary Highland group emigration in such ventures as the recruitment of Inverness Highlanders for Darien in Georgia in 1737; in the recruiting in Islay by Capt. Lachlan Campbell of 423 emigrants...