We have no detailed understanding of the circumstances in which Pringle and his family chose to abandon their native country and emigrate to the Cape Colony. The closest we get is this passage early in the Narrative:

This passage registers the geopolitical reverberations of a shifting world system in which a tenant farming family from the Scottish Lowlands is “scatter[ed] over the world” and where displacement from one national space becomes displacement into another. For just as the practices of agricultural improvement serve to evict the Pringle family from the tenancy of their farm, so to do modernizing imperatives drive the Xhosa and other indigenes from the territories that the Scottish settlers are to occupy. And while for the occupying colonists the intent of their chosen spatial displacement is to restore the state of “rural independence” of which they had been deprived (i.e., by their own reckoning, to move backward in time before moving forward), for the colonized the consequences are more calamitous: they experience an unprecedented acceleration in time, a shattering, with their present tense forced to become a “distant point,” to use Scott's phrase, as they are hurtled into an enforced futurity.