In this multidisciplinary collection, academics, museum professionals, and creative practitioners engage with heritage sites, museum objects, and recent visual artworks to probe legacies of Scotland's transnational history. Scotland's Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery promotes creative methods of communicating this history, such as walking tours and social media. The book is comprised of a foreword, introduction, and afterword, plus twelve chapters that are divided into three sections: Transnational Sites, Transnational Things, and Transnational Time(s). In her introduction, Emma Bond explains these themes while referring to complementary art installations by Alberta Whittle (one of these installations, Hindsight is a Luxury I can't Afford [2019], appears on the front cover). At the time of writing, the Edinburgh University Press website states that the book's illustrations are in black and white, but in fact most are in colour.
The first theme, sites, focusses on how “sites are joined transnationally” (5). In one chapter, Teleica Kirkland discusses her research into Scottish tartan's journey through Africa and the African Diaspora. This journey was facilitated by colonial trade, slavery, and British Imperialism not just in Africa and the Americas but in India, where textiles influenced by Scottish tartan were made and exported. In 2014 Kirkland's organization, the Costume Institute of the African Diaspora, held an exhibition and workshops based on this research at various locations in London. In another chapter, Sally Tuckett and Christopher A. Whatley explain the transition between linen and jute manufacture in the Dundee region. This transition corresponds with the shift in Scotland's reliance on a colonial and enslaving economy in the eighteenth century to an imperial one in the nineteenth (50). Lisa Williams's chapter, which recounts her experiences leading walking tours on Edinburgh's Black history, is eye-opening—notably to the critical significance of this public-facing form of historical education. Williams's work involves telling painful stories; some of which have been systematically suppressed from institutional records but have endured in oral accounts and family histories. The chapters in this section speak to the material, cultural, and psychic relationships of disparate sites which have been linked by Scotland's transnational networks—mainly those generated by the country's role in imperialism and slavery.
The second theme, things, discusses how objects can help us to understand transnational history, and how their curation shapes our understanding. This follows growing awareness of the imperial history of collecting (see Joel Fagan's chapter on Paisley Museum's world collections); and furthermore, that the “authoritative museum voice” exerted through gallery labels is not neutral but often replicates a Eurocentric and colonialist understanding of the world (143, 146). In her chapter on researching slavery at National Museums Scotland, Sarah Laurenson emphasizes that concentrating on surviving material from Scotland “runs the risk of producing a picture that is focussed overwhelmingly on the impact on Scottish life and culture, while the impact on the people, culture, and landscapes of Africa and the Americas – and the experiences and agency of enslaved people – is less visible” (117). Continuing this research based on collections from other regions is therefore vital. Unlike these museums, the V&A Dundee, which opened in September 2018, has no imperial history of collecting; still, its curators faced the challenge of defining what Scottish design is, and whether there even is a national school of design (139–42). As academic Rosie Spooner points out, Scottish society and culture historically thrived off of access to “imperial markets, resources, goods, and labour” (144). This makes a transnational lens and acknowledgement of Scotland's role in the British Empire essential to understanding the history of design within Scotland. Proposing avenues for further research, the contributors to this section stress that decolonization is an ongoing process. For this reason, they argue that museums should be spaces of knowledge generation and debate rather than instruction alone (149–50).
The third theme, time, concerns the politics of memory and methods of memorializing. Engagement with digital media features in Mona Bozdog's chapter on storywalking (a term referring to collective engagement with a site and memories of that site through gameplay) and Nicôle Meehan's chapter on digital museum objects. Meehan highlights the decolonizing potential of digital objects, which improve access to museum collections. However, Meehan acknowledges that the internet is no egalitarian space. Barriers to digital access replicate social gaps from the physical world—for example, between wealthier and poorer nations and between genders (180).
Empire and slavery are the primary but not exclusive focusses of Scotland's Transnational Heritage; the book's overarching theme of transnationalism includes consideration of trade and industry generally. For this reason, a subtitle that included the third theme of “trade,” which Emma Bond acknowledges in her introduction (1), would better-encompass this collection. For instance, Bozdog's chapter does not directly address empire or slavery, but women's (usually low-paid) labor in Dundee, within the manufacturing industries of jute, mechanical watches, and electronics—the latter having prepared the city for its current specialty in video game development. As Bond explains in the introduction, a transnational lens de-centers the nation by placing it in dialogue with local sites and global processes. It can consequently reveal under-told stories of marginalized groups including marginalized women (2–3) as in Dundee's manufacturing industries, the products of which have been exchanged around the globe.
Calling on authors from diverse disciplines, the chapters in this collection are written in very different styles. Some are formal in tone while others are informal; some are in essay form while a couple are transcriptions of spoken conversations. This book is not a retelling of Scotland's transnational history, but a series of case studies featuring new perspectives and innovative methods of communicating that history by drawing on Scotland's heritage landscape. Scotland's Transnational Heritage will be of interest to heritage and education professionals as well as members of the public with interest in these subjects and themes.
