There are many detailed accounts of nineteenth-century emigrants of their journeys and
settlements abroad - but what of those they left behind? This book delves into the heart of
Georgian Britain to explore the role that the men and women of the Scottish Borders played in
the mass emigration of the early nineteenth century. Although most never departed themselves
their perceptions of wealth poverty morality and community shaped the flow of emigrants from
the rural south to the wide and expanding British Empire as well as its North American rival
the United States. Scouring the records of grand estates humble Kirks flamboyant newspapers
and family correspondences the author returns the Scottish Borders to the centre of Scotland's
agricultural industrial and demographic revolutions. Standing on the sharp edge of rural
transformation the Borders played both archetype and exception pioneering the way from a
regional past to an imperial future.
