Creative Blogging Takes Time To Do
Something not really talked about too much in blogging circles is the
amount of time required in being creative. It takes countless hours—correction,
years— to make sense out of research among primary (i.e. original) sources of
information. The time it takes finding and assembling stacks of potentially useful
material, separating the relevant from the dross, and then writing up is mind
boggling.
Here (below) is a little example (the introduction to an article) of
this sort of thing; one being worked upon at this very moment. Believe me, it
all takes time and makes it really difficult, i.e. leaves little opportunity, to communicate with the big wide
world through the BLOG —an exercise I think essential for sanity!
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Commercial Exploits of the
Scottish Elite in India and South-East Asia
c.1760–c.1840*
Introduction
This essay forms part
of a research project still in progress, concerned with Scottish mercantile
activities outwith Scotland. The whole assignment embraces the period from around 1675 to the 1880s
and focuses on the expanding ambitions
and movements of a section of the Scottish elite bent on commercial exploits
that would take them first south to London, South-East England and Northern
Europe; then, particularly from 1725 onwards, eastwards to India and South-East Asia.
The portion of research laid out in this paper
incorporates the years reaching from about 1760 to 1840, by which time the East
India Company (EIC) had lost its monopoly to trade in India and in China. There
are two major objectives: the first is to demonstrate the existence of what was
an immense Scottish presence involved with the commercial life of India and
South-East Asia between 1760 and 1840. This was a mercantile arena which continued
to gather Scots recruits throughout these years—most of whom have been hidden
from general view. Extricating their endeavours, normally lost in a morass of
general description, is, and remains a formidable task.
The other key venture is to demonstrate the
over-arching dominance and prominence of Scots operating in this commercial
world; and to explain how and why this came about. There clearly were
substantial numbers involved in eastern commerce that keep turning up in
important positions and doing unusual things. That this was so, poses the
question: Why has this Caledonian prominence been so veiled from the eyes of
posterity?
