Scottish Presbyterianism and Settler Colonial Politics, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018 Empire of Dissent Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in the settler colonies of Britain?s empire in the early nineteenth century. It examines the influence of Scottish Presbyterian dissenting churches and their political values. It re-evaluates five notorious Scottish reformers and unpacks the Presbyterian foundation to their political ideas: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), a poet in Cape Town; Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), an educator in Pictou; John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), a church minister in Sydney; William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), a rebel in Toronto; and Samuel McDonald Martin (1805?-1848), a journalist in Auckland. The book weaves the five migrants? stories together for the first time and demonstrates how the campaigns they led came to be intertwined. The book will appeal to historians of Scotland, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the British Empire and the Scottish diaspora.

Valerie Wallace is a Lecturer in History at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In 2011 she was the inaugural US-UK Fulbright Commission Scottish Studies Scholar. Before that she was a researcher at the Bentham Project, University College London. 

Winner of the 2019 Frank Watson Book Prize for the best first book in Scottish history

Shortlisted for the Saltire History Book of the Year 2018

Explores the lives and ideas of five colonial reformers to reveal a transcolonial network of Scottish dissenters in the British Empire

Recovers the experiences of Scottish Presbyterian dissenters from the fringes of colonial historiography

Considers the role of these colonial reformers in broader movements to secure church disestablishment, freedom of the press and representative government