Remembering and Forgetting the Scottish Highlands: Sir James Mackintosh and the Forging of a British Imperial Identity Onni Gust Abstract This article explores the formation of British imperial identity through a focus on the career of Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), a well-known Whig intellectual and imperial careerist who originally hailed from the Highlands of Scotland. Using Mackintosh’s unpublished letters and autobiography, the article shows how he imagined and narrated his relationship to the Scottish Highlands from the vantage points of Bombay and London. In contrast to recent historiography that has focused on the trans- lation of Scottish society, culture, and identity in British imperial spaces, this article argues that dis-identification from the Highlands of Scotland and the erasure of different peoples, cultures, and textures of life was integral to Mackintosh’s configuration of a British imperial identity. All over the Highlands of Scotland may be observed, here and there, the effects of a little stream of East or West Indian gold, running side by side with the mountain torrent, spreading cultivation, and fertility, and plenty along its narrow valley, and carrying away before it silently all those signs of rocky sterility, over which its elder companion has tumbled “brawling” since “creations morn.” 1 I n the Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh (1835), Robert Mackintosh (1804–64), son of Sir James Mackintosh and editor of the Memoirs, lamented the hasty sale of his father’s Highland Scottish estate. Unlike other Scotsmen, whose imperial endeavors enabled them to return home with riches to improve their lands and develop their estates, Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832) had sold his estate in 1801 in order to pay off the debts he had accrued as a result of living in metropolitan London. 2 Mackintosh had left Scotland Onni Gust is a research associate at the Five Colleges Inc., Massachusetts, and a visiting lecturer at Amherst College and Smith College. The author would like to thank Jane Rendall, Catherine Hall, Margot Finn, Uditi Sen, and the three anonymous reviewers and editors of JBS for their comments on drafts. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the research for this article, and Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, Massachusetts, provided an institutional home from which to write it. 1 Robert James Mackintosh, ed., Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London, 1835), 1:169. 2 See Andrew Mackillop, “The Highlands and the Returning Nabob: Sir Hector Munro of Novar, 1760–1807,” in Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000, ed. Marjory Harper (Manchester, 2005), 233–61. Charles Grant (1746–1832), director of the East India Company between 1794 and 1799, provides another example of a Highlander who returned from the colonies with considerable wealth. Unlike Munro and perhaps more like Mackintosh, Grant showed little The Journal of British Studies 52 (July 2013): 1–23. doi:10.1017/jbr.2013.114 © The North American Conference on British Studies, 2013 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 1