Dr Valerie Wallace
Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellow in 18th-Century Scottish Studies, July 2022 - July 2023 (in residence June-July 2023)
Home Institution: University of St Andrews
In 2022 I joined the University of St Andrews as a Lecturer in the history of Scotland and the wider world. Before that I taught for ten years at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. Between 2010 and 2012, I was a researcher at the Bentham Project, University College London, and in 2011-2012, the inaugural Fulbright Scottish Studies Scholar at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. My first prize-winning book, Scottish Presbyterianism and Settler Colonial Politics: Empire of Dissent (2018), is a global study of the subversive influence of Scottish Presbyterian dissent in the first half of the nineteenth century. It reassesses the politics of five Scottish colonial reformers: Thomas Pringle, Thomas McCulloch, William Lyon Mackenzie, John Dunmore Lang and Samuel McDonald Martin. I am currently the principal investigator of two research projects: ‘Scots Law and British Colonialism’, a major study of the role of Scots law in New Zealand’s law, governance, and social and cultural life from 1840 to c. 1914, which is funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden standard grant; and People of Parliament, a digital resource on New Zealand’s parliamentary history for researchers, students and the public, which includes the first searchable database of New Zealand’s politicians, past and present.
Project Title: The Case of William Macao: Alienness, Subjecthood and Legal Pluralism during Britain’s Reign of Alarm
As the Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellow in 18th-century Scottish Studies, I am researching the unsuccessful quest of William Macao (c.1753–1831) – the first immigrant to settle in Scotland from China – to secure British citizenship through the courts. An act of the Scottish Parliament establishing the Bank of Scotland in 1695 had stated that foreign persons who purchased shares worth £1000 Scots would become naturalised Scotsmen. Just over a century later, and after forty years’ residence in Scotland, Macao purchased stock in the bank to acquire the rights of a naturalised Scotsman and thus of a naturalised British subject. Macao brought a test case to establish the nature of his subjecthood, hoping to free himself from the disabilities imposed by the Aliens Act. Though Macao was declared to be a Scotsman by the Outer House of the Court of Session, the Inner House overturned the decision and an appeal to the House of Lords was unsuccessful. Articulating contemporary fears, the government’s counsel represented Macao’s claim as an assault on the Crown. The ruling of the House of Lords in the Macao case underlined the sovereignty of the British Parliament in the British union state; the Scottish Court of Session, it was declared, had no jurisdiction on the issue of British subjecthood. As a tribute to Linda Colley’s Britons (New Haven, 1992), published thirty years ago this year, I intend to examine Macao’s experience to illuminate Scotland’s global connections, the limits of Anglo-Scottish integration and the political and legal developments which redefined the boundaries of national belonging.