The Uses of Affection: White Families in Service to Empire

Grey, E., (2024) “The Uses of Affection: White Families in Service to Empire”, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 11(2). doi: https://doi.org//jiss.364

In 1825, Margaret Ogilvie wrote to her uncle, Alexander Irvine: ‘we have got your friend Georgie’s sister with us and have the comfort to find her one of the most engaging sweet tempered children we ever met with’.¹ Alexander was the Laird of Drum Castle and in Rome on an extended Grand Tour, while his niece, Margaret, was in Aberdeen, looking after her niece and nephew, whose parents were in India. Margaret was introducing the girl to her great uncle in the letter, but also reinforcing the bond between him and the young George. The description of George as Alexander’s ‘friend’ suggests an already established affection between the patriarch and the boy, who would have been seven. Whilst ‘friend’ was often used within families to denote family members in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this usage, in particular ‘your friend’ does more work.² Margaret was doing emotional family labour, and strengthening relationships was part of the work of the unmarried aunt at home in Aberdeen. These familial correspondence networks connected the impoverished gentry women of Aberdeen with elite British culture of the Grand Tour and imperial spaces of India. This article argues that imperial families relied on the formation of emotional bonds to further their careers and, in so doing, created a white imperial class that excluded others.

The Ogilvie women spent their adult lives in Aberdeen, and the movement of their menfolk and their empire-born white children to and from imperial spaces shaped their lives. The children’s father, also called George Ogilvie, was working in the East India Company Army. Margaret talked about caring for the children as ‘a very great charge’ and worried about her brother’s health in India: ‘we have been for some time and still are under great anxiety about their dear father, who had a most dangerous attack of fever about this time last year – the effects of wh. he had by no means recovered. … his wife and infant boy proposed remaining at Cananore untill [sic] after the monsoon.’³ George had left Scotland in 1817 and taken his wife to India, and had three children there. As was typical for young white children in India, they were sent back to family, invariably single women in Britain. Another sister, Rebecca, had written to her uncle in a similar fashion a year earlier.⁴ These missives were ways in which emotional connections between family members were woven. The sisters had lived with their mother until her death a year before, and the family home was something of a hub for children and brothers returning from imperial spaces in the early nineteenth century. Margot Finn’s description of elite women in England could easily refer to these more middling women of the North East of Scotland: ‘daily lives of kin [who] were separated by vast geographical distances but remained intimately connected by ties of affection, financial interest and the shared care of children’.⁵ Margaret and Rebecca Ogilvie’s single status is likely to have been related to the loss of property and enslaved people in Carolina incurred by their father, George, as a result of the American Revolution. The family had had to sell the family seat, Auchiries, in 1805, and there would have been little money for a dowry.⁶

Margot Finn argues that homosocial love between women of East India Company (EIC) families sustained the imperial project.⁷ Her perspective shows the ways in which women and families are so often obscured by the bureaucratic nature of EIC archives. This article supports such a claim of the role of women as fundamental to the success of the company. It highlights different ways in which metropolitan provinces, such as the North East of Scotland, operated for empire. This case study, however, shows that expressions of love went beyond imperial women to explore horizontal and diagonal kinship affection across gender, and that inter-generational lines served empire, working across continents. As a result of the way these bonds served to form boundaries and identity, it argues that nurturing love between family members excluded those of African descent and Indian people. This played a role in creating a white imperial class.

Race is unarguably an invention of science and culture, with Scotland heavily implicated in the process. Whilst the ontological state of race has no basis, racialisation is highly contingent on historical processes and took shape as imperial ventures multiplied. European civil society responded intellectually and scientifically to different worlds, especially those new to it.⁸ Onni Gust argues that the intellectual apparatus of difference created by Enlightenment thinkers presented models of moral superiority of white people, and this led to the need for spaces of whiteness in alien lands.⁹ Families, and in particular, imperial families, were institutions where varying notions of race were played out.¹⁰ They were spaces where belonging was conditional on historically situated forms of behaviour; feelings and relationships were shaped from a young age and throughout the life cycle irrespective of distance. Without needing to remark on racialised others or reflect on imperial projects, the labour of affiliation and exclusion was reproduced within families and repeated over time, such that it became a key site in what Ahmed describes as a ‘bodily and spatial form of inheritance’: whiteness.¹¹

Whiteness combines cultural ubiquity and invisibility, and yet is vital for its inheritors, as it provides systemic and economic dominance.¹² The intellectual and historical importance of whiteness as a concept is in the way it marks subjects, in this case the Scottish gentry, as historically positioned selves in relation to colonial difference and how it was constituted. The imperative to erase, differentiate, and deny complicity becomes, thus, a constitutional feature of European whiteness and reveals the structures and everyday practices that produced white supremacy.¹³ Whilst reparatory history can and must take multiple forms, critically engaging with the ways families responded to the diversity and subjugation of the colonised world serves to reposition them in the colonial order.¹⁴ It is not without risks, in particular that of recentring the white subject.¹⁵ It requires constant reminders of the ways in which the agency and resistance of subject and enslaved people required elaborate control infrastructures that persist to this day.¹⁶ The making of white families in a period of colonial sojourning, even at a great distance, shows another means by which the provincial metropole was an important imperial site.¹⁷ This study considers how such differentiation, here analysed in the framework of whiteness, started to become embodied in families whose sons were positioned in empire and whose mixed-heritage relations were appearing in metropolitan Scotland.

This case study uses methodologies from the history of emotions and archival sources from gentry family archives held at the University of Aberdeen Special Collections, a repository for both institutional connections to empire and archives of landed gentry families of the North East of Scotland.¹⁸ Such archives show that empire was intensely experienced on the home front through reading letters. These were very often shared between family members and the contents transmitted county-wide through gentry networks.¹⁹ As such, correspondence was a technology of the eighteenth-century family which kept white families whose members were at a distance together in a period of global, social, economic, and political change.²⁰ Families played a critical role in shaping which emotions were acceptable and which deserved opprobrium. The methodology critiques an essentialised (and Western) view of human behaviour, and is helpful in revealing how historical change became embedded, and embodied, in families.²¹ The process of nurturing relationships was not ‘natural’ but one that had to be learned through familial praxis. Affection bound white individuals and classes of individuals together in provincial societies like the North East of Scotland and, at the same time, excluded others.

In addition, this article draws on scholarship on the history of the family and historical kinship studies. These give a longue durée perspective that connects to political and demographic change and the ways in which class was reshaped in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In historical kinship studies, the relationship between familial affect and economic history is instructive.²² Imperial, demographic, societal, and economic changes created an insecure world, and therefore, Scottish families needed to pool resources in order to survive. Emotional bonds, and the culture that cemented them, became more pronounced as such bonds provided not only emotional but economic support. The intersection between emotional and economic support may have played out through patronage, network management, and the development of marriage opportunities. These dynamics affected the way kinship models evolved during the period.²³

A vertical model of kinship privileges the paternal dynastic descent line, whereas a horizontal model gives more equality to children, irrespective of birth order. The evidence from this case study is that horizontal and diagonal consanguineal emotional bonds across sibling groups played a more significant role than the conjugal family and vertical kinship model. The family showed a paradoxical flexibility in their make-up, yet the energy expended to nurture and maintain such horizontal bonds, what Christopher Johnson and David Sabean term a ‘sibling archipelago’, shows that consanguinity did not automatically form strong supportive bonds.²⁴ However, whilst more horizontal lines are important, estates and a succession of lairds were still the fulcrum around which gentry families identified themselves. Land and property show the link between economic and symbolic capital which gave elite families prestige and power, but these became more distributed in this period.²⁵

Kinship studies challenge earlier debates that argued for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries being a period in which the nuclear family emerged across Europe.²⁶ In addition, more defined gender roles between men and women were said to have emerged as the household became a domesticated family space, with men going out to work in new professionalised or industrialised spaces.²⁷ Scottish historiography has weighed into this debate, notably in the work of Katie Barclay, in her work on the Scottish gentry and, more recently, on less elite Scottish society, in which family and Kirk became the central influences for an emotional ethic of kindness and neighbourliness.²⁸ Barclay places family at the centre of both identity and the economy of the Scottish gentry. Well into the eighteenth century, individuals needed to partly forgo their identities in favour of the family and inheritance practices. This had a long legacy. Keith Brown’s study of seventeenth-century Scotland still resonates into the nineteenth: ‘the noble family throughout Europe still embraced an extended lineage of living and dead kinsmen linked to one another by a web of obligations’.²⁹ However, Brown’s words suggest a retrospective and somewhat romantic view of family and connections. The strong webs seen in this case study were more about the immediate demands of employment, social survival, and opportunity that these connections served.³⁰ Eleanor Gordon makes the pertinent point that the idealised nuclear family may have dominated the Scottish cultural space, and that this ideal permeated the law and work culture into the twentieth century, but the lived reality may have been different.³¹

Absent from these discussions on family is the imperial and overseas perspective. Work by Emma Rothschild and Margot Finn, has provided a corrective by showing the intense horizontal connections used by Scottish families of empire.³² Sarah Pearsall’s work on white Atlantic families more generally argues that the pressures of empire, the insecurity and distance, created a shift in affection between family members: ‘Families did not get happier in the eighteenth century; they just emphasised claims of domestic harmony more, in order to serve various ends’.³³ Her work, in particular, shows that such families were expansive rather than nuclear. The interdependencies between aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings were critical for the education of children and the furthering of careers across empire. The consanguineal network consolidated emotional bonds in a self-reinforcing relationship across horizontal and diagonal lines.

This case study covers several generations of the Ogilvies of Auchiries, alongside correspondence from their cousins, the Irvines of Drum, and interactions with the Forbeses of Boyndlie with whom they married and had close gentry affiliations.³⁴ The family tree (Figure 1) shows the intergenerational engagement with empire of the Ogilvies. Their sojourning started in the mid 1700s, when four Ogilvie brothers went to the Americas. James went to Charleston, South Carolina, as an apprentice in 1742, followed by William, who went to Virginia as a surgeon, as did their brother John. John Ogilvie had a medical practice in the Caribbean island of St Eustatia (Sint Eustatius).³⁵ These three sons all died within ten years of their departure from Scotland. The youngest son, Charles Ogilvie, later went to Charleston to attend to William’s affairs, and he made a financial success of his sojourning, buying two plantations and enslaving dozens of Africans in South Carolina and Georgia. Charles Ogilvie moved his merchanting work to London in 1760 and managed his American estates from there.³⁶ In 1774, George Ogilvie, by then a young man, travelled to South Carolina, took over the work of enslaver and planter of indigo and rice on his uncle’s estates, and partnered with him in business.³⁷ Of Charles’s sons, Charles and James, one went to India and the other returned to South Carolina. In the nineteenth century, George’s son, Alexander, entered the British Army and was stationed in Palawa country (Van Diemen’s Island/Tasmania) and Saint Lucia, amongst other places. He and two of his brothers, William and George, ended up being stationed in India.³⁸ The other son, John Charles Ogilvie, became a surgeon in Aberdeen, and the sisters remained single and looked after their nephews and nieces from India.

Figure 1

Figure 1

The family tree of the Ogilvies of Auchiries.

Source: Peter Beauclerk Dewar, (ed.), Burke’s Landed Gentry the Kingdom in Scotland (Burke’s Peerage and Gentry, 2001), 452–3.

Thus, over half of each generation worked in colonial spaces in the period 1740–1840, and yet the family at home were heavily involved in this labour and it would have had a defining influence on them. This family of the lower gentry was somewhat typical in the North East of Scotland, whose imperial sojourning started in slave economies of the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century, followed by extensive engagement with the East India Company in the nineteenth.³⁹

A key dependency between siblings was the way in which children were sent to be cared for by aunts and uncles in the metropole. This forged diagonal kinship bonds and dependency between siblings who were separated from their parents. Children were moved around considerably as part of the imperial process. In 1762, twelve-year-old George Ogilvie, the future laird of Auchiries, was sent to London, to Charles, his Carolina enslaver uncle, suggesting that a London education within a plantation merchant community was deemed desirable for his future.⁴⁰ When Charles’s American wife died in 1769, his children were sent back to Auchiries and were brought up by his sister, Rebecca Forbes Pitsligo.⁴¹ Charles’s Scottish Carolina friends would send their children to Scotland for their education. The naturalist, Dr Alexander Garden, originally from Aberdeenshire, sent his son to the Ogilvies of Auchiries in the late eighteenth century, an investment in his whiteness, as a result of his close friendship with Charles and George Ogilvie in South Carolina.⁴² The intimate and almost paternal relationship between George Ogilvie and Alexander Garden was infused with affection to the extent that it could be seen as a ‘fictive’ kinship relationship.⁴³ The presence of Garden’s son and grandson in the home of the Ogilvies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggests that a form of kinship relationship could be established between non-consanguineal families where strong professional, social, and regional ties existed. The movement of children between families sometimes led to marriage, and cousin marriage was common.⁴⁴

It was established practice that the Scottish gentry excluded African-descended, Indian, and non-gentry British women from marrying into their class.⁴⁵ Affection and kinship bonds were not so easily available to such women, and even if there may have been affection at times with their sexual partners, the affection of their partners’ families was entirely absent. Encounters and relationships with these women were part of an imaginary of moral degradation and orientalisation from the metropole. More than an imaginary, the reality was that North East Scots had relationships with enslaved and Indian women, and children from these relationships were also sent back to Scotland, though with a less secure familial trajectory.⁴⁶ The Ogilvies were also involved in the care of two mixed-heritage Indian children. The mother of the children was an Armenian Indian woman, Eliza Kewark, who had a relationship with Theodore Forbes. Her children were separated from her and sent to Scotland.⁴⁷ Such a stark and contrasting approach to the production of kinship ties shows one of the ways in which the imperial project used kinship as a tool to consolidate whiteness and mark difference. Lines of affection between Eliza and her children were cut with what could only be called emotional violence. Their arrival in Scotland had been contingent on them being separated from their mother. Any hope her children had of kinship rights were dependent on this rupture and their movement to a white space. Kinship rights to a white Scottish family and to her Indian family were not compatible.

In an imperial context, kinship between and towards those racialised as non-European was problematic. Consanguinity, through rape and concubinage, did not grant automatic affection between children of colour and their white relatives in Scotland. Jennifer Morgan argues that unlike the enslaved, white Europeans were those afforded the rights to kinship.⁴⁸ Instead for the enslaved, ‘kinship posed dangers for an economic system in which race demarcated human beings as property’.⁴⁹ Whilst Eliza and her children were never enslaved, the efforts to disrupt kinship by white colonists serves to show another way in which colonists asserted power across imperial spaces, and that kinship needed to be heavily controlled.

In 1824, Dr John Charles Ogilvie, and his wife, Jane, received mixed-heritage ten-year-old Alexander Scott Forbes from Bombay.⁵⁰ John Charles was the only son of planter George Ogilvie who did not go to empire and was a successful member of the Aberdeen medical establishment in the early nineteenth century. He married Jane Forbes, from a suitable Aberdeenshire gentry family, the Forbeses of Boyndlie. The children were niece and nephew to Jane, as Theodore Forbes was her brother. Three of Jane’s brothers, Theodore, James, and William, spent time in India working for the East India Company and the private trading house Forbes & Co. of Bombay. These Forbes and Ogilvie young men, who had probably been educated together and mixed in similar social circles, formed a community of Aberdeenshire and Scottish sojourners in India.⁵¹ The arrival of Alexander had been preceded by his sister, Kitty Scott Forbes, who had arrived in Aberdeen from India five years earlier.⁵² Kitty’s departure had been brokered by William Ogilvie, John Charles’s brother, for Theodore, the children’s father.⁵³ Theodore Forbes and William Ogilvie had a particularly close relationship. Theodore lent William money, and William provided extensive on-the-ground support to Theodore’s Indian family in Surat, whilst Theodore was making his career in Bombay. That Theodore’s sister had married John Charles, the brother of his intimate friend in India, reveals something of the familial networks in operation.

The two mixed-heritage children from India, Kitty and Alexander, were thus sent to the house of their aunt and uncle. Given the blood connection, the question arose whether mixed-heritage children should still not be permitted entry into the family archipelago. Daniel Livesay remarks that British mixed-heritage children of enslaved women had been accepted in the early to mid-eighteenth century when the sojourner father was of elevated social status.⁵⁴ However, by the early nineteenth century, there was a growth in prejudice against children of mixed-heritage in Britain, and social status offered no protection.⁵⁵ Whilst this transition is complex, the widespread debate on abolition, as well as other anxieties about the impact of empire on the social fabric, led to more racialised descriptions of people of colour being embedded in the cultural imaginary. At the same time the scientific community, responding to traveller accounts, played a role in the production of essentialised ideas of difference through typological studies.⁵⁶ As Onni Gust has argued, Britain was becoming configured as a safe and homely place that belonged to white people, despite the reality that the British imperial elite was constantly on the move.⁵⁷ These cultural processes, combined with more class homogeneity, meant that mixed-heritage children were excluded from the ways of producing affectionate bonds with family members. Their networks were increasingly closed to them.⁵⁸

The silence in family correspondence on Kitty and Alexander Scott Forbes is notable, compared to the contemporaneous warmth of language about ‘little Georgie’. Indeed, such erasure of colonial connections was not just unfortunate to observe, but part of the practice of being white. Their uncertain legitimacy and the fact that their mother was Indian meant affectionate kinship bonds were not automatic. Kitty and Alexander had access to some capital and genetic proximity, but as with many mixed-heritage children, such bonds were precarious.⁵⁹ Theodore had baptised them both with the name Scott, out of respect for his brother-in-law, Alexander Scott. Scott was of an earlier generation of Scottish sojourner, who had amassed considerable wealth in India, before marrying ‘up’ to Theodore’s sister, Catherine Forbes in 1807.⁶⁰ However, the choice of godparent, an attempt to foster kinship ties, did not appear to bond the wealthy couple to the children. William Ogilvie, when writing to Theodore about sending Kitty to Theodore’s parents at Boyndlie, assured him that when she met her grandmother she would ‘secure herself such a favorite with her excellent Grand Mother & all around herself’.⁶¹ Yet there is little evidence that Kitty formed a strong bond with her grandmother. Their father, Theodore who died in 1820, shortly after Kitty arrived in Scotland, left them a generous financial legacy, which included a good gentry education. Kitty was educated near Durham, rather than close to the family in Aberdeenshire.⁶² Their scarce appearance as children in correspondence suggests their affectionate bonds were not guaranteed.

Kitty did marry well, to wealthy mill owner James Crombie, though Crombie was of a lower class than the gentry Forbeses or Ogilvies. This would have been due to her education and dowry. Dr John Charles Ogilvie was noted as having assisted at her wedding in 1837. Her Forbes uncle, Alexander, was described much later as playing the role of a father to her and her brother, Frederick Forbes, who was also illegitimate, but white.⁶³ In this way, as she became an adult, there is some evidence of a strengthening of bonds with the following generation.⁶⁴ Kitty and Frederick, maintained an affectionate communication in early adulthood, and thus, they had learned to form affectionate bonds despite their liminal status in the family. Alexander Forbes, by this time the laird of Boyndlie, described Frederick as his ‘beloved nephew’.⁶⁵ Mixed-heritage Alexander Scott Forbes, did not fare so well, and little affection was shown in correspondence between his uncles when he was a young adult.⁶⁶ He was left a small annuity of £20 a year by the laird, in a will which described him as ‘son of his deceased Brother Theodore Forbes’, whereas Kitty was left £200 cash on her uncle’s death in 1862.⁶⁷ Frederick left Alexander £25 and similarly described him as ‘son of my late father Theodore Forbes of Bombay’.⁶⁸ Catherine Scott left £50 to Kitty, ‘Mrs James Crombie daughter of my late Brother,’ in her will, but there was no mention of Alexander Scott Forbes.⁶⁹ It may be that Alexander followed a similar path to the Gordon boys in Ellen Filor’s study of mixed-heritage boys who, though educated alongside white boys in good schools in Edinburgh fared considerably less well than their white peers.⁷⁰ Age fifty, Alexander married the daughter of a weaver in Arbroath, but had disappeared from family correspondence by this time. Neither child was listed in a family history written in the late nineteenth century.⁷¹

Displays of affection were also viewed as signifiers of a level of civilisation, and dehumanising debates proliferated as to whether indigenous people could have the same feelings as Europeans.⁷² Emotions were another tool for justifying difference and superiority. A generation earlier, William and John Charles’s father, the planter, George, complicated this picture in his treatment of enslaved Africans in South Carolina. He professed his lenity as an enslaver by keeping his enslaved people together as families and friends. However, he also made it clear that the threat of separation persistently hung over them: ‘by selling a few, who proved obstinately bad, [I] taught the others to consider their being sold as the greatest punishment I can inflict & the hopes of living and dying my on property, without being separated from their families, connexions and friends, as the greatest incitement [sic] to their duty’.⁷³ Thus, Ogilvie was well aware of the value of kinship between his enslaved workers and the effect a rupture would exact. Whilst it served enslavers’ consciences to dehumanise enslaved people by disavowing their emotional communities, such communities clearly existed and were used to serve empire by soothing the consciences of those who had embraced a discourse of empathy.⁷⁴ At the same time, the power to disrupt such communities of affection served colonialism, as enslaved communities could be fractured at any time.

These white Scottish families thus imposed a different emotional regime on their connections, both of African descent and Indian, whether consanguineal, enslaved, domestic, or sexual.⁷⁵ The children from the Indian relationship could not be entirely confident of their claims to Scottish kinship, nor of the affection that cemented it. Indeed, given the generous inheritance the children received after their father’s untimely death, James and Andrew Forbes saw them as compromising their own futures. James wrote of Theodore’s will in terms of affection: ‘we must regret his having left so large a provision for his natural children, it appears his affections have been … set upon them & it cannot be helped’.⁷⁶ James saw Theodore’s affection leaving them a ‘dismal prospect in this world’.⁷⁷ Likewise, Andrew described the death as having ‘annihilated our prospects’.⁷⁸ It would appear that considerable family funds were invested in Theodore, most likely to pay for his partnership in the private trading company Forbes & Co. of Bombay. Theodore’s siblings felt betrayed, and that thus, he was behaving in an unexpected manner in relation to his Asian illegitimate children.

The Ogilvies and kin used affection to cement bonds between white family members to provide emotional, financial, and social support over generations. The early period of sojourning by the Ogilvie sons in the 1740s and 1750s shows that family in Scotland was an important emotional resource. Emotional needs were conceived to be met by brothers. In 1752, William Ogilvie, a surgeon in Hanover County, Virginia, wrote to his brother, Alexander at Auchiries: ‘It is now so long since I hear’d any thing [sic] particular from Buchan that I long extremely for a Letter’. William modestly asked if he could be written to, going into some detail about the specifics of what he would like to hear. For example, if there had been an ‘increase to your family, … what success attends your farming, wither [sic] any of your Friends or Neighbours are lately married or likely to be so, &c’.⁷⁹ His instructions demonstrate that familial and regional news was a source of comfort at a distance. These young men bemoaned their lack of friends and those who were similar to them; thus, brothers formed the familiar. This may be self-evident, but if, as the literature suggests, siblings were not so close in previous centuries, then a tight intrafamilial emotional bond had previously been nurtured.⁸⁰ The death of their father in 1741 may have amplified the interdependency.⁸¹ The death of one or both parents was not uncommon. Therefore, a circle of affection and emotional dependency might have been more normative in these families, to ensure support in such eventualities. Allan Karras argues that Scots sojourners’ continued affiliation with Scotland was part of a desire to return home with a fortune and this created social isolation.⁸² Family at home for these young men, was where they met their emotional and often financial needs, and maintaining the bonds was therefore important. However, it also shows that they were not educated to build affectionate relationships outside their families or the local Scottish elite, with whom they could socialise. Anxiety about the movement of younger sons outside the familial circle may have closed off the possibility of wider social relations.⁸³

The tenor of feelings between 1760 and 1790 coincided with the contemporary cultural practice of sensibility.⁸⁴ The nexus of this communication was between Rebecca Forbes Pitsligo (née Ogilvie) and her brothers, Charles and Alexander Ogilvie. Rebecca took in two of Charles’s children after his wife’s death in 1769, and this shows the horizontal family working along practical support lines. Tragically, Charles’s son James died whilst being inoculated at the hands of Rebecca, and this prompted an outpouring of feeling between the siblings.⁸⁵ Rebecca’s description of her feelings for her brother are indicative of the sentiment of the period: ‘Our desire to see him is as great and ardent as the most tender the most sympathising heart can imagine yet it proceeds from the true genuine love which cannot enjoy anything out in concert with the beloved so do advise him whatever you think will be most for his ease’.⁸⁶ Such language (‘the beloved,’ and ‘true genuine love’) is resonant with remarks Sabean makes about a period in which young sisters’ and brothers’ love was presented as pure and almost spiritual.⁸⁷ Equally, the ‘sympathising heart’ accords with sentimental tropes of Scottish moral philosophy, exemplified by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling.⁸⁸ Rebecca and her family were connected to a North East Scotland literary and social circle that included James Beattie, and she would have been well versed in contemporary ideas of sympathy.⁸⁹ Later, Rebecca was to describe Charles as ‘the brother and friend of my soul … I have shared all his trials … And shall yet … share his good fortune’, and she continued by confessing that ‘I can conceal nothing from you’.⁹⁰ It is notable that apart from the occasional visit to Auchiries, Charles spent his adult life outwith the North East of Scotland. Epistolary sensibility bridged these distances and was thus a tool that reproduced the practice of sibling affection.⁹¹ In widowhood, his family at Auchiries continued to be his emotional refuge: ‘Nothing could make me happier than to have an opportunity of embracing you all & forgeting [sic] my Misfortunes in the Bosom of so amicable a Family & one so dearly beloved.’⁹²

In addition to the emotional ties, financial ties bound all three siblings. Trading in the Carolinas meant that brothers Alexander and Charles, and Alexander’s son George extended credit between one another.⁹³ Their sister Rebecca was party to discussions between the brothers and George, and this suggests her voice was important when it came to financial arrangements.⁹⁴ She may have contributed investments.⁹⁵ As the losses due to the American Revolution became clearer the impact was felt at Auchiries, including by Rebecca. A letter from Charles to Alexander in 1783 intersects with these elements: ‘so much Pleasure & Comfort indeed do I derive from the Consideration that the affections of such dear & inestimable Relations continue unimpaired by Absence, Suffering, Loss of Property or what I feel more than either, the Inconveniences yourself & our Dearest Sister must have suffered by my being disabled from her forming those Engagements my Heart pants to fulfil!’⁹⁶ These words repeat the emotional support Charles was receiving from his family in Scotland and his expressions of sympathy relating to the ‘suffering’ that his sister may have felt. Rebecca’s ‘Engagements’, which she could no longer form, point to financial commitments. These exchanges show that language of affection, feelings, and finance were intensely woven together.⁹⁷ Such losses, it might be emphasised, were in relation to enslaved people, and this was the background to the emotional regime of sensibility.⁹⁸

The language of affection between the next generation of siblings, George and Margaret, was not as effusive in their youth, though as they grew older, Margaret’s intensity of feeling emerged. In 1774, when George was twenty-four, he wrote to his sister about his life in Carolina, and his style was much more restrained. For example: ‘the sincerity of my affection and good wishes – you need not be afraid of saying more than my heart feels for you all. I long very much to hear from you having no letters from Scotland later than February.’⁹⁹ Margaret and George’s intimacy is evident, however, in the liveliness of his descriptions and the detail he chose to share with her about the natural geography, his daily life as an enslaver, and some of the political situation.¹⁰⁰ Margaret’s relationship with George thus included a shared experience of enslavement: he in Carolina and she as an affectionate correspondent in Scotland. The awareness of his whiteness is apparent in the way he both revealed the presence of Black bodies and distanced himself from their humanity: ‘having no overseer here just now I slept last night (for the first time in my life) at least four miles distant from any white Person – like the tyrant of some Asiatick Isle the only free Man in an Island of Slaves’.¹⁰¹ In a manner remarkably similar to the correspondence between Scottish East India Company diplomat George Bogle and his sister, Ogilvie’s writing showed the epistolary device that gave an ‘impression of immediacy’: ‘You perhaps looked for a more particular description of Both Myrtle Grove and Belmont but you must excuse till next time – for I can no longer resist the temptation of a plate of wild cherries which has just made its appearance – after despatching the one I shall treat myself with a dry shirt and a dry pair of breeches for those I have on are dripping with my morning’s teas – nay do not laugh I have not bep___d myself but when the thermometer is at 92, water finds more ways than one out of our leakie [sic] Casks’.¹⁰²

The affection between the siblings evolved despite the fact that they mostly lived in different places. George Ogilvie’s marriage to his cousin, Rebecca Irvine, in 1780, mirrored Margaret Ogilvie’s marriage to William Urquhart of Craigston in the same year.¹⁰³ These family networks assisted each other in securing positions in empire. The Irvines of Drum had many connections to both eastern and western imperial spaces.¹⁰⁴ William Urquhart, in addition to his castle and land near Turriff, Aberdeenshire, owned extensive lands and enslaved people in Carriacou, in the Ceded Islands of the Caribbean.¹⁰⁵ After her marriage, Margaret’s feelings deepened, and she later looked back on a strong emotional bond with her brother. In 1786, after the death of several of her young children, Margaret wrote of her feelings for him: ‘I have a brother who till I knew still dearer ties might be said to absorb my heart’.¹⁰⁶ George was either in London or Carolina from when Margaret was six until just before she married. To forge such a bond with an absent brother from a young age, her family would have been critical enablers of the relationship. Indeed, in her later years, Margaret reflected on her relations as bestowing her happiness, but also that she had ‘a heart formed to enjoy all that they can bestow.’¹⁰⁷ These words articulate a consciousness that affection was something actively formed and that the benefits of this were tangible.

These examples show that correspondence was the tool that reproduced the practice of sibling affection. The siblings’ lives were deeply connected throughout the period when they were parents themselves. In addition to siblings, aunts and uncles played an important role in fostering relationships between family members. One way they did this was by being closely involved in courtship, often providing their own children as marriage partners. Marriage strategies were intended to provide security across families and cousin marriage was common across gentry families in this period. George’s marriage to his first cousin Rebecca Irvine, shortly after his return from South Carolina in 1779, is such an example. Their son, Alexander Ogilvie, married Janet Rebecca Ogilvie, daughter of his first cousin John Alexander Ogilvie, whose father had been the Carolina planter and merchant Charles Ogilvie. This couple married in 1825, before they set sail for India.

In contrast, William Ogilvie remained a bachelor in India until his death in 1751.¹⁰⁸ There is a fleeting mention of his son arriving at Theodore Forbes’s house in Bombay.¹⁰⁹ This brief mention, despite many subsequent letters between the two friends, suggests that the son, who would have likely been of mixed-heritage, did not survive. Theodore, whilst having three children with Eliza Kewark, may have married her in the Armenian church, but by describing her as a ‘temporary’ partner, he showed he did not see this as counting within his white family in Scotland.¹¹⁰ British wives needed to come from the same background and needed to embody Christian virtue. As Durba Mitra argues, Indian women, except in rare occasions, were considered sexually deviant and, potentially, prostitutes.¹¹¹ Even white marriage partners were considered a risk if they were outside the social circle. When, in 1762, Charles Ogilvie wanted to marry Mary Michie, the daughter of the Hon. James Michie, Chief Justice of South Carolina, her guardians were initially resistant to Charles’s advances.¹¹²

Cousins were a much safer option that ensured property could stay within families, and social class and virtue were maintained. Affection between cousins was actively nurtured by adults, and they were frequently brought up together. Margaret Ogilvie was brought up with her cousin Margaret Irvine (sister to George Ogilvie’s future wife, Rebecca) at Auchiries. Their aunt, Rebecca, wrote, in 1774, that the friendship between them was important: ‘cousine [sic] meg & her are very fond of each their & I [hope] their friendship shall encress [sic]’.¹¹³ Later, Margaret (by then Margaret Urquhart) found tutors for both her and her brother George’s children. Such affection could lead to marriage in adulthood. The tight bonds also created a network of mutual support that assisted imperial ventures from patronage to child-rearing and socialisation. A perfect example of this was when Rebecca and George’s son William was helped to secure his commission in the EIC army by her brother, the painter Hugh Irvine.¹¹⁴ These were ways in which families as institutions become emotional communities.¹¹⁵ Through the repeated reinforcement by other family members an emotional bond emerged that created shared goals.

Kitty and Alexander Scott Forbes show racialised distancing, but class and status was also an important indicator of inclusion. In 1818, Mary and Rebecca Ogilvie, two middle-aged, unmarried sisters of George and Margaret, from the second marriage of their father, Alexander, were found to be confined in a boarding house in Musselburgh, in which they were being maltreated.¹¹⁶ Rebecca seems to have been a spirited figure who, in 1792, at age twenty-six, had shocked the family by going to live independently.¹¹⁷ They were confined to the institution because of their mental state, or at least Rebecca’s, and their nephews, Thomas and Dr John Charles Ogilvie, were financially responsible for them.¹¹⁸ Their marginal status in the family is suggested by this, by their rare surfacing in correspondence, and by the fact that the two men communicated the importance of these events being kept secret from the womenfolk in the family. These women were little more than an administrative and financial burden. The marginalisation of racialised people shows how an already established process of alienation of those who do not ‘fit’ was established on the basis of class, but which could be replicated when racialised relations tried to enter the group that was deemed more worthy of close affectionate ties.

In Sabean and Johnson’s words, horizontal families were ‘a vast human chain bound by affection and understanding that is fairly clearly distinguished from other elements of society by virtue of their biological relationships.’¹¹⁹ It is clear from the non-Europeans, the illegitimate, and the impoverished unmarried women in this family, that not every member of a family connected through biology was deserving of affection. Sabean and Johnson’s compelling contention is that sentimentalism was a cultural response to developments of the seventeenth century whereby aristocratic siblings established roles and usefulness. These kinship structures, which held sibling affection of primary importance, were common in property-owning classes and were fundamental in the formation of the bourgeoisie. They created large constellations, helped each other in business, and, through patronage, opened up opportunities for family members in state institutions, such as the military or public administration.¹²⁰ Whilst the term bourgeoisie betrays the French sources of Johnson’s work, there are strong parallels with the Scottish gentry. Leonore Davidoff, in her studies of siblinghood, and in her earlier work with Catherine Hall, argues that horizontal relationships were fundamental for the creation of the English middle classes. They formed the infrastructure around which business, religion, and educational norms were established.¹²¹ However, it is also clear from this case study that within families, a selection process took place.

Katie Barclay’s work on lower-rank Scots suggests a version of affection, caritas, held communities together, and this was religiously inflected. Looking to the Scottish gentry, they, like the Anglo-Irish, were disproportionately involved in Empire.¹²² Arguments that Scottish kinship networks played a critical role in the British empire are not new.¹²³ However, the European nature of historical kinship patterns suggests that this was not a uniquely Scottish feature, but it would have had a Scottish character. The economic challenges of the eighteenth century were pronounced for the Scottish gentry, and affectionate bonds may have gone some way to mitigate those challenges. Demographic change and Europe-wide disruptions in the eighteenth century were amplified by empire and created another field which required considerable support from extended families.¹²⁴ At the same time, empire emerges as another solution for economic instability. As Andrew Mackillop argues, human capital, was of greater significance and eventually brought greater financial benefit from empire to those in Scotland than to their peers in England.¹²⁵ The case of the Ogilvies and the means by which aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings dominate their letters across empire show that this ‘human chain bound by affection’ was important. A distinctive white imperial class of Scots were being produced by this affective community.

Mixed-heritage children, when the father had the means, were sometimes educated and socialised, but they were generally separated from their mothers and either entirely excluded or only partially included. Thus, the loving archipelago, on which these imperial families relied and invested emotional energy in, from India or the Caribbean to Scotland, was a way of excluding African-descended and Indian people. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes of the ways in which racialised emotions have evolved due to the divergent histories.¹²⁶ Such racialised emotions are ways in which power and difference became naturalised and exclusionary practices continue. The emotions, such as family affection, are thus both embodied histories and familial investments. It can be argued, then, that the embodiment of imperial and social history in emotional culture—in this case, in the fomenting of affection between family members—played a role in creating a class of white Scottish men, women, and children. This gave them a material advantage and entrenched white supremacy.

Notes

1. Margaret Ogilvie, Aberdeen, to Alexander Irvine, Rome, 28 March 1825, Aberdeen University Library (hereafter AUL), Irvine of Drum: family correspondence, MS2998/2/2. ⮭
2. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), 109. ⮭
3. Margaret Ogilvie, Aberdeen, to Alexander Irvine, Rome, 28 March 1825, AUL/MS2998/2/2. ⮭
4. Rebecca Ogilvie, Aberdeen, to Alexander Irvine, Florence, 22 January 1824, AUL/MS2998/2/2. ⮭
5. Margot Finn, ‘The Female World of Love & Empire: Women, Family & East India Company Politics at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Gender & History, 31, 1 (2019), 10. ⮭
6. Alexander Ogilvie, Saint Lucia, to Mrs Rebecca Ogilvie, Aberdeen, 12 November 1805, AUL/MS2740/34. ⮭
7. Finn, ‘The Female World’. ⮭
8. Bruce Buchan and Linda Andersson Burnett, ‘Knowing Savagery: Australia and the Anatomy of Race’, History of the Human Sciences, 32, 4 (October 2019), 123–7; Onni Gust, Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760–1830 (London, 2021), 19–57. ⮭
9. Gust, Unhomely Empire, 1–35. ⮭
10. Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Williamsburg, VA, 2018), 400. ⮭
11. Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8, 2 (2007), 149, 158. ⮭
12. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1963; London, 2001), 39–40; Barbara Applebaum, ‘Critical Whiteness Studies’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, 9 (June 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.5 [Last accessed 04/01/2022]; Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, Harvard Law Review, 106, 8 (1993), 1707–91. ⮭
13. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 73; idem, ‘White Ignorance’, in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (New York, 2007), 13–37; bell hooks, ‘Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination’, in David R. Roediger (ed.), Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998; New York, 2010), 38–53, 40–1, 46. ⮭
14. Priyamvada Gopal, ‘On Decolonisation and the University’, Textual Practice, 35, 6 (3 June 2021), 892. On positionality: Rolando Vázquez, Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary (Amsterdam, 2020), 169–71; Catherine Hall, ‘Doing Reparatory History: Bringing “Race” and Slavery Home’, Race & Class, 60, 1 (2018), 3–21. ⮭
15. Applebaum, ‘Critical Whiteness’. ⮭
16. Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, 2006), 2. ⮭
17. Andrew Mackillop, Human Capital and Empire: Scotland, Ireland, Wales and British Imperialism in Asia, c.1690–c.1820 (Manchester, 2021), 11–3. ⮭
18. Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51, 2 (2012), 193–220; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001); Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 2011); idem, ‘State of the Field: The History of Emotions’, History, 106, 371 (2021), 456–66. ⮭
19. C. Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke, 2006), 5, 9; Kate Smith, ‘Imperial Families: Women Writing Home in Georgian Britain’, Women’s History Review, 6 (2014), 855. ⮭
20. Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge, 2005), 38–41. ⮭
21. Barclay, ‘State of the Field’, 463–6. ⮭
22. Hans Medick and David Warren (eds), Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge, 1984). ⮭
23. Christopher H. Johnson, ‘Siblinghood and the Emotional Dimensions of the New Kinship System, 1800–1850, A French Example’, in Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean (eds), Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900 (New York, 2013), 190. ⮭
24. Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations, 9. ⮭
25. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Robert Nice (1972; Cambridge, 1977), 179. ⮭
26. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977; London, 1990); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London, 1976); Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, Childhood in Society (1960; Harmondsworth, 1973). ⮭
27. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987). ⮭
28. Barclay, Love, Intimacy; idem, ‘Emotional Lineages: Blood, Property, Family and Affection in Early Modern Scotland’, in Alicia Marchant (ed.), Historicising Heritage and Emotions: The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land (London, 2018), 84–98; idem, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (New York, 2021). ⮭
29. Keith M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family, and Culture from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000), 157. ⮭
30. See also Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English Speaking World, 1580–1740 (New York, 2001), 32–3. Johnson and Sabean argue that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries kinship was present-centred: Johnson and Sabean (eds), Sibling Relations, 11. ⮭
31. Eleanor Gordon, ‘The Family’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton, and Eileen Janes Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History Since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006), 235–67. ⮭
32. Margot Finn, ‘Family Formations: Anglo India and the Familial Proto-State’, in David Feldman and John Lawrence (eds), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge, 2011); idem, ‘The Female World’; idem, ‘The Barlow Bastards: Romance Comes Home from the Empire’, in Margot Finn, Michael Lobban, and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds), Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History (London, 2010), 25–47; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford, 2011). For England, see also: Katie Donington, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World (Manchester, 2021). ⮭
33. Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York, 2008), 6. ⮭
34. Papers of the Ogilvie-Forbes of Boyndlie, AUL/MS2740, and Irvine of Drum: family correspondence, AUL/MS2998. The author would like to thank the Brose family for granting permission to use the Ogilvie-Forbes of Boyndlie papers. ⮭
35. James Ogilvie, Charleston, to Mrs Margaret Ogilvie and Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 17 March 1742, letter (copy), and William Ogilvie, Edinburgh, to Alexander Ogilvie, Cortes, 20 December 1748, AUL/MS2740/10/2/1; William Ogilvie, Hanover County, Virginia, to Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 20 January 1752, AUL/MS2740/10/2/3; Peter Beauclerk-Dewar (ed.), Burke’s Landed Gentry of Great Britain: The Kingdom in Scotland (London, 2001), 452. ⮭
36. Charles Ogilvie, Charleston, to Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 20 March 1760, AUL/MS2740/10/3/8. ⮭
37. George Ogilvie, Amsterdam, to Charles Ogilvie, London, 31 January 1779, AUL/MS2740/10/5/14; George Ogilvie, Myrtle Grove, South Carolina, to Margaret Ogilvie, Auchiries, 22 November 1774, AUL/MS2740/10/5/1. ⮭
38. Beauclerk-Dewar, Burke’s Landed Gentry, 452. ⮭
39. Mackillop, Human Capital, 8–9; Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2010). ⮭
40. Charles Ogilvie, London, to Alexander Ogilvie, Cortes, 17 August 1762, AUL/MS2740/10/3/10. ⮭
41. Charles Ogilvie, London, to Alexander Ogilvie, Cortes, Aberdeenshire, 9 August 1770, AUL/MS2740/10/3/15. ⮭
42. Alexander Garden, Charleston, to George Ogilvie, Auchiries, 10 April 1779 and 26 July 1787 and George Ogilvie, Aberdeen, to Alexander Garden[, Charleston], 18 August 1801, AUL/MS2740/10/7; Alexander Garden letters; Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Dr Alexander Garden of Charles Town (Chapel Hill, 1969). ⮭
43. Alexander Garden, Charleston, to George Ogilvie, Auchiries, 10 April 1779 and 26 July 1787, AUL/MS2740/10/7; Barclay, ‘Emotional Lineages’, 90. ⮭
44. Gordon, ‘The Family’, 243. ⮭
45. Eloise Grey, ‘Natural Children, Country Wives, and Country Girls in Nineteenth-Century India and Northeast Scotland’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 47, 1 (2021), 33–4. ⮭
46. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 98–105, 193–6, 227–30. ⮭
47. Grey, ‘Natural Children’, 35–40. ⮭
48. Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, 2021). ⮭
49. Ibid., 4. ⮭
50. James Forbes, Bombay, to William Bridgeman, London, 6 March 1824, AUL/MS2740/42. ⮭
51. For example: James Forbes, Bombay, to Andrew Forbes, Riga, 1 April 1822, AUL/MS2740/6/25/1; John Forbes, Aberdeen, to William Forbes, Surat, 25 March 1811, Letter Book William Forbes, AUL/MS2740/67; William Forbes, Jeroor, to William Ogilvie, Surat, 3 November 1811, and William Ogilvie, Surat, to Theodore Forbes, Bombay, 22 October 1817, AUL/MS2740/26; Mackillop, Human Capital, 204–5, 210–12. ⮭
52. Alexander was born on 9th December 1814: AUL/MS2740/5/Letter Book Theodore Forbes 1812–13; Newmachar gravestone for Katherine Scott Forbes Crombie, born 1812. ⮭
53. William Ogilvie, Surat, to Theodore Forbes, Bombay, 27 October and 30 November 1817, AUL/MS2740/26. ⮭
54. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 80, 83, 306. ⮭
55. Ibid., 343. ⮭
56. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London, 1982), xvii–xviii. ⮭
57. Gust, Unhomely Empire, 4–6. ⮭
58. Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune, 373–4. ⮭
59. Ibid., 296. ⮭
60. Beauclerk-Dewar, Burke’s Landed Gentry, 455; Aberdeen City Archives, Aberdeen County Commission of Supply Assessed Tax Report, AS/ACOM/14; AUL/MS2998/2/1 Rebecca Ogilvie, Aberdeen, to Alexander Irvine, Rome, 1820; Letter Book Theodore Forbes, journal entry, 19 February 1815, AUL/MS2740/5. ⮭
61. William Ogilvie, Surat, to Theodore Forbes, Bombay, 28 June 1818, AUL/MS2740/6/25/9&10; Grey, ‘Natural Children’, 44. ⮭
62. Theodore Forbes, Last Will and Testament, 20 September 1820, AUL/2740/6/25/1; Frederick Forbes, Smyrna, to Katherine Crombie, Cothal Mills, 30 December 1838, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge (hereafter CSAS)/Crombie Papers/Small Box 7. ⮭
63. Grey, ‘Natural Children’, 45–6; Frederick Forbes, Balmeir, to Katherine Crombie, Swailend of Elnick, 22 October 1837, CSAS/Crombie Papers/Small Box 7. ⮭
64. Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford, 2011), 84. ⮭
65. Grey, ‘Natural Children’, 41, 106; Alexander Forbes, Boyndlie, to James Crombie, Swailend of Elnik, New Macher, 9 November 1841, CSAS/Crombie Papers/Small Box 7. ⮭
66. Grey, ‘Natural Children’, 46. ⮭
67. Alexander Forbes of Boyndlie, last will and testament, 8 May 1860/1862, AUL/MS2740/35/x. In contrast, Forbes left £500 to the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, £800 to Rebecca Ogilvie, and £500 each to Helen Ogilvie and Margaret Ogilvie, who were not his consanguineal relatives. ⮭
68. Last Will and Testament, Frederick Forbes, Tehran, 3 April 1841, CSAS/Crombie Papers/Small Box 7. ⮭
69. Catherine Scott, Craibstone, 12 November 1852, AUL/MS2740/7, will and testament (copy). ⮭
70. Ellen Filor, ‘“He Is Hardened to the Climate & a Little Bleached by It’s [Sic] Influence”: Imperial Childhoods in Scotland and Madras, c. 1800–1830’, in Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (eds), Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (London, 2016), 87. ⮭
71. Grey, ‘Natural Children’, 45–6. ⮭
72. Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire (Cambridge, 2019), 9, 31; Nicole Eustace, ‘Emotional Pursuits and the American Revolution’, Emotion Review, 12, 3 (2020), 148–51. ⮭
73. George Ogilvie, Charlestown, to Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 25 April 1778, AUL/MS2740/10/5/3. ⮭
74. Lydon, Imperial Emotions, 1–29; Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville, VA, 2016), 1–10. ⮭
75. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 124–6; Ghosh, Sex and the Family. ⮭
76. James Forbes, London, to Andrew Forbes, Riga, 20 February 1821, AUL/MS2740/6/25. ⮭
77. James Forbes, London, to Andrew Forbes, Riga, 2 January 1821, AUL/MS2740/6/25/1. ⮭
78. Andrew Forbes, Riga, to James Forbes, Bombay, 22 January 1821, AUL/MS2740/15. ⮭
79. William Ogilvie, Hanover County, Virginia, to Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 20 January 1752, AUL/MS2740/10/2/3. ⮭
80. Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations, 5. ⮭
81. Beauclerk-Dewar, Burke’s Landed Gentry, 452. ⮭
82. Alan L. Karras, Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 5. ⮭
83. H. French and M. Rothery, ‘Male Anxiety among Younger Sons of the English Landed Gentry, 1700–1900’, The Historical Journal, 62, 4 (2018), 967–95. ⮭
84. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), 1–36; Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (New York, 2011), 108–12; William M. Reddy, ‘Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution’, The Journal of Modern History, 72, 1 (2000), 109–52. ⮭
85. Charles Ogilvie, London, to Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 9 August 1770, AUL/MS2740/10/3/15. ⮭
86. Rebecca Forbes Pitsligo, Auchiries, to George Ogilvie[, London (probably)], 19 July 1774, AUL/MS2740/4/18/1/10/1. ⮭
87. David Warren Sabean, ‘Kinship and Issues of the Self in Europe around 1800’, in Johnson and Sabean (eds), Sibling Relations, 222. ⮭
88. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, second edition (Edinburgh, 1761); Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London, 1783); Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (London, 2000), 92–4. ⮭
89. National Records of Archives of Scotland (hereafter NRAS), 204, Urquhart Family of Craigston, King Edward, Aberdeenshire, ‘Craigston Castle Library Register’: shows a range of books borrowed by the family; Margaret Forbes, Beattie and His Friends (Westminster, 1904), 151–2. ⮭
90. Rebecca Forbes Pitsligo, Auchiries, to Charles Ogilvie, Charleston, 24 October 1780, AUL/MS2740/4/18/1/29. ⮭
91. Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 8. ⮭
92. Charles Ogilvie, London, to Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 27 September 1783, AUL/MS2740/10/3/19; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 147–54. ⮭
93. Tadmor, Family and Friends, 109; Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2007), 2. ⮭
94. George Ogilvie, London, to Rebecca Forbes Pitsligo, Auchiries, 19 April 1779, AUL/MS2740/10/5/19. ⮭
95. She had £200 a year in annuity after her husband, the Master John Forbes of Pitsligo, died in 1781: Sir William Forbes, Cramond House, to George Ogilvie, Aberdeen, 22 October 1800, AUL/MS2740/10/Sir William Forbes Banker; Rebecca Ogilvie, The Hon Rebecca Forbes & Sir William Forbes, 17 September 1783, National Records of Scotland/RS64/13 Register of Sasine Minute Book ref: 34/135, vol. 1 of 30th book, 66. ⮭
96. Charles Ogilvie, London, to Alexander Ogilvie, Auchiries, 27 September 1783, AUL/MS2740/10/3/19. ⮭
97. Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations, 17; Medick and Warren, Interest and Emotion, 171. ⮭
98. Eustace, ‘Emotional Pursuits’. ⮭
99. George Ogilvie, Myrtle Grove, Santee, to Margaret Ogilvie, Auchiries, 25 June 1774, AUL/MS2740/10/5/1. ⮭
100. George Ogilvie, St Eustatia, to Margaret Ogilvie, Auchiries, 30 August 1778, AUL/10/5/8-11. ⮭
101. Ibid. ⮭
102. George Ogilvie, Myrtle Grove, Santee, to Margaret Ogilvie, Auchiries, 25 June 1774, AUL/MS2740/10/5/1; Kate Teltscher, ‘Writing Home and Crossing Cultures: George Bogle in Bengal and Tibet, 1770–1775’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), 287. George Bogle was writing to his sister in 1774, the same year as Ogilvie. ⮭
103. William Urquhart, Craigston, to John Urquhart, Carriacou, West Indies, 14 October 1789; Bundle 1, Contract of Marriage Twixt Will. Urquhart of Craigston Esq and Miss Ogilvie Auchiries, 27 December 1780, NRAS, Urquhart Family of Craigston, King Edward, Aberdeenshire, 2570, Vol 1, letterbox. ⮭
104. Douglas Catterall, ‘The Worlds of John Rose: A Northeastern Scot’s Career in the British Atlantic World, c.1740–1800’, in Angela McCarthy (ed.), A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities Since the Eighteenth Century (London, 2006), 67–94. ⮭
105. H. Gordon Slade, ‘Craigston and Meldrum Estates, Carriacou, 1769–1841’, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 114 (1984), 481–537. ⮭
106. Margaret Urquhart’s journal 1786 (transcription), AUL/MS2740/37. ⮭
107. Ibid. ⮭
108. Jane Stewart Ogilvie, Poona, to Jane Forbes, 18 June 1851, AUL/MS2740/6/25/1. ⮭
109. Theodore Forbes, Bombay, to William Ogilvie, Surat, 20 November 1816, AUL/MS2740/5/Letter Book Theodore Forbes. ⮭
110. Theodore Forbes, journal entry, Surat, 26 March 1817, AUL/2740/5. ⮭
111. Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, 2020), 6–7. ⮭
112. Charles Ogilvie, London, to Mrs Ogilvie, Auchiries[, c.1762], AUL/MS2740/10/3/1; Charles Ogilvie, London, to Mrs Mary Ogilvie, Cortes, 1762, AUL/MS2740/10/3/11; Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier, The House of Commons, 1754–1790, The History of Parliament (London, 1964), 223–4. Charles Ogilvie married Mary Michie, daughter of Chief Justice of South Carolina, James Michie, on 1 November 1762. ⮭
113. Rebecca Forbes Pitsligo, Auchiries, to George Ogilvie, 19 July 1774, AUL/MS2740/4/18/1/10/1. ⮭
114. Edward Penmann, London, to Rebecca Ogilvie [née Irvine], Aberdeen, 3 February 1810, AUL/MS2740/6/25. ⮭
115. Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review, 107, 3 (2002), 821–45. ⮭
116. Beauclerk-Dewar, Burke’s Landed Gentry, 452. Rebecca Ogilvie was born in 1766 and Mary, later, but her birthdate is not known. John Charles Ogilvie was born in 1784, and Thomas was probably born between 1766 and 1770. ⮭
117. George Ogilvie, Auchiries, to Sir William Forbes, Edinburgh, 25 May 1792, AUL/MS2740/10/ ⮭
118. Thomas Ogilvie, Edinburgh, to Dr John Charles Ogilvie, Aberdeen, 16th January 1818; Thomas Ogilvie, Musselburgh, to Dr John Charles Ogilvie, Aberdeen, 18 January 1818; Thomas Ogilvie, Glasgow, to Dr John Charles Ogilvie, Aberdeen, 5 March 1818, AUL/MS2740/38/x/Dr JC Ogilvie 1814–1837. ⮭
119. Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations, 10; see also from a legal perspective: Katie Barclay, ‘Emotional Lineages: Blood, Property, Family and Affection in Early Modern Scotland’, in Alicia Marchant (ed.), Historicising Heritage and Emotions: The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land (London, 2018), 84–98. ⮭
120. Johnson, ‘Siblinghood’, 213. ⮭
121. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 3. ⮭
122. Mackillop, Human Capital. ⮭
123. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, 221–3; T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London, 2003), 218–22; B. R. Tomlinson, ‘From Campsie to Kedgeree: Scottish Enterprise, Asian Trade and the Company Raj’, Modern Asian Studies, 36, 4 (2002), 769–91; Andrew Mackillop, ‘Locality, Nation, and Empire: Scots and the Empire in Asia, c.1695–c.1813’, in T. M. Devine and John M. Mackenzie (eds), Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2011), 54–83. ⮭
124. High mortality in India required constant circulation of new personnel: Finn, ‘The Female World’. ⮭
125. Mackillop, Human Capital. ⮭
126. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions’, American Sociological Review, 84, 1 (2019), 1–25. ⮭