Burns and the British Empire: Viewing a Scottish Monument from an Imperial Perspective

Abstract

On 8 October 1817, the Edinburgh Town Council received a letter from John Forbes Mitchell of Thainston, a merchant of the East India Company. This letter, entitled ‘Proceedings respecting a situation for [a] Monument to the memory of Robert Burns’,2 described a subscription of funds that had been collected in India with the intention that ‘… a monument could be erected of the Poet in the Capital of his much loved country’. This popular proposal attracted donations from royalty, nobility and many well-known members of the early nineteenth-century elite. It has often been assumed that the enthusiasm for this monument stemmed from the popularity in Edinburgh circles for the poet during his lifetime. However, the circumstances suggest that the Edinburgh structure was more than a memorial to the man or his work. In fact it was indicative of a growing post-mortem obsession for Robert Burns in the search for a Scottish cultural identity during the emerging British Empire.