EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCOTTISH MILITARY PENSIONERS AS HOMECOMING SOLDIERS

This article makes use of the data-rich sources, little used by historians, relating to rank and file soldiers, especially those who became Chelsea Hospital outpensioners. It particularly seeks to find out the migration history of such men in the years after Waterloo, focusing on Scots. The conclusion is that Scots were under-represented among soldiers who became imperial settlers. There appear to be good reasons for Scots finding colonial conditions uncongenial, and, in this respect, there was little difference between the ‘ Napoleonic ’ soldiery and the succeeding generation who belonged more definitely to an imperial service army. Most, in fact, returned to Scotland, and then to that part of the country familiar to them. Moreover, they refute an image of veterans as marginalized men. They are shown, on the whole, to have settled back into civilian society with surprising ease, law-abiding rather than lawless, respected rather than despised or feared.