1 - Scottish Beginnings: Commerce, Christianity and Schooling

Summary

THE TWO scholar-administrators whose activities in India are the subject of this study joined the East India Company from a modest family background in textile finishing in Scotland’s newly industrialized West Lowlands. They had no longstanding links with any of the many Scottish families that by the late eighteenth century had strong military or commercial connections with India. However, some more recent commercial enterprises undertaken in the Americas, and also in India, by some of their relatives-by-marriage were to create the connections through which the patronage necessary for Company service was acquired. Apart from demonstrating how such social and professional mobility occurred during a particularly vibrant phase of Scotland’s commercial and industrial history, the purpose of this first chapter is to situate the Muir family in the newly evangelical post-Enlightenment religious and intellectual environment of the brothers’ upbringing and schooling.

Ayrshire origins

The Muirs belonged to Kilmarnock, 20 miles from Glasgow, and by the 1790s ‘one of the principal manufacturing towns in Ayrshire’. The town’s new industrial success, though rooted in a long tradition of manufacturing woollen goods, carpets, stockings and shoes, was attributed to the recent introduction of spinning jennies and carding machines for the manufacture of cotton calicoes and muslins. This particular family did not as yet play a direct part in the new industrial boom, but their grandfather, also a John Muir (hereafter ‘senior’), was well known locally because of a business dealing miscellaneously with grocery, wine and later the postal service. He plied this from the Portland Arms Tavern, previously owned by a relative, Robert Muir, a friend and patron of Robert Burns. Situated at the ‘Cross’, in the town’s centre, at the hub of Kilmarnock’s growing prosperity, his business was rapidly turning John Muir senior, according to the family history, into ‘one of the leading merchants of Kilmarnock’ (fig. 1). Although this history makes much of some earlier connections with a once prosperous landowning family, the Muirs of Rowallan, the reality by the late eighteenth century was dependence on retail trade, on the profits from which some small and scattered farms and domestic properties were then accumulated in Kilmarnock and the neighbourhood.