Accounts of empire in postcolonial critique largely remain silent on colonial relations internal to the United Kingdom, tending to elide the work of Scots, Irish, and Welsh within a solely English imperial enterprise. This article draws on recent reevaluations of the Scottish role in empire to outline the ambivalent place of Britain’s “Celtic Fringe” in its global hegemony. Focusing on eighteenth-century cartography and Scottish accounts of African exploration, it argues that the aesthetic practice of colonial control developed in Scotland established a pattern imperial agents could repeat in overseas territories. The colonization of the “White Highlands” in Kenya, it suggests, relied on aesthetic forms that originated in the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. By focusing on landscape's influence in a constellation of fields—in aesthetics, cartography, and natural history—this article also moves toward an understanding of landscape as a form of aisthesis, a “regime of sense perception.”
