A Colonial Port, a Caledonian Wedding and the Scots’ Diaspora: Callum McLean (1903–1990) as Businessman in Surabaya and Laird in Aberdeenshire During the Inter-War Decades

Abstract

The Aberdeenshire-born Niel Malcolm ‘Callum’ McLean was an individual who rose to prominence in European mercantile circles in the colonial Indonesian port of Surabaya in the interwar decades of the twentieth century. In discussing his life and times, the paper reflects on a number of larger themes, pertaining chiefly to empire and to the Scots’ diaspora, understood not only in terms of dispersal but also of return. McLean, it argues, was a new kind of ‘expatriate’. Thanks not least to improved global communications, he was able to maintain a presence not only in ‘the East’ but also on his native turf in Aberdeenshire.