This is an account of a Highland family in the Caribbean, Liverpool and Scotland, explored through a focus on Christy (Christian) Robertson, whose life, although she never travelled beyond the shores of Britain and Ireland, was shaped by involvements in the West Indies. These involvements were a source of material wealth – and from relatively modest beginnings she came to move in elite circles in Liverpool, Edinburgh and elsewhere – but also of personal loss. Two brothers and two of the five children of her first marriage died in, or returning from, the Caribbean; and two other brothers and two other sons spent many years there. In these human terms she was as much an investor in the Caribbean as any man of money.

Christy was married twice and her second husband, Thomas Stewart Traill, wrote a ‘Memoir of Mrs Traill’ immediately after her death in 1842, a private record of her life composed for himself and for her family. Traill, who was a friend before he was her husband, also preserved much of Christy's correspond-ence, including letters from her brothers and sons in Guyana. These sources make it possible to understand Christy's life in unusual detail. This might be described as an example of what Emma Rothschild in The Inner Life of Empires has called ‘a micro-history of the uneminent’. But Rothschild's study is of more prominent individuals active across the British Empire – the four sisters and seven brothers of the Johnstone family of Westerhall. Christy was truly a minor player on the stage of Britain's empire; a woman whose life illuminates both the long reach of the Highlands into networks of commerce and influence within and beyond Scotland – and the continuing importance of a Highland identity and connections within these networks.

Kiltearn and Kiltearn

Christy Robertson, the sixth of ten children of Anne Forbes (1753–1826) and the Reverend Harry Robertson (1748–1815), was born and brought up at the manse of Kiltearn, on the north shore of the Cromarty Firth in the Highlands of Scotland. Her mother, who came from Golspie in Sutherland, was a daughter of William Forbes, gardener to the Earl of Sutherland at Dunrobin Castle and later the tenant of a farm on the estate.