18th-century migrants: The jostling Johnstones | The Economist

18th-century migrants: The jostling Johnstones | The Economist: "EMMA ROTHSCHILD is an historian of the mind, of characteristic ways of thinking and feeling. She aims to blindfold hindsight and to recover not just external events but the way people perceived them at the time. The difficulty is evidence. Most people leave no trace. Even the eminent, she says, show little sign of the inner consequences of outward affairs. As if in answer, her absorbing new book, “The Inner Life of Empires”, overflows with evidence—so finely detailed and from such scattered sources as to be scarcely imaginable before the development of digitised, searchable catalogues and archives.

It is based on an extraordinar"