By Hamish MacPherson Back in the Day Colonel Colin Mackenzie and his Indian pandits Painting by Thomas Hickey (1816). Suggested identities of the persons from left to right are Dhurmia, a Jain pandit holding a palm-leaf manuscript, Cavelli Venkata Lechmiah, a Telugu Brahmin pandit, Colin THE British Empire may have been defunct for decades, save its septic presence in the deluded mindsets of many English exceptionalists and comparatively few Scottish Unionists, but it can nevertheless never be denied that Scots played more than their fair share in developing and maintaining that empire. I have shown in past columns how Scottish soldiers, engineers, doctors and administrators were key people in the empire project from its inception and, in the latter half of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, Scots achieved high positions and great influence in the military in particular.