At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

The statistical picture for Scots in Empire is well known: they were disproportionately represented in the many professions, the army, medicine, administration that served the imperial project. The chapter begins in early 1772 with a twenty-year-old Scot from Ayrshire, Claud Alexander, being appointed to the East India Company. Working first as an assistant in the Account’s Office at Calcutta and later as Paymaster-General for the East India Company in Bengal, Alexander maintains a global correspondence with his family and friends which reveals his multiple epistolary identities as a colonial servant, a private trader, a European in Bengal and a Scot with many personal and professional links with fellow Scots in India, including David Alexander and George Bogle. His epistolary identities are juxtaposed with his visual identity as imaged in a large portrait by Johann Zoffany in which he is shown with his brother Boyd and an Indian servant. The chapter ends with the purchase of a house and estate at Ballochmyle in Ayrshire prior to his return to Scotland in 1786, when eschewing the identity of nabob for laird, he established a cotton manufacturing village at nearby Catrine.