Associate Lecturer in History Dr. Terence McBride has published ‘Scottishness and “Foreigners”: the role of a developing Scottish “machinery of government” before 1939‘ , in the journal Historical Research. Before 1939 continental Europeans were settling in Scotland, in a part of the United Kingdom that had been shaped by distinct religious and legal traditions. Government bodies in Scotland that had emerged in the nineteenth century also gained significant powers over welfare, public health and local government before that date. This article, as the foundation for a wider study on migrants in Scotland, uses government records to examine attempts by these bodies to engage with migrants and also to develop ideas on managing ‘foreignness’. It concludes that although officials largely engaged on the basis of increasingly restrictive UK-wide immigration legislation from 1905, this was also a period in which migrants could benefit from the efforts of both ministers and mandarins to act in line with what they saw as the particular traditions, practices and priorities of Scotland.