THE RECORD OF THOSE Scots who helped achieve the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery itself within the British Empire in 1833 has already been well recorded in books by C. Duncan Rice and Iain Whyte. Yet Scottish engagement in the slave system itself was either ignored or lost from both academic history and popular memory for generations until the early years of the present century. When amnesia started to take root is difficult to determine. Compensation to Scots slave owners after emancipation remained a live issue into the late 1830s as assessment of claims was not completed until 1837. However, a mere four decades later, on the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of abolition in 1883, the Glasgow West India Association felt able to publish a triumphalist statement in the Glasgow Herald newspaper:

This bold assertion was remarkable at several levels.

For a start, the claim was brazenly hypocritical. Just a generation before it was made, the city's West India Association had been one of the most vocal and powerful anti-abolition pressure groups in the United Kingdom, famed for its unyielding and unrelenting opposition to the liberation of slaves in the Empire. The statement is confined to slave trading alone and in isolation. As shown below, direct trafficking of slaves from Africa to the Americas by Scottish ships from Scottish ports was indeed on a minor scale compared to the enormous human trade conducted from the major English centres. Hence, by ignoring Scottish involvement in the slave economies more generally, the Association was able to claim the moral high ground for Glasgow and the city's transatlantic business community.