Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- List of the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- map
- Introduction: Scotland and Transatlantic Slavery
- 1 Lost to History
- 2 Yonder Awa: Slavery and Distancing Strategies in Scottish Literature
- 3 Early Scottish Sugar Planters in the Leeward Islands, c. 1660–1740
- 4 The Scots Penetration of the Jamaican Plantation Business
- 5 ‘The habits of these creatures in clinging one to the other’: Enslaved Africans, Scots and the Plantations of Guyana
- 6 The Great Glasgow West India House of John Campbell, senior, & Co.
- 7 Scottish Surgeons in the Liverpool Slave Trade in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
- 8 Scotland and Colonial Slave Ownership: The Evidence of the Slave Compensation Records
- 9 ‘The Upas Tree, beneath whose pestiferous shade all intellect languishes and all virtue dies’: Scottish Public Perceptions of the Slave Trade and Slavery, 1756–1833
- 10 ‘The most unbending Conservative in Britain’: Archibald Alison and Pro-slavery Discourse
- 11 Did Slavery make Scotia Great? A Question Revisited
- Conclusion: History, Scotland and Slavery 246
- Index
4 - The Scots Penetration of the Jamaican Plantation Business
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- List of the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- map
- Introduction: Scotland and Transatlantic Slavery
- 1 Lost to History
- 2 Yonder Awa: Slavery and Distancing Strategies in Scottish Literature
- 3 Early Scottish Sugar Planters in the Leeward Islands, c. 1660–1740
- 4 The Scots Penetration of the Jamaican Plantation Business
- 5 ‘The habits of these creatures in clinging one to the other’: Enslaved Africans, Scots and the Plantations of Guyana
- 6 The Great Glasgow West India House of John Campbell, senior, & Co.
- 7 Scottish Surgeons in the Liverpool Slave Trade in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
- 8 Scotland and Colonial Slave Ownership: The Evidence of the Slave Compensation Records
- 9 ‘The Upas Tree, beneath whose pestiferous shade all intellect languishes and all virtue dies’: Scottish Public Perceptions of the Slave Trade and Slavery, 1756–1833
- 10 ‘The most unbending Conservative in Britain’: Archibald Alison and Pro-slavery Discourse
- 11 Did Slavery make Scotia Great? A Question Revisited
- Conclusion: History, Scotland and Slavery 246
- Index
Summary
There are few sights more impressive in the world than a Scotsman on the make.
J. M. BarrieTHE FIRST HISTORIAN OF Jamaica, Edward Long, writing on the eve of the American War of Independence, thought it necessary to dedicate a section in his History of Jamaica to the Scots as, ‘Jamaica indeed is greatly indebted to North Britain as very near one third of the [white] inhabitants are either natives of that country or descendants from those who were’. If his calculation of the total white population on the island is correct, the number of Scots on the island in the mid-1770s numbered between 5,000 and 6,000. More followed with the exodus of loyalists from the rebellious American colonies, and the final wave of sojourners during the last two decades of the ‘golden era’ in sugar when most of the large trading houses of Glasgow switched their shipping resources from the American to the West Indies trades.
As an English-born colonial administrator, Long was plainly impressed, not only by their diligence but also by their clannishness and loyalty to the old homeland. He was certain that the social cohesion it engendered when abroad was the key to their survival on first arriving on Jamaica in the first half of the eighteenth century, and their rapid advancement thereafter:
their young countrymen who come over to seek their fortunes are often beholden [to] the benevolence of these patrons who do not suffer them to fall into despondence for want of employment but [place] them under friendly protection and if they are well disposed are soon put into a way of doing something for themselves.
Long, however, did not mention the haemorrhage of many of the new arrivals, wiped out by deadly diseases before they could become established. Succeeding in the Caribbean entailed many risks as well as opportunities, and the evidence of surviving wills and testaments lodged in Scottish courts suggests that those who achieved real wealth were very much in the minority. What follows focuses on the successful. Those who failed or died in the attempt would repay further study.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Recovering Scotland's Slavery PastThe Caribbean Connection, pp. 82 - 98Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015