IN THE EARLY STAGES of Scottish transatlantic trade, the 1660s was a key decade, with the founding of Port Glasgow, the first Scottish sugar houses, and the first signs of the benefits of trade in Glasgow. In the British Americas the 1660s was also the decade that black chattel slavery took hold. Though separated by the Atlantic, these phenomena were hardly coincidental. Of the three stages of transatlantic commerce, namely: cultivation in the colonies; shipping across the Atlantic; and processing and marketing in Britain, it is really only the second and third stages which have received significant attention in Scotland.

In Scottish history the direct connection between the import of transatlantic staples and slave labour has rarely been made until recently. Yet the gradual increase in transatlantic trade could not occur without cultivation of the staples by the growing enslaved workforce. The rise in the use of enslaved Africans becomes of even greater interest to this volume if Scots were directly involved in their control and ownership. This chapter investigates the rise of Scots operating as planters in the Americas. It asks how deeply, and to what scale, Scots were involved in the ownership and control of enslaved Africans. As the leading staple in the pre-1740 period was sugar, the focus is on sugar plantations in one part of the British Caribbean.

Although Caribbean sugar plantations in the study period are relatively well documented from an English perspective, it is important to ask why we should revisit the subject from a Scottish angle. The answer is primarily a question of balance: to balance the attention paid to transatlantic trade in Scotland; to balance the acknowledged role of Scots on various British Caribbean islands from the end of the study period; finally, to balance the enormous social success of sugar planters in Scotland.

Building on the work of E. V. Goveia and L. J. Ragatz, the most prominent historian in the middle decades of the twentieth century to seriously consider slavery from the Caribbean side of the Atlantic was Eric Williams.

SCOTLAND'S CONNECTIONS TO SLAVERY can seem tenuous, almost nonexistent. After all, few vessels left Scottish ports for Africa to participate in the horrific slave trade. By the end of the eighteenth century, when England had a black population of about 15,000, perhaps fewer than one hundred black slaves resided in Scotland. Furthermore, Scots were in the vanguard of the abolitionist movement; and Scotland can pride itself as a pioneering abolitionist nation. A country that was about 10 per cent of the United Kingdom population contributed at times about a third of the petitions to Parliament advocating abolition of the slave trade. Iconic figures such as James Ramsay and William Dickson were in the forefront of the opposition to the slave trade. Moreover, in Duncan Rice's view, scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment ‘perfected most of the eighteenth century's rational arguments against slavery’. Scottish philosophers discussed slavery at greater length than their continental counterparts. Adam Smith's famous The Wealth of Nations contains a condemnation of the slave trade and slavery not only as morally repugnant but as economically inefficient. Is it any surprise that many general histories of modern Scotland fail to mention slavery at all?

But the essays in this impressive collection make clear that, if Scots think their country has few or no connections to slavery, they are sorely mistaken. In effect, they are engaging in a form of collective amnesia, for in fact Scotland's connections to slavery were extensive. Scots participated fully in slave trading from ports such as Liverpool, Bristol and London. At the height of the slave trade, a fifth of the ship captains and two-fifths of the surgeons manning slavers out of Liverpool, the world's major slave-trading port at the time, were Scots. The image of Scots, dressed in tartan, playing golf by the slaving fort of Bance Island, Sierra Leone, points to the quotidian nature of Scottish involvement in that nefarious business. One Scottish slave trader thought so familiarly of slavery that he named his vessel after his daughter. This book shows that Scots owned and managed enslaved people in many New World slave societies – from Maryland to Trinidad, from St Croix to St Kitts.

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.

BETWEEN THE EARLY DECADES of the seventeenth century and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, ships of the Empire carried over 3.4 million Africans to a life of servitude, and often an early death, in the plantations across the northern Atlantic. That figure accounted for as many slaves delivered to that part of the New World over the period as the vessels of all other European nations combined. At the peak of the business in the 1760s, annual shipments reached an average of 42,000 slaves a year. As far as the history of black slavery in the northern Atlantic was concerned, Britain by all measures was the dominant force.

The system of bondage practised was chattel slavery, where the enslaved became the property of their masters until death, like their beasts of the field or their household plenishings, with no legal right to be treated as humans and with all the potential for exploitation and degradation which could accompany that helpless condition. The progeny of enslaved women also became the property of their masters at birth, either to be sold on from the plantation where they had been born or to spend their lives in hard labour within its bounds in perpetual servitude. Those modern sceptics who consider the contemporary poor at home, often eking out a miserable existence, or the indentured white servants in the transatlantic colonies, to be just as oppressed as black slaves, fail to take account of that stark and fundamental distinction. Colonial servants were bondsmen, indentured to labour, often under harsh conditions, but their contracts were not for life but for specific periods, usually an average of four to seven years, and were enforceable at law.

Throughout the Americas, the enormous increase in the output of the exotic commodities of sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo and rum destined for consumption in Europe would have been impossible without the magnitude of black enslavement. The extreme risks to the health of whites in the tropics and the arduous climatic conditions of the transatlantic plantations made it impossible to attract European field workers by the late seventeenth century on anything like the numbers required by the intensity of the new capitalist agriculture.

WALTER SCOTT'S HISTORICAL FICTION Rob Roy, written in 1817, is set around the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. The century between the time of action and the time of writing had seen the city of Glasgow become a major Atlantic port, the flourishing of the Enlightenment, the defeat of the Jacobite claim to the throne, the solidification of an apparently enduring political union with England, the expansion of the empire to west and east, and the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 which brought an apparently conclusive victory to almost constant war with an imperial rival. During this time, Britain became the leading slavetrading nation from Africa to the Americas, before latterly abolishing the trade; a feature intimately intertwined with the more familiar ‘national story’ in ways that are only beginning to be fully recognised. In the novel's narrative present, the union of 1707 still struggles for credibility, the restoration of the House of Stuart over the Hanoverian usurpers seems both achievable and urgent, and the rule of state law carries little weight over large areas where glamorous brigands like Rob Roy roam. Into this landscape, the arrival of limes signifies a fresh new beginning. The ‘exotic’ green Caribbean citrus fruit mixes in the punch bowl with classical European brandy (not rum) creating a zesty transatlantic cocktail suggestive of the kinds of delights that the Union and Empire can bring to Scotland. The drinkers ‘found the liquor exceedingly palatable’.

THOSE WHO HAVE WRITTEN this book are aware that they have not engaged in any ordinary academic exercise. Its findings may provoke not only interest but also argument and controversy well beyond the world of scholarship. This would not be surprising. The study deals with big issues: a suggested reinterpretation of part of a nation's past, its beliefs and sense of itself. Readers of the book therefore should be assured that all contributors are bound by the classic credo of historical scholarship – to aspire towards convincing conclusions based on professional scrutiny of relevant and representative evidence without either fear or favour.

The immense scale and duration over two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire was bound to leave its mark on the history of the four nations of the United Kingdom. Equally, the depth and range of the impact was likely to vary significantly between them. This study suggests that the effect was relatively minor in the case of Ireland and Wales but much more significant for England and Scotland.

The relationship between England and slavery has long been recognised and understood, the linkages with Scotland much less so. Indeed, for more than a century and a half, any such connections were mainly lost to history as a comforting myth took root and then flourished that the Scots had little to do with the history of the enslaved. It was believed that the ‘nefarious trade’ in human beings within the Empire was always an English monopoly and never a Scottish preserve. After all, Scots had long taken pride in the Calvinist tradition of the equality of souls before God and the sentiments of shared humanity articulated most eloquently in the immortal words of the national bard, Robert Burns, ‘a Man's a Man for a’ that … That Man to Man, the world o'er Shall brothers be for a’ that’.

Moreover, the Christian values of the nation coupled with the progressive thought and humane sympathies of the Scottish Enlightenment eventually inspired many Scots to play a leading and well-documented role in the successful campaigns for abolition of the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself within the British Empire in 1833 and then to become passionately involved in the global crusade to confront that moral evil throughout Africa and the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century.

ALTHOUGH, IN THE PLANTATIONS, they have laid hold of the poor blacks and made slaves of them, yet I do not think that that is agreeable to humanity, not to say to the Christian religion. Is a man a slave because he is black? No. He is our brother; and he is a man, though not our colour, he is in the land of liberty, with his wife and child, let him remain there.’ Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, addressed these words in January 1788 to his fellow judges in the Court of Session in Edinburgh. They found, by a majority of eight to four, that the state of slavery was not recognised by the laws of Scotland, and Joseph Knight, a slave from Jamaica, was freed from the service of Sir John Wedderburn of Ballindean in Perthshire.

There are distinct threads that run through Scottish thinking on slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two of which found an echo in Auchinleck's statement. The Scottish intelligentsia, possibly feeling the loss of national identity in the wake of the Union, were concerned about a self-image that encapsulated civilisation and humanity. Scots may have had an unusually harsh reputation in the colonies for their treatment of slaves, but they were keen to hide that from their countrymen at home. Robert Burns's poignant The Slave's Lament touched a popular chord, as did other poems proclaiming human feeling for others, even though the author was within an ace of sailing for Jamaica to help run a slave plantation.

Another obvious strand was commerce. The fact that the wealth of Glasgow and other parts of Scotland, based on tobacco, sugar and cotton, was dependent on slavery, is demonstrated in Chapter 11. Scottish mariners were extensively involved in the slave trade, and Scottish cheap linen clothed bondsmen and women in the plantations. In a bizarre twist, those caddying for ships’ captains on a two-hole golf course on Bance Island, the slave station on the Sierra Leone river, were dressed in tartan manufactured in Bannockburn. Economic ties with the trade and plantation slavery were emphasised by those who opposed the moves for abolition. The Glasgow Courier carried continuous reminders of this, with castigation of any who argued against the slave trade.