THE 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:

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.

IN HIS MAGNUM OPUS, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously declared: ‘Under the present system of management, therefore, Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.’ Yet even Smith's authority could not lay to rest the question whether empire in the later eighteenth century was a drain on the metropole or a priceless resource of great material advantage to the mother country as it progressed towards economic transformation and industrialisation.

More recently, in 1944, Eric Williams published his seminal Capitalism and Slavery. In it he not only made a stimulating contribution to the intellectual debate which Smith's assessment had encouraged, but raised the issues to a more polemical and controversial level. His focus in part centred on the role of African slavery in the origins of the world's first Industrial Revolution in Britain. Williams himself described his book as ‘an economic study of the role of negro slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England’. Ironically enough, however, despite its later fame, if not notoriety, this thesis formed a relatively small section of a much broader study which also included the argument that mature industrial capitalism was ultimately responsible for the destruction of the slave system itself. At first the book provoked little published reaction in scholarly circles and only in the 1960s were significant responses forthcoming. They were unambiguously hostile. A series of thoroughly researched and carefully argued articles stretching from the 1960s to the 1980s sought to demonstrate that the ‘Williams thesis’ did not stand up to serious scholarly scrutiny. Thus, one estimate published in volume two of the Oxford History of the British Empire series concluded that the slave trade, though immense in scale, might only have added a mere 1 per cent to total domestic investment in Britain by the later eighteenth century. Scholarship seemed to have delivered a final verdict on the Williams ideas.

ON 6 April 1792 James Irving junior, a Scottish slave ship surgeon, met James Currie, an abolitionist and Edinburgh-trained doctor, at Liverpool Infirmary. The occasion for their meeting was a formal examination by Currie and two other practitioners to establish whether Irving had sufficient medical knowledge to qualify for certification under the terms of the Dolben Act of 1788. Irving and Currie were both from Dumfriesshire, and their places of birth in Langholm and Kirkpatrick Fleming were located only fourteen miles apart. In other respects they had little in common. Currie studied medicine in Edinburgh and graduated MD from Glasgow University, whereas Irving was a barber-surgeon whose more limited medical knowledge was built up through his apprenticeship to his older cousin and namesake as a surgeon's mate on slave ships. Their views on the trade in enslaved Africans were diametrically opposed; Currie had already written various condemnations of the trade, whereas Irving had displayed some eagerness in calculating the bonus he would receive depending on how many Africans died in the course of the Middle Passage on the Ellen in 1791.

Other Scottish surgeons, who either felt no moral qualms about the dehumanisation of Africans as cargo or who had become inured to the brutality of the trade, undertook a series of slaving voyages from Liverpool. James Irving senior (later Captain Irving) from Langholm in Dumfriesshire undertook his first slaving voyage on the Vulture in 1783 and five years later persuaded his younger cousin (James Irving junior) to join him as surgeon's mate on his fifth voyage as a surgeon. The Edinburgh-trained surgeon Archibald Dalzel became involved in slave trading following his discharge from the Royal Navy at the end of the Seven Years War. He accepted a position as surgeon at Anomabu fort in the employ of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in 1763, and was subsequently appointed as governor of the fort at Whydah in 1767. Born in Kirkliston, West Lothian, Dalzel also captained a number of slave-trading voyages during his career, including one from Liverpool.

THIS VOLUME AS A whole and many of the individual chapters within it explore the importance of slavery to Scotland. This chapter, by contrast, primarily addresses the importance of Scotland to slavery. It is based on work undertaken by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) project at University College London which allows us, for the first time, to locate Scotland within the totality of slave ownership in the United Kingdom and hence to gauge the relative importance of Scotland within overall British and Irish colonial slave ownership at the end of slavery. This last is an important qualification that readers need to bear in mind in assessing the evidence presented here, which reflects the end-position of slave ownership in the early decades of the nineteenth century and does not include analysis of the ownership patterns in the preceding two centuries of British colonial slavery. Nevertheless, the work of LBS to date both provides an overall context in which to place consideration of Scotland's role in colonial slavery and establishes an empirical framework for a synchronic comparative ‘four-nations’ approach to British and Irish colonial slave ownership.

The title of our project, Legacies of British Slave-ownership, was consciously chosen. The team comprised historians of England, steeped in English economic, social, cultural and political history and not equipped to do the same type of work in analysing national and local elites in Scotland (or Ireland or Wales) as we have done for England. But the single metropolitan archive at The National Archives in Kew which was the foundation of our work captured the universe of slave owners across all four nations (and indeed across the Caribbean), and we adopted the same practices of recording, classification and digitisation for the records of all slave owners resident in Britain and Ireland. As a result, we have accumulated, organised and published data from the four nations which we believe is of considerable value to those who can use it better than we can ourselves. We fully recognise that the connections between Scotland and slavery have been and continue to be the subject of active work based on archives in Scotland and the Caribbean.

IN FEBRUARY 1832, while abolitionists rallied their troops for a final attack on the institution of slavery, Archibald Alison, a 40-year-old Scot, issued a dire warning to the nation on the appalling consequences that would follow emancipation. Reeling from the ‘destruction of the constitution’ as a consequence of the Reform Bill, he argued that Britain was now facing ‘the dismemberment and dissolution of the empire’. ‘The vast and splendid colonial possessions of Great Britain, encircling the globe with their stations, and nourishing its commerce by their productions’, were, he warned, ‘menaced with destruction’. ‘The rash innovations of the mother country’ were enraging the West Indian colonists and driving them into the arms of the Americans. If slavery was abolished, he was convinced, the white colonists would abandon Great Britain. But sugar islands were not separate colonies of settlement, they should be thought of as a part of the mother country. The majority of West India proprietors lived in Britain and brought their riches home. A separation between the sugar islands and the mother country would be a disaster, not just for them, but also for Britain. In a flourish of his rhetorical imagination, Alison declared that the old country would be mortally wounded if the islands were lost.

His dramatic rendition of the dangers facing Britain in the event of emancipation was only part of the nightmare scenario that Alison evoked. The idea of abolition, he reported, was breeding terror among the West Indians. It came from ‘the same spirit of rash, ignorant, and impetuous innovation’ that had inspired the madness of parliamentary reform. Such a spirit was particularly dangerous in the Caribbean, ‘as the passions are more violent, and reason less powerful, under a tropical sun and among an enslaved population, than under the cloudy atmosphere and among the free inhabitants of northern regions’. ‘We’ have the interests of the negroes at heart, he insisted, and do not love slavery. But slavery was ‘a necessary step in the progress of improvement in the early ages of mankind.’ This was a truth demonstrated by history; slavery was coexistent with the human race.

WHEN THE HISTORIAN John Guthrie Smith majestically surveyed the landed estates of the West of Scotland in The Old Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry in 1878, he cited one family in particular that epitomised Glasgow's elite ‘sugar aristocracy’:

In his landmark study The Price of Emancipation, Nicholas Draper underlined the exceptional standing of the great merchant house of John Campbell, senior, & Co. On the abolition of plantation slavery in 1834, partners in the firm received over £73,000 compensation, which ranked the merchant house as the eighth-largest ‘mercantile beneficiary’ in Great Britain and the highest in Scotland. Given their prominence and the availability of business records, it is surprising the firm has not attracted serious attention by historians. This case study will address this lacuna, thus adding to a developing historiography on Scottish– West India merchants, planters and firms in the colonial period.

The rise of the firm in Glasgow, including capital stock and partnership structure, can be traced in some detail from surviving business records. This will be placed in a transatlantic context. The colonial activities of the firm will be illustrated through dealings with correspondents in Scotland and the Caribbean. Early commercial ventures in Grenada and Carriacou provided the foundation for the firm's later expansion into the frontier colony of Demerara, which was joined with Berbice and Essequibo to become British Guiana in 1831. Colonial operations will be outlined through deeds and mercantile correspondence. Finally, the firm's compensation claims and the financial interests of co-partners will be traced through parliamentary sources, and wills and confirmation inventories generated on the death of individuals concerned.

ALONG THE MUDDY COAST of Demerara, on the north coast of the South American continent, some of the slaves whose forced labour made others rich could earn a little cash for themselves and their families by catching large prawns. These were hawked around the scattered plantations houses and in the only larger settlement, Georgetown. Today we might call these shellfish Norway lobsters, Dublin Bay prawns or langoustines but the slaves, with what one imagines was a bitter irony, noted ‘the habits of these creatures in clinging one to the other’ and called them ‘Scotchmen’.

There was a large Scottish presence in Demerara, and in neighbouring Essequibo and Berbice, which had all been Dutch possessions until they were surrendered to British forces in 1796. The three colonies were not formally ceded by the Netherlands until 1814/15, later united in 1831 to become British Guiana, and now form the Republic of Guyana. They have received even less attention than the islands of the British Caribbean in accounts of Scotland's role in the British Empire, despite being the only British colonies in South America. Indeed, they often seem to be glimpsed only in peripheral vision, unexpectedly not islands although part of the West Indies and in the Caribbean.

Research led by Nicholas Draper on the records of compensation awarded to slave owners at emancipation in 1834 now clearly demonstrates the importance of British Guiana at the end of colonial slavery, when there were 84,075 enslaved people held there. This was an eighth of the 655,780 enslaved in the colonies of the West Indies but, as a result of the demand for labour in the sugar plantations, these slaves were valued disproportionally highly at £4.28m, amounting to more than a quarter of the total compensation subsequently paid by the British Government. The equivalent value of this sum, expressed as comparative purchasing power in 2015, is £367.7 million. Other means of calculating comparative value would give a higher sum. In both the number of enslaved at the time of emancipation and in the amount of compensation paid, British Guiana was second only to the long-established colony of Jamaica.