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.

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.