Scotland and Transatlantic Slavery: The Tobacco Lords and the Wealth of Glasgow

• The Clyde dominated Britain's tobacco trade. In 1771, the peak year, more than 47 million lb of tobacco was imported into Scotland, and more than half of the British tobacco trade passed through the Clyde. In 1758 Scottish imports already exceeded those of London, Bristol, Liverpool and Whitehaven combined. At the peak, tobacco made up about a third of Scotland's imports and, once re-exported, about two-thirds of its exports.
• That tobacco was grown by enslaved people. It came from plantations in the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland). Glasgow's "store system" gave planters credit, and historians argue that this credit helped planters buy more enslaved Africans.
• Scotland's direct part in the slave trade was small. Records show 27 slave-trading voyages leaving Scottish ports between 1717 and 1766, with four more financed from Scotland. They carried roughly 4,000–5,000 Africans. Liverpool cleared 1,011 slaving voyages in the 1790s alone.
• Scots were prominent as plantation owners and managers. By the late eighteenth century, Scots owned about a third of the plantations in Jamaica, Britain's most valuable sugar colony. Between 1771 and 1775 Scots accounted for nearly 45 per cent of Jamaican inventories at death worth more than £1,000.
• The 1778 Knight case. The Court of Session ruled that slavery was not recognised by the law of Scotland, so an enslaved man brought to Scotland could not be held as a slave.
• Scotland also campaigned against the trade. In 1792 Scotland sent 185 of the 519 petitions to Parliament for abolition, more than a third. Glasgow's magistrates and its West India merchants opposed abolition.
• The money left lasting traces. Slavery-derived wealth paid for mansions, banks, factories, churches and university buildings. It also bought land: beneficiaries of slavery made at least 63 estate purchases that today cover about a third of the western Highlands and Islands.
• Recent reckoning. In 2018 the University of Glasgow became the first UK university to publish a report on its own slavery links. In 2022 Glasgow City Council published an audit of the city's connections.

Before 1707, Scottish merchants were shut out of England's colonial trade by the Navigation Acts. The Darien scheme of the 1690s, Scotland's attempt at a colony of its own, ended in disaster. The Treaty of Union changed this: Scottish ships could now trade legally with English America.

Scots were already in the Americas before the Union, though. The historian Douglas Hamilton estimates that perhaps 4,500 Scots went to the Caribbean before 1707, and there were Scottish settlements in East New Jersey and Carolina by the 1680s. Some traded illegally, often through the Dutch island of Curaçao. In 1698 the Governor of New York complained of "a most licentious trade with pirates, Scotland and Curaçao". Hamilton also notes that the full benefits of Union took a generation to show: the tobacco lords' power was not obvious until about the 1740s. Devine suggests the good years began earlier than the official figures show. Smuggling and under-recording were rife: one estimate puts unrecorded tobacco at an average of 42 per cent of legal imports between 1715 and 1731, and English rivals believed the Clyde merchants paid duty on only half their imports in the two decades after 1707.

Glasgow was well placed to take advantage. Its harbours on the Clyde faced west, and the northern route round Ireland was shorter and safer in wartime than the passage from London. By the 1740s Glasgow merchants were the most aggressive buyers of Chesapeake tobacco. Devine gives the rise in Scotland's share of official UK tobacco imports: 10 per cent in 1738, 20 per cent in 1744, 30 per cent in 1758 and over 40 per cent in 1765. Within Scotland the Clyde took about 90 per cent of imports by the 1710s and 98 per cent by the 1760s; Ayr, Dumfries, Bo'ness, Leith, Dundee and Aberdeen had all traded in the leaf earlier. For the next quarter-century the Clyde was the centre of Europe's tobacco trade. The Virginia planter William Lee thought it "self-evident that Glasgow has almost monopolised Virginia".

Most of the leaf was not smoked in Scotland. It was re-exported, chiefly to France, where the royal tobacco monopoly bought in bulk, and also to Holland, Ireland, Scandinavia and the German states. Most of it ended up as snuff.

What set the Glasgow merchants apart was their method. London firms usually sold tobacco on commission for the planters who grew it. The Glasgow firms bought the crop outright at the point of production.

To do this they built a network of permanent stores across rural Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. Each store was run by a factor, usually a young Scot serving his apprenticeship. The store sold European goods such as cloth, tools, ironware and luxuries on credit. In return, the merchant had first call on the planter's next harvest, often at a price fixed in advance.

The system worked, and it bound planters to their creditors. Devine estimates that the debts owed to Scottish houses alone rose from about £500,000 in the early 1760s to £1.3 million when the Revolution broke out in 1775. Colonial resentment of those debts was one of the grievances that fed the American Revolution.

The money lent across the Atlantic did not come only from the merchants. The big firms borrowed on personal bond from landowners, trustees, tradesmen, physicians, army officers, widows, spinsters and university professors, so the returns of the trade, and its stake in slave-grown tobacco, were spread well beyond the merchant community. At home the tobacco merchants also invested in tanneries, bottleworks, linen manufactories, sugar houses, breweries and ironworks in and around Glasgow, to supply the goods their stores sold.

The labour behind the leaf. Chesapeake tobacco was grown, cured and packed largely by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Historians of the Glasgow trade argue that store credit allowed smaller planters to buy more enslaved people to raise their yields. Enslaved workers also did much of the manual labour around the stores themselves. The tobacco lords' fortunes rested on enslaved labour, whether or not a particular merchant ever owned a person.

At the height of the trade, a few dozen interlinked families controlled it. They are remembered as the "Tobacco Lords".

• John Glassford (c.1715–1783). Born in Paisley, he entered the tobacco trade in 1750 in partnership with Archibald Ingram. He became the largest Scottish shipowner of his generation. The novelist Tobias Smollett, who met him in 1771, called him "one of the greatest merchants in Europe". Smollett recorded the report that Glassford had once had 25 ships at sea, all his own, and traded above half a million pounds sterling a year.
• Alexander Speirs (1714–1782). He built the Virginia Mansion that gave Virginia Street its name, and was one of the richest men in Glasgow.
• William Cunninghame (1731–1799). He is said to have made much of his fortune by holding large stocks of tobacco when war cut off supply in 1775–76, and selling as prices soared. His mansion of 1778–80, said to have cost £10,000, survives at the heart of the building that now houses Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art.
• Andrew Buchanan of Drumpellier. The Buchanan family firms were among the biggest in the trade. They collapsed in 1777, when the war cut off the supply of tobacco.

The tobacco lords were famous for the way they dressed: scarlet cloaks, black silk, three-cornered hats and gold-headed canes. They walked the "plainstanes", a paved strip outside the Tontine where only they were allowed to walk. They paid for St Andrew's in the Square, built 1739–56, and founded Glasgow's first banks: the Ship Bank and the Arms Bank in 1750, and the Thistle Bank in 1761.

Glassford's family portrait. One painting puts slavery literally into the picture. Around 1767 Archibald McLauchlan painted John Glassford and his family at Shawfield Mansion. A Black servant, almost certainly an enslaved boy, stands at the edge of the canvas.

• The myth: for years visitors were told that the boy had been painted out in shame.
• What conservation found: he had only been hidden under dirt. The figure that really was painted over was Glassford's second wife, Ann Nesbit, replaced by his third wife after he remarried in 1768.

The painting now hangs in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. There it is interpreted as what it is: a display of wealth that included a person as one of the family's possessions.

Glassford's own agent in the Carolinas, Neil Jamieson, was involved in the slave trade there. Some accounts state that Glassford held plantations in Virginia and Maryland, but published detail is thin, and it is safest to describe his wealth as built on slave-grown tobacco.

established How fast the trade grew. The literary historian Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America (1975), summarises Jacob Price's figures for Glasgow's tobacco imports: about 1.45 million lb a year in the years just after the Union, 6 million in 1722, 13 million in 1745, 21 million in 1752, 32 million in 1760 and the record 47 million in 1771. On Price's reckoning Scotland's share of the British trade rose from 10 per cent in 1738 to 51.8 per cent in 1769. shared Devine's series, given above, reaches "over 40 per cent" in 1765; the two are compatible, but they are different calculations and should not be mixed in one sentence.

established A channel for news and ideas. Price noted that the Clyde ships reached the Chesapeake twice a year in numbers equal to those from the rest of Britain, so that for many Virginians mail, news, reading matter and politics arrived via Glasgow. The traffic ran both ways. Hook shows that the Scots Magazine carried a regular "Plantation News" section by 1750 and was still printing long extracts from American newspapers in 1776, the year the war cut the link. He also connects the trade with medicine: of 139 Americans who took Edinburgh medical degrees between 1749 and 1812, 65 were Virginians.

established Resentment of the Scots. The store system made Scottish merchants creditors to much of the tobacco country, and Hook documents how that fed hostility. In 1774 the Virginia Gazette printed a squib on "Scotch impudence" that ended with a Scot, helped by his countrymen, taking over the house that had let him in. In 1777 the Yale minister Ezra Stiles recorded a Scottish merchant's boast that the Scots had two-thirds of Virginia and Maryland "mortgaged or otherwise engaged to them". The Virginian Robert Munford's play The Patriots (1775–76) put three Scottish merchants, M'Flint, M'Squeeze and M'Gripe, before a committee of safety that votes all Scotchmen enemies. Munford was mocking the prejudice, not sharing it; Hook cites a letter showing that he had defended local merchants, probably Scots, accused of breaking the tea embargo.

established Loyalism. The resentment had a political basis. In 1776 the Scots Magazine reported that Scottish houses in Virginia had been destroyed and Scottish families had fled to St Domingue for siding with the government. Hook cites Wallace Brown's analysis of loyalist compensation claims: Scots made up 42 per cent of the foreign-born claimants from Virginia, 54.3 per cent from North Carolina and 32 per cent from Georgia. In August 1782 the Georgia Assembly barred any Scot from settling or trading in the state unless he had supported the patriot side. Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence complained of "Scotch and foreign mercenaries"; the word "Scotch" was struck out, and Hook, citing Richard Henry Lee's memoir, credits John Witherspoon with its removal. shared Hook explains the hostility by Scottish loyalism, commercial envy and resentment of Scottish clannishness, together with an anti-Scottish politics imported from England in the Bute and Wilkes years. The weight of each factor is his interpretation.

established Glasgow and the war. Glasgow's merchants at first opposed the war, and neither Glasgow nor Edinburgh sent a loyal address supporting government policy until the autumn of 1777, when, with hope of an early peace gone, each offered to raise a regiment. Hook points to T. M. Devine's 1973 study of the collapse of the trade for its consequences.

The American War of Independence (1775–83) ended Glasgow's tobacco boom. Some merchants sold up in time. Others, including Glassford, did not: he died in 1783 owing a very large sum, with sources giving figures between about £50,000 and £93,000.

The city's capital did not disappear. It moved, mainly to the British Caribbean. From the 1780s Glasgow's leading merchants were West India merchants, importing sugar, rum, coffee and, increasingly, cotton from Jamaica, Grenada, Trinidad, Demerara and elsewhere. The historian Stephen Mullen's study The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy (2022) traces this group from 1775 to 1838. Its members were tightly connected by marriage and partnership, sat on the city's councils and church boards, and lobbied hard against abolition.

Devine describes these "sugar princes" as a small elite of about eighty partners, with an inner group of a couple of dozen families. The biggest firm, Alexander Houston and Co., held assets in trade, land and industry valued at £630,000 in 1809; when it looked close to collapse in the 1790s the government stepped in, because its failure was thought dangerous to the whole Scottish economy. Below it came John Campbell Sen. and Co. (assets of £179,000 in 1814), Robert Dunmore and Co., Dennistoun, Buchanan and Co., Leitch and Smith, Robert Mackay and Co., and Stirling, Gordon and Co. These firms sold sugar, rum and coffee in Britain and Europe, advanced credit for the purchase of enslaved people, and organised exports to the islands. After about 1780 they supplied Glasgow's provosts, councillors and the officers of the Merchants' House and Chamber of Commerce. In 1807 they founded the Glasgow West India Association, which with its press ally the Glasgow Courier became a vocal opponent of emancipation in the 1820s.

The trade shift was dramatic. The West Indies took 21 per cent of the official value of British goods exported from Scottish ports in 1781, 42 per cent in 1801 and 65 per cent in 1813. By then the tonnage of Scottish shipping bound for the Caribbean was half as large again as that bound for the whole European continent.

The Caribbean connection went far beyond merchants. Scottish surgeons, overseers, book-keepers and attorneys went out in large numbers to make a fortune on the plantations. By the late eighteenth century Scots owned about a third of the plantations in Jamaica, the colony where the system was at its harshest. The Stirlings of Keir, for example, held two Jamaican sugar estates, Hampden and Frontier, from the 1720s to the 1850s. Their papers include a 1771 list of the enslaved people on Hampden.

Scottish industry supplied the plantations as well. Coarse linen from Dundee and other Scottish towns was sold to plantation owners to clothe the people they enslaved. Between 1765 and 1795 linen exports to Jamaica rose tenfold, and by 1796 almost two-thirds of all Scottish linen exports went there. Devine stresses how much of this depended on the state: a tariff wall against European linen, and export bounties from 1743 (extended to cheap cloth from 1745) that supported 80 to 90 per cent of linen exports. When the bounty lapsed in 1754, output of some coarse linens halved until it was restored two years later. Nine-tenths of Scottish linen exports went to North America and the West Indies, and after the American War the standard of living of many working families in Fife, Angus and Perthshire came to depend on clothing enslaved people in Jamaica and the Leeward Islands. Herring was shipped to the Caribbean as cheap food for enslaved people. Some planters made the link explicit. In 1766 James Stirling of Keir thought about dressing the enslaved people on his Jamaican estate in tartan, because "it will help encourage our Woollen manufactory".

Scots in the islands

Hamilton's survey in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012) shows how prominent Scots were in the Caribbean, especially in Jamaica and in the islands Britain took from France in 1763: Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent and Tobago. In the Windward Islands, land sales after 1763 suggest Scots owned 30–40 per cent of the land. Scots were the largest national group in the Grenada Assembly for much of the late eighteenth century, and some Tobago assembly meetings were attended only by Scots. Besides owners and merchants, Scots worked as clerks, book-keepers, overseers, doctors and especially "attorneys". These were managers who ran estates for absentee owners and held enormous power over the enslaved people on them.

Devine adds detail from wills and land records. Between 1771 and 1775 Scots held nearly 45 per cent of Jamaican inventories at death valued at over £1,000, and about two-fifths of all personal property inventories. When St Kitts was ceded in 1713, half the land divisions of 100 acres and more went to Scots; in Grenada in 1772, fifty-four Scots, over half the British landowners, held 40 per cent of the land planted in sugar and coffee. In 1750 over 60 per cent of the doctors in Antigua were Scots or Scottish-trained. The Jamaica network went back to Darien: Colonel John Campbell from Inveraray, a captain of troops there, settled on the island, sat on its Assembly and Council, and by his death in 1740 had brought out many kinsmen from Argyll and Jura. Edward Long counted about a hundred Campbells on the island in 1774, all claiming kin with the Argyll family. Lady Nugent, wife of the governor, wrote in 1801 that almost all the agents, attorneys, merchants and shopkeepers were Scots.

Absenteeism made the managers' role decisive. Devine cites a count for 1832 in which 540 of 646 sugar estates (84 per cent) were owned by absentees or minors. Devine argues that attorneys and overseers, many of them Scots, pushed production hard because they too wanted to get rich and go home, and that this helped make the British islands among the deadliest slave systems in the Americas. Around 1830 the crude death rate was 26 per thousand in Jamaica against 20 in the United States, and the birth rate 23 against 50.

Most were young, single men who meant to make money and go home. Slavery meant there was little demand for white labourers or artisans, so the Caribbean drew Scots with capital, education or connections, usually through family patronage. Until the abolition campaigns of the 1780s, West Indian wealth was regarded as a "genteel fortune", more respectable than money made in India. Hamilton's verdict is blunt: Scots who made money from the Caribbean "displayed no more remorse about the abuse of African lives than any other ethnic group".

Families often worked the whole empire at once. Six sons of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall made their careers overseas at the same time. George became Governor of East Florida in 1763. Alexander bought a 1,000-acre plantation in Grenada, renamed it Westerhall, and saw it valued at over £54,000 in 1770. John made £300,000 in India, and Patrick died in the "Black Hole" of Calcutta in 1756.

Scotland's part in the slave trade, meaning the shipping of captive Africans across the Atlantic, was small compared with England's.

The research of Mark Duffill and others has identified:

• 27 slaving voyages leaving Scottish ports between 1717 and 1766, 19 of them from Glasgow's outports of Greenock and Port Glasgow;
• 4 more voyages financed from Scotland;
• the first voyage, the George Galley from Port Glasgow in 1717;
• the busiest decade, the 1760s.

Together these voyages carried an estimated 4,000–5,000 Africans. In the 1790s alone, Liverpool cleared 1,011 slaving voyages.

shared Counts differ with the way voyages are classified. Devine's table, drawn from Duffill's 2004 article and the Eltis slave-voyage database, also totals 27 voyages but over 1706–66, and breaks them down differently: Port Glasgow 7 (c.1717–30), Greenock 14 (mainly 1760s), Montrose 4 (1760s) and Leith 2 (1706 and 1764), carrying about 4,500 people in all. On that reckoning the first known voyage left Leith in 1706, not Port Glasgow in 1717. About 3.5 million Africans were shipped in British vessels before 1807.

Devine is clear that the small numbers reflect port specialisation, not scruple: London, Bristol and Liverpool already held the Africa trade, so the Clyde specialised in tobacco. There was little sign of serious Scottish opposition to slavery before the 1760s.

Scots were active in the English slaving ports. In Liverpool at least five Scots managed slaving firms; of 128 slaving captains whose origins are known, 25 were Scots, as were 136 ships' surgeons. The two leading Scots houses there were those of Samuel McDougal, later a prominent opponent of abolition, and the Tod brothers from Moffat. In Bristol, the fortune of the Baillies of Dochfour, near Inverness, rested partly on slaving, and Robert Gordon from Moray profited from eighteen voyages between 1745 and 1769. In London about one in ten African traders were Scots in the early 1750s, and Scots sat on the committee of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa.

Scots were far more active in the trade from outside Scotland, especially through London. In 1748 Richard Oswald (1705–1784) and a group of London-based Scots bought Bance Island, a slave-trading fort in the Sierra Leone River. Devine describes a consortium of five Scots led by Oswald, Augustus Boyd and Alexander Grant, with the fort linked to about a dozen "outfactories" in the interior and staffed mainly by the partners' kinsmen and associates. Around a quarter of its employees between 1751 and 1773 were Scots. Between 1748 and 1784 the firm and its satellite companies shipped nearly 13,000 Africans across the Atlantic, many to Charleston and, Devine notes, many to Scottish plantation owners in the Caribbean. Oswald also owned Caribbean plantations and huge tracts of East Florida. In 1782 he was the British commissioner who negotiated the peace with the United States in Paris.

The fair summary is this: Glasgow's ships rarely carried enslaved people, but Glasgow's wealth depended on them.

Enslaved Africans were brought to Scotland as servants. Newspapers carried advertisements for runaways and for sales. Most of these people are recorded only by a first name.

Several of them went to court to win their freedom:

• Montgomery v Sheddan (1756). Jamie Montgomery died in the Edinburgh Tolbooth before his case could be decided.
• Dalrymple v Spens (1769). David Spens went free by default when his owner died during the case.
• Knight v Wedderburn (1774–1778). Joseph Knight had been bought in Jamaica by John Wedderburn and brought to Perthshire. He wanted to marry, live with his wife and earn his own living, and he sued for his freedom.
  • 1774, Sheriff Court: the Sheriff ruled that "the state of slavery is not recognised by the laws of this kingdom".
  • 1778, Court of Session: Wedderburn appealed, and the Court upheld the ruling by eight votes to four. It held that the dominion claimed over Knight under the law of Jamaica was unjust and could not be supported in Scotland.

Knight's lawyers had help from Samuel Johnson. In 1777 Johnson dictated to James Boswell an argument for Knight that ends: "No man is by nature the property of another: The defendant is, therefore, by nature free." Boswell printed it in his Life of Johnson (1791), then added his own "most solemn protest" in favour of the slave trade, a reminder that educated Scottish opinion was divided right to the end.

The Knight case meant that no one could be held as a slave in Scotland. It did nothing for the hundreds of thousands of people enslaved on Scottish-owned plantations overseas.

Scotland was home to some of the most important abolitionist arguments of the Enlightenment. The Glasgow law professor John Millar attacked slavery in Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks (1771; retitled The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks in later editions), and Adam Smith argued that slave labour was ultimately the most expensive kind. Francis Hutcheson's ethics of sympathy and benevolence also cut against the system. Devine notes the irony that these arguments were being made just as Scotland's prosperity came to rest on slave-grown goods, and that they seem to have had little hold on Scots in the colonies. James Beattie, professor of moral philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, called slavery "utterly repugnant to every principle of reason, religion, humanity and conscience" in 1790, yet admitted that many of his own pupils had gone to the West Indies.

In 1788 the University of Glasgow's Senate, together with the city's presbytery and synod, petitioned Parliament against the trade. In 1792, Scotland sent 185 of the 519 abolition petitions submitted to Parliament, more than a third, from a country with roughly a seventh of Britain's population. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paisley, Perth and Aberdeen all had abolition societies.

The opposition was just as Scottish:

• Glasgow's magistrates refused to support abolition.
• No petitions came from Greenock or Port Glasgow.
• In Glasgow, the West India lobby branded the boycott of slave-grown sugar "treason".
• In Parliament, Henry Dundas, the most powerful Scottish politician of the age, moved in 1792 that abolition should be "gradual". The trade continued until 1807.

Historians still argue over whether Dundas delayed abolition or simply recognised what Parliament would accept. In 2020 the City of Edinburgh Council added a plaque to his monument in St Andrew Square saying that he was instrumental in deferring abolition. The wording was supported by Professor Sir Geoff Palmer and sharply criticised by other historians.

Slavery itself in the British colonies was ended by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which came into force in 1834. The enslaved received nothing. Their former owners shared about £20 million in compensation, many of them Scots or living in Scotland, and the formerly enslaved were made to work four more years without pay as "apprentices" until 1838.

When the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass toured Scotland in 1846, his target was a Scottish institution. The Free Church of Scotland had accepted donations from slaveholding churches in the American South. "SEND BACK THE MONEY!" appeared on placards across Edinburgh, and Douglass and his allies carved it into Arthur's Seat. The money was never returned.

Where did the profits go? They went into Glasgow's merchant mansions and the streets named after them: Glassford Street, Buchanan Street, Virginia Street, Jamaica Street, Ingram Street, Dunlop Street, Oswald Street and Cochrane Street. Colonial merchants financed Glasgow's first banks and helped fund dozens of manufacturing concerns, ironworks and coal mines across the west of Scotland. They endowed churches, hospitals, schools and the university.

Slavery wealth also reshaped the countryside. Research by Iain MacKinnon and Andrew Mackillop found that beneficiaries of slavery made at least 63 estate purchases in the western Highlands and Islands, mostly between 1790 and 1855, peaking in the late 1830s after compensation was paid. Those estates cover more than a million acres, about a third of the land in the region. Their new owners evicted at least 5,000 people.

The size of slavery's contribution to Scotland's industrial take-off is genuinely disputed. Some historians see colonial capital as decisive. Others point to agricultural improvement, domestic trade and Scottish banking as larger sources. The money was real; how much it mattered compared with everything else is still debated.

The debate: did slavery help to make Scotland?

shared The wider argument began with the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams, whose Capitalism and Slavery (1944) claimed that the slave trade and slavery provided capital for Britain's Industrial Revolution. From the 1960s to the 1990s a series of studies rejected this; one estimate in the Oxford History of the British Empire suggested the slave trade added only about 1 per cent to domestic investment. From the 1980s historians widened the question from the trade to the whole slave-based plantation economy, and Joseph Inikori's Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002) argued that Africans' contribution was central. The debate about England remains unresolved.

The historian T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), argues that Scotland makes a stronger case than England, for four reasons:

• Scotland was poorer. Around 1750 it had lower wages, widespread subsistence farming, and a smaller pool of domestic capital than England.
• Its change was faster. Devine calls it one of the most rapid transformations in Europe before Soviet industrialisation. Only one Scot in eight lived in a town of 4,000 or more in 1750; by the 1820s it was nearer one in three.
• Its home market was small. The population was about 1.25 million in the 1750s and 1.6 million in 1801, so growth relied on overseas demand.
• Its industry was textile-led. Textiles employed 257,900 people, 89 per cent of recorded manufacturing jobs, before the 1830s.

He then traces three links. First, raw cotton: during the American War, Glasgow tobacco houses moved into the sugar islands, where planters made them take cotton with their sugar. Cotton landed on the Clyde roughly halved in price between 1776 and 1780, pulling linen and silk manufacturers into cotton. Caribbean "sea island" cotton fed the mills until the 1790s, when the slave plantations of the American South took over. Second, markets, above all for linen "slave cloth". Third, capital: about eighty industrial units in iron, sugar, glass and soap received colonial merchant investment, and forty-six textile firms. Leitch and Smith and Stirling, Gordon and Co. were key shareholders in James Finlay and Co., probably Scotland's largest cotton producer. Partners in John Campbell Sen. and Co. and Dennistoun, Buchanan and Co. put £70,000 into the £150,000 capital of the New Lanark Company in 1810–12. West India money also backed the Stanley mills in Perthshire, the Blantyre mills of Monteith, Bogle and Co., Robert Humphrey and Co. of Hutchesontown and the Ballindalloch Cotton Co. Colonial merchants helped found Glasgow's first three banks, invested in the Forth and Clyde and Monkland canals, and bought at least 140 landed estates in and around Glasgow.

Devine also sets limits on the argument. Landed commitment to improvement, education and skills, Enlightenment ideas and natural resources mattered too. The slave economies were important to the first, textile phase of industrialisation but had little to do with the second, based on iron, steel and engineering after about 1830. Money from India also flowed home, though it went mainly into land. His conclusion is that the Atlantic slave economies were important to Scotland's eighteenth-century transformation, not that they caused it alone. Other historians still weigh domestic sources more heavily.

For most of the twentieth century, Scotland told itself a comfortable story. Slavery was something English ports like Liverpool and Bristol did, while Scots were abolitionists, missionaries and David Livingstone. The historian Stephen Mullen summed up the attitude in the title of his 2009 book, It Wisnae Us.

That story has been taken apart over the past two decades. Devine gives a telling example of the earlier silence: the index of the Oxford Companion to Scottish History (2001) had one entry for the Caribbean sugar plantations, on linen sales, no entry for "slavery", and a single "slave trade" entry, on abolition. He also notes that the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade drew far less attention in Scotland than in England.

• Research: Sir Tom Devine's edited volume Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past (2015) brought together the research.
• The University of Glasgow (2018). In September 2018 it published Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow, by Stephen Mullen and Simon Newman, believed to be the first such report by a UK university.
  • It found that the university had received gifts and bequests from people whose wealth came partly from slavery, worth an estimated £16.7 million to £198 million in today's money, depending on the measure used.
  • It also recorded the university's abolitionist side: its petitions, its honorary degree for William Wilberforce, and its education of James McCune Smith, a formerly enslaved New Yorker who became the first African American to gain a medical degree.
  • In 2019 the university signed a reparative justice agreement with the University of the West Indies. It committed to raising and spending £20 million over 20 years and to founding a joint Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research.
• Glasgow City Council (2022). It published Mullen's audit, Glasgow, Slavery and Atlantic Commerce. The audit identified 62 streets and locations with direct or associational links to Atlantic slavery, 11 surviving buildings, and eight individuals commemorated in monuments. It also noted that Kelvingrove Park stands on an estate bought by a West India merchant.
• The Scottish Government. An independent steering group reported in 2022 on how Scotland's museums should address empire, colonialism and slavery. The government responded in January 2024, committing to take its recommendations forward.

"Scotland had nothing to do with slavery." This is false. Scots ran few slave ships, but they owned, managed, insured, supplied and profited from slave plantations on a large scale. Glasgow's eighteenth-century prosperity rested heavily on slave-grown tobacco and sugar.

"The Scots were slaves too." This conflates very different things.

• Colliers and salters: until the Colliers and Salters (Scotland) Acts of 1775 and 1799, Scottish coal miners and salt workers were legally bound to their workplaces, often for life. That was a real and harsh form of servitude.
• Indentured and transported Scots: some Scots were transported as indentured servants or prisoners.
• The difference: neither group was chattel slavery. Chattel slavery was hereditary, racialised and lifelong, and it treated people as property who could be bought, sold and separated from their children.

The comparison is used online to minimise Atlantic slavery, and it does not stand up.

• In 1786 Robert Burns accepted a post as a book-keeper on a Jamaican plantation. He gave up the plan only when the success of the Kilmarnock edition of his poems kept him in Scotland.
• The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow's Royal Exchange Square is built around the mansion of the tobacco lord William Cunninghame.
• Only the tobacco lords were allowed to walk on the "plainstanes", the paved walkway outside the Tontine on the Trongate.
• Richard Oswald, a Scottish slave trader, was the British negotiator in the 1782 peace talks that recognised American independence.
• In 1766 James Stirling of Keir considered putting the enslaved people on his Jamaican estate in tartan, to help Scotland's woollen industry.
• By 1796 almost two-thirds of all Scottish linen exports went to Jamaica.
• In Arbroath in 1846, campaigners painted "THE SLAVE'S BLOOD" on Free Church buildings in protest at the church's American donations.
• Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence accused Britain of sending "Scotch and foreign mercenaries"; the word "Scotch" was removed before the final text.
• In a Virginian play of 1775–76, three Scottish merchants called M'Flint, M'Squeeze and M'Gripe are hauled before a committee of safety.

• Figures are estimates. Voyage counts rest on incomplete records, and more voyages may yet be found. The "one-third of Jamaican plantations" figure is widely used by archivists and historians but depends on how ownership and residence are defined. A related claim, often traced to the planter-historian Edward Long, is that a third of Jamaica's white population was of Scottish descent by the 1770s. Hamilton notes that it is "often cited", but it was one contemporary's belief, not a count.
• Individual involvement varies. Not every tobacco lord owned enslaved people directly. Their wealth came from slave-produced goods, and the evidence for personal ownership differs from merchant to merchant.
• Today's values depend on the method. Today's money figures, such as the £16.7m–£198m range, vary hugely with the measure used: prices, wages or share of the economy.
• Causation is debated. How far slavery funded industrialisation remains an open historical question.
• Dundas is contested. His record is disputed among reputable historians.
• Glassford's debts: sources disagree on the amount he owed at his death.
• The peak tobacco year. Most accounts, including the Glasgow Story, give 1771 for the peak of more than 47 million lb. Devine's To the Ends of the Earth (2011) places the record "three years" after 1758, which would be 1761; this looks like a slip, and 1771 is used here.
• Shares of the British trade. Price's series, used by Hook, gives Scotland 51.8 per cent of British tobacco imports in 1769; Devine's gives "over 40 per cent" in 1765. They are separate calculations, and "more than half by about 1770" is the safe summary. shared Both series sit awkwardly with the claim, given above from Devine, that Scottish imports in 1758 already exceeded those of London and the English outports combined, which would mean a share above half in 1758. Until the 1758 claim is checked against Devine's source, treat it with caution.
• Voyage counts and Bance Island totals. Devine's own figures vary slightly: his text gives nearly 13,000 Africans shipped by the Bance Island firm in 1748–84, a picture caption over 12,000 in 1749–84.

• Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations
• The Darien Disaster
• The Highland Clearances
• Henry Dundas
• Robert Burns
• University of Glasgow
• Who Owns Scotland? — Concentrated Land Ownership