Bought & Sold E-Book

Kate Phillips

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 418

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This book traces the story of how and why thousands of Scots made money from buying and selling humans… a story we need to own. We need to admit that many Scots were enthusiastic participants in slavery. Union with England gave Scotland access to both trade and settlement in Jamaica, Britain's richest colony and its major slave trading hub. Tens of thousands from Scotland lived and worked there. The abolition campaign and slave revolts threatened Scottish plantation owners, merchants, traders, bankers and insurance brokers who made their fortunes from slave-farmed sugar in Jamaica and fought hard to preserve the system of slavery. Archives and parliamentary papers in both countries reveal these transatlantic Scots in their own words and allow us to access the lives of their captives.  Scotland and Jamaica were closely entwined for over one hundred years. Bought & Sold traces this shared story from its early beginnings in the 1700s to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and reflects on the meaning of those years for both nations today.

Leseprobe

KATE PHILLIPS is a social development specialist. For over 40 years, she researched, taught and prepared educational material for rights activists, trade unionists, members of parliaments and would-be politicians in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Pacific Islands, where she travelled widely. She has a particular interest in women’s lives and organisations in Africa. For many years she directed a postgraduate fellowship awarded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and held in the University of Glasgow which brought rights activists from troubled countries in Africa and the Middle East to study in Scotland.

First published 2022

ISBN: 978-1-80425-028-0

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon by Lapiz

© Kate Phillips 2022

Contents

Notes on language and money

List of illustrations

Timeline

Acknowledgements

Preface: Freeing our minds

CHAPTER 1 Seeking a fortune

CHAPTER 2 The planters

CHAPTER 3 The enslaved men and women

CHAPTER 4 A different kind of brethren

CHAPTER 5 Scottish traders

CHAPTER 6 Inventing apartheid

CHAPTER 7 Commerce or morality?

CHAPTER 8 The fight to abolish the slave trade

CHAPTER 9 Keeping everything under control

CHAPTER 10 The civilising mission

CHAPTER 11 Anti-slavery campaign revived

CHAPTER 12 A general uprising of slaves

CHAPTER 13 Learning to become wage labourers?

Endnotes

Bibliography

Notes on language and money

LANGUAGE. DURING THE period covered by this book, many Scots were adapting their names to an English spelling; at that time, English itself was not completely standardised. Modern Jamaica has retained some original old Scottish spellings for people and places, such as the plantation Argyle, which retains the old spelling, while the place in Scotland is now spelt Argyll. The language used by slaves was evolving, too, with rhythms and constructions from African tongues applied to European words. To help with continuity and for ease of reading, I have standardised some of these spellings, except when quoting letters, documents and voices where the original spelling is more appropriate. When quoting directly from letters, I have therefore kept the writer’s own words, complete with their use of capital letters and sometimes random spelling and punctuation.

Money. Jamaica did not have its own currency during the 18th century. Various coins and currencies were in circulation on the island at that time. Pounds were used as the unit of measure for transactions between Europeans and their estates, and sometimes between white men and the black community. Annual salaries for white men were expressed in pounds and often paid in Britain. When Scots talked of pounds, we should assume they were talking of pounds sterling; Scottish pounds were abolished in 1707, though they were still occasionally used for reckoning. There were 240 pence or 20 shillings in a pound. A shilling was therefore worth 12 pence. It is difficult to compare what a pound would buy in England, Jamaica or Scotland, as its value was volatile throughout the century. In 1750, an English pound was worth almost £220 at today’s prices, though it bought less in later years. A skilled slave worth £50 to £100 was therefore as valuable as a good second-hand car today. A pistole was a widely used Spanish gold coin, though the word is French. It was the equivalent of almost one English pound. ‘Bits’ or ‘bitts’ were the small coins in use in Virginia and Jamaica for day-to-day transactions, such as paying for vegetables and sex. In the first half of the 18th century, slaves were hired to others for two or three bitts a day.

List of illustrations

1. Map of Scotland in 1750.

2. Map of Jamaica in 1749.

3. Kingston Harbour, from above the town. Drawing by James Hakewill from A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London: Cox and Baylis, 1823).

4. Simon Taylor’s Holland Estate. Drawing by James Hakewill from A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London: Cox and Baylis, 1823).

5. List of Pemberton Valley enslaved men and women. Hamilton Family papers. AA/DC17/113 1 January 1756 (reproduced by permission, Ayrshire Council Archives).

6. List of Pemberton Valley enslaved children. Hamilton Family papers. AA/DC17/113 1 January 1756 (reproduced by permission, Ayrshire Council Archives).

7. Trinity Estate, among those captured by Tacky in 1759. Drawing by James Hakewill from A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London: Cox and Baylis, 1823).

8. Port Maria showing the sugar works of Frontier Estate also captured by Tacky in 1759. Drawing by James Hakewill from A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London: Cox and Baylis, 1823).

9. Golden Vale, home to 500 slaves. Drawing by James Hakewill from A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London: Cox and Baylis, 1823).

10. Montego Bay. Drawing by James Hakewill from A Pic-turesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London: Cox and Baylis, 1823).

11. The sugar harvest, cutting canes. Ten Views in the Island of Antigua (London: Thomas Clay, 1823) via British Library,https://unsplash.com/photos/atIgjLlFryg.

12. The sugar harvest, milling the cane. Cut canes had to be crushed in mills which were turned by wind, water or animals. Ten Views in the Island of Antigua (London: Thomas Clay, 1823) via British Library,https://unsplash.com/photos/Sh3FPP0uOug.

13. Treadmill, Jamaica 1837. Widely used when slaves became apprentices and planters’ use of violence was outlawed. Copy-right British Library Board, Tr.148(k).

14. Pamphlet explaining why households should boycott sugar. Printed in Sunderland in 1791.

15. Flogging men and women to instil obedience. Printed for J Hatchard and son, c 1825, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540 USA.

Timeline

1660s

Small sugar houses in Glasgow are refining Caribbean sugar.

1707

Act of Union. Scotland joins England and Wales to form Great Britain. Scots sugar trade now protected from piracy and competition by the British navy.

1707

Jamaica becomes a British Colony. Scots take up land in Jamaica.

1728

Maroons (indigenous Jamaicans [Taíno] and escaped slaves) fight British authorities for control of land in Jamaica.

1738

Philosopher Francis Hutcheson publishes System of Moral Philosophy, which warns that Scots buying, selling and owning slaves are allowing ‘the high prospect of gain’ to ‘stupefy their consciences’.

1740

After ten years of fighting, Britain is forced to sign peace treaties with the Maroons. Maroon land in Jamaica recognised on condition they return ‘runaway slaves’.

1740

Philosopher David Hume publishes his thoughts on Africans: ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to whites’.

1744

Jamaican sugar exports now worth £703,000.

1744–8

Britain at war in Europe; French encourage rebellion in Scotland.

1746

Sons of rebel families escape to Jamaica.

1748

Scottish Consortium of Grants, Boyds and Oswalds buy Bunce Island Fort, where Africans are kept like cattle before shipment to colonies.

1752

Royal monopoly over slave trade ends; Scottish merchants and traders invest fortunes in Liverpool, Bristol and Kingston, Jamaica.

1754

Maroon revolt brutally put down.

1760

Tacky, leader of enslaved people, attempts to capture five estates which are brutally reclaimed, but unrest continues for several years.

1762

Jamaican sugar exports now worth £1,003,290.

1765

Merchants invest in industrial-scale sugar refineries on lower Clyde.

1770

James Beattie’s thoughts on slavery make him a popular bestselling writer. An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth argues that commerce cannot take precedence over justice to fellow human beings. David Hume calls Beattie ‘a pretend philosopher’.

1774

Lord Kames argues in Sketches on the History of Man that Africans might be an entirely different species.

1775–83

American War of Independence. Britain fears loss of further colonies such as Jamaica.

1776

Martial Law imposed to control continuing and widespread rebellions amongst slaves seeking their freedom.

1787

Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade formed in England.

1788

Anti-Slavery Committee established in Edinburgh.

1788

Privy Council enquires into nature of slavery.

1789

French Revolution overthrows monarchy, leading to widespread repression in Britain.

1792

Scottish Anti-Slavery Committee sends out ‘Address to the people of Scotland’, resulting in anti-slavery petitions being sent to Westminster from religious groups all over the country.

1792

Wilberforce tables bill for abolition of the slave trade. Bill derailed when Dundas adds ‘gradual’ before the word abolition.

1805

Jamaica now has 280,000 slaves; those who die young are replaced by thousands more imports.

1807

Trade in slaves is finally abolished.

1823

Anti-Slavery Campaign revived to work towards the end of the institution of slavery. The Jamaican Assembly refuses to implement the British Government’s agreed plan to improve the lives of slaves.

1824

Slaves fight for the implementation of the rights granted to them by the British Government. John Clarke, John Miller and Ben Reynolds, revolutionaries from Argyle Estate, kill themselves and die free rather than be hanged as slaves. Argyle gains symbolic meaning for the slave community.

1826

Questions in British Parliament about perversion of justice in Jamaica during ‘recent slave trials’.

1831

Governor of Jamaica reports that despite his efforts to get the Jamaican Assembly to agree upon limited rights for slaves, there is no hope of the Jamaican Assembly approving them.

1831

Jamaica now has 300,000 surviving slaves.

1831–2

In the final revolt, 60,000 enslaved men and women stop work to protest their conditions and demand rights, led by black Baptist deacon Samuel Sharpe. Missionary activity blamed for slave unrest.

1832

Colonial Church Union formed to violently oppose missionary activity in Jamaica. Planters Campbell, Grant, Oswald, McDowel and Napier organise the Trelawny branch.

1834

British Government decrees all slaves over six years old must become ‘apprenticed labourers’ until 1838.

1834

Compensation of £20 million paid to former slave owners. Apprenticeship abandoned.

Acknowledgements

LET ME BEGIN BY thanking the people of Brighton District, Jamaica who first made me question the idea that the mission to end slavery had righted wrongs done to their country and its people. I also want to thank Roger Thompson in his homemade cabin in the Blue Mountains, who shared his love of preserved fish, oat porridge and so much more from our joint past. I also benefited from many chance conversations and kind encounters which led me on a distressing, complicated, but fascinating journey towards a better understanding of our history. Abey Ina Billow spurred me on with messages from the far north of Kenya, rebuking me for introducing students like him to Glasgow without discussing slavery, an omission I needed to correct. Once I had a first draft, Brenda Graham helped immensely by volunteering to read, comment on and correct my text, and Susan Dalgety offered a crucial suggestion about how to introduce the story. I am indebted to all three of them.

Archivists in Ayrshire, Argyle and Dumfries were most helpful in identifying useful subject matter, in particular Claire Kean in South Ayrshire who directed me towards the Hamilton family papers and the minutes of a great number of local Kirk sessions. Thanks also to Sam Phillips for all his help with the illustrations.

I’m immensely grateful to my editor, Gwyneth Findlay, for making this a much better book by questioning my language, challenging my perspective and sharpening my focus. Finally, my husband Dave deserves a big thank you. He lived with my obsession for a whole year while I struggled to understand the whole story.

Preface: Freeing our minds

BOB MARLEY SINGS about the painful abuse that enslaved Africans suffered and the damage of slavery which lives to this day, a hangover from events long ago. His songs claim that we cannot properly understand and put right false ideas that we do not acknowledge. He makes a plea to all of us to ‘emancipate ourselves’ and understand that we need to ‘free our minds’.

The Black Lives Matter campaign has rightly drawn attention to the role of prominent Scots in slavery and the way some of these people are still celebrated in our street names and statues. It seems to be the right moment to revisit that period in our history and ask what the people of Scotland thought. How widespread was the belief that ‘Black lives’ did not particularly matter?

Before Europeans began buying large numbers of enslaved people in Africa, dark-skinned people were simply people. Before the 1700s, when my telling of this story begins, society judged status by wealth and ownership of land. The wealthy were high class; the poor were looked down upon. Those of a different religion were regularly discriminated against, even hated at times, but skin colour was of very little significance. ‘Black’ and ‘white’ differences were invented for a particular purpose.

This book uses two small countries, Scotland and Jamaica, to trace the story of how and why many Scots became involved for well over a hundred years in the buying and selling of humans and the crucial change this commerce made to our society, including our understanding of ourselves. As the book explains, the slave trade was vigorously defended by attitudes and beliefs that cascaded down through the generations to produce the long-lasting consequence of widespread racism.

It is worth reminding ourselves about the economic importance of slavery. Although Jamaica is a very small island, throughout the 1700s sugar production by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans made the island Britain’s most wealthy colony by far. It was worth more than all the tobacco from Virginia, indeed more than the whole produce of North America, to the British economy. Taxes on sugar imports and personal taxes collected from Jamaican slave owners and traders, together with massive transfers of private wealth, were worth many millions to the British economy.

In the 1660s, there were already several sugar refineries on the Clyde in Glasgow. The implementation of English laws principally intended to keep the Spanish and French from ‘stealing’ England’s lucrative overseas trade began to squeeze out the many Scottish merchants. Though subjects of the same king, they were interloping foreigners when it came to trade, unlawfully busy making money in the Caribbean. The 1707 Act of Union which joined Scotland to England specifically addressed this question, giving Scots full rights to trade and settle in the British colonies. The Scots took advantage of this opportunity, becoming major players in and around Jamaica. In the 18th century, control over enslaved Africans on the lucrative island of Jamaica became very important to Scotland’s prosperity. For some idea of how high the stakes were, the legislation which brought slavery in the British colonies to an end included a government payment of the modern equivalent of £2.3 billion (using Bank of England figures) in personal compensation to former slave owners, about 20 per cent of which went to people living in Scotland.

When I set out to write this book, it was not my intention to write a polemic on Black lives in Jamaica. I will leave that to a person for whom racism is lived reality. I could have written an academic text, a ‘whole history’ packed full of relevant academic references and arguments, but that is not my style, and this is therefore not that kind of book. I began with a simple question: How did so many thousands of educated Scottish Christians become involved in slavery in Jamaica, and how did they justify their lifestyle to themselves and to others? What did Scottish newspapers, popular historians, philosophers and the public think at the time? Did they tell themselves that black lives didn’t matter because white people were superior to anyone with a darker skin?

To address this question, I needed first-hand accounts. I needed to go back to the beginning, when Scots first crossed the Atlantic and encountered Africans. I ended up doing a good deal more research than I had anticipated. The question I was trying to pin down was both more harrowing and complicated and the results ultimately more challenging than I had first expected. Fortunately, Scots in the 1700s were literate and opinionated. Our forebears, even in the 1700s, sent letters and instructions back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. They wrote angrily to the newspapers and argued in Parliament about Jamaica. The place was important enough to Scotland to receive a lot of public attention.

The reason the resulting book is framed quite deliberately as a journey, a story with a beginning, middle and end, is because it is intended as exactly that. My narrative records the many reasons why people from Scotland crossed the Atlantic, the ambitions they had, where those ambitions took them and where that leaves us today. I try to tell it as far as possible through their eyes. In that sense, the story is written from a ‘white perspective’. The book ends with the end to slavery, but my research confirmed that the attitudes formed in the time of slavery have undoubtedly been passed down through many generations and remain with us in Scotland today.

The text is informed by wide reading of Black academic sources and writing by people who lived in bondage for much of their lives. For obvious reasons, precious few enslaved Jamaicans left behind written accounts of their lives in the 1700s, though remarkably some did. Wedderburn’s recollections of his white father’s predatory attitude toward the women he enslaved and his descriptions of his courageous, smuggler granny offer a rare window into their long ago lived experience.1 Most slave writing, however, was published, and sometimes rather clumsily edited, by white Christians in the United States after slavery was abolished. Though these accounts are very helpful, their time frame and attitudes arose in a more settled society. Scots in the Caribbean Islands were predominantly male, itinerant visitors rather than settler families. Jamaica had few resident white women and tens of thousands of young, enslaved girls. The result was a society where sex between white men and black women and the sexual abuse of young black girls was widespread.

Letters home to Scotland recorded much about life on the island of Jamaica: recovery from debilitating tropical illnesses, gossip about Scottish neighbours, explanations of how to cook turtles sent as gifts and the delights of eating pineapples. They included details of the birth and health of many Jamaican grandchildren. Family members replied from small towns and landed estates across Scotland expressing hopes for the success of Jamaican enterprises and the safe return of their adventurers. Newly arrived young men wrote to reassure family that they had safely made it, were receiving help from fellow Scots, and hoped to find new positions on the island. Arrangements were made for their children – some white, but mostly children of colour – to be sent home to get a good Scottish education. Successful planters invited friends to visit and view their island lives and arranged regular visits home for themselves.

Some of the language I use to tell this story needs explanation. It was some years before ‘white’ and ‘black’ were widely understood categories. I therefore avoid them in the early chapters of the book. Planters used the word ‘negro’, a word I quote in the text when reporting their speech or views. As I have suggested, ‘white’ was a category given to Europeans of all classes for political reasons. It came later in the 1700s when the need to keep the enslaved in their place became more strident as some children of colour and skilled slaves were mixing freely in white society. I use the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ when I am talking about that system, the institution and the campaigns against it. In doing so, I recognise how hard it is to find words which help us to escape de-humanising ideas and images of enslaved people. I want to rewind, wipe the images and rebuild for a number of reasons. The typical slave cutting and planting cane in the sugar fields was not a black-skinned man with whip marks on his back, though many thousands of such men existed, but a resilient, sexually abused, teenage girl. Enslaved girls thought of themselves as Africans by cultural heritage, and this is the word I mostly use to talk about them. Second and third generation slaves maybe thought of themselves as Jamaican Africans. Scots, by contrast, were ‘in Jamaica’ but never thought of or referred to themselves as ‘Jamaicans’.

In those years, the island had great prestige with which Scots were keen to be associated. Moreover, it was a place that was familiar to many, many Scottish people. When Scots left home for North America, they stayed there, but most of the tens of thousands of young men of all classes and trades who went to Jamaica came back to Scotland. They wrote home regularly. I spent hours in archives with their letters and carefully kept accounts, unwrapping their flimsy, yellowed papers, struggling with the curly flourishes of their script and imagining their journey across the Atlantic all those years ago. I studied the regular orders for nails, hoes, bed sheets, candles, butter and pearl barley. I read the writers’ thanks for the presents of pickles, cheese and sauces, safely arrived on the other side of the Atlantic. These letters introduced characters who spoke of bathing in the warm waters of the Caribbean and asking whether the barrel of sugar sent as a present for their grandmother had arrived yet.

Africans might arrive in Jamaica in a wretched state, but they also left homes, familiar foods and loved ones behind. They brought with them plenty of useful African know-how about surviving in a hot climate. Like rural people in Scotland at that time, they knew how to build their own homes and grow their own food. In addition, on arrival they were often trained to became expert masons, carpenters and distillers. In an effort to free the narrative from dominant images, I hesitate to call them ‘enslaved’ each time they are mentioned, even though they certainly were enslaved, but the word feels dehumanising. They were also struggling to be thinking, feeling, fully human beings. In an effort to restore some of that humanity, I prefer to simply call them ‘Africans’, ‘expert Africans’ or ‘field workers’. I call them ‘slaves’ when paraphrasing white thinking, reporting white perspectives and examining official views in order to emphasise that difference.

Scottish place names, smoked herrings in tins, oat porridge and folk with the surname ‘Campbell’ are obvious signs that Scottish people once lived in Jamaica. Porridge made with ale and sugar is a current staple in the Blue Mountains, a dish which was the centrepiece of Scottish harvest festivals in the 18th century. I had never thought of Scotland and Jamaica as quite so intimately connected. I was surprised to find that four of the six 18th century governors of Jamaica, those who were in charge when the sugar trade was at its height, were proud Scots. These governors received the second highest salary paid to any British colonial official. The post was one of huge influence. The Scots were active in all the Caribbean Islands; in many, they formed a higher proportion of the population than they did in Jamaica, but Jamaica, being the most prosperous, was of much greater importance to Scotland’s economy. At the time, it brought more profit to Britain than the much larger colonies of North America.

Shortly after I began my work on Scotland and Jamaica, I made a visit to the island. There I learned that not only Campbell but Thompson, Cameron, Grant and various Mcs and Macs are common Jamaican surnames. Several people I met claimed descent from Scots. I could see superficially that Scotland played a role in shaping modern Jamaica and that the island has undoubtedly influenced Scotland. Jamaicans love preserved fish, and Scots to this day have a sweet tooth. Without sugar from Jamaica, there would have been no Scottish shortbread, marmalade, tablet or boiled sweets. Enslaved Africans were fed from products which never grew in the West Indies and which today’s Jamaican residents still have a taste for. But tracking down the more fundamental ways in which the relationship shaped Scotland needed sustained work. Plantation books confirmed that feeding and clothing the enslaved population with barrels of herring, oats and linen cloth were good business opportunities on which many Scottish jobs depended. The cheap imported protein of those days has been passed down through several generations and lives on in modern taste buds. The slave diet of yesterday has become the soul food of today: salt or smoked fish with ackee in Jamaica and ham hock soup with greens in the American South.

Several of the rural shacks in which we slept on our visit to the island were obviously homemade. The plots on which they stood had been handed down from generation to generation on abandoned ‘capture land’ and settled by squatters. Like many Jamaicans, our hosts might roughly know the history of their homes, but had no documents to prove the little plot on which their home stood belonged to them. When sugar lost the protective taxes it had enjoyed for centuries and workers had to be paid, many European landowners simply walked away, still holding their proof of ownership of the land. The more recent tourist boom has created a potential for profit in the picturesque Blue Mountains, where runaways hid themselves long ago, and on the scraps of provision ground land along the seaside coast, where former slaves made free lives. Squatters are now being confronted by owners who want their land back.

My research uncovered that Jamaica gave Scotland so much more than sugar. Scottish doctors, working on slave ships and sugar estates, practiced the use of quinine for treating malaria and built expertise in tropical medicine. It was in Jamaica that doctors pioneered the widespread use of the live smallpox inoculation that eventually led to better survival rates for Scottish schoolchildren.2 Scots learned and brought home commercial habits from sugar estates that were later applied to Scottish land management and industry. The profitable business which attracted many to the port of Kingston, the biggest slave trading centre in the Caribbean, was the buying and selling of slaves, which many Scots moved into. They hired hundreds of Scottish seamen and sea captains who risked their lives trading slaves and gained valuable ocean-going navigational expertise in the process. Little real money changed hands in Jamaica. The proceeds of enterprises there were paid into accounts in Glasgow, Ayr or Edinburgh that were used for all financial transactions, including funds to buy shoes and underclothes for mothers and sisters at home.

Estate accounts and ostentatious spending by elite Scots, family wills and eventual compensation for slaves were all testaments to the money made in Jamaica. Some families made enough to be catapulted into a global elite. Since so much has been written about planter families and their estates, I was surprised to find that Scottish traders and merchants were more numerous than planters in Jamaica. Scottish archives brought home to me how many small traders made a living by loading their boats with Scottish produce and crossing to Jamaica, returning with cargoes full of sugar, rum and sometimes cotton from America. This trading brought various degrees of wealth to most of Scotland’s coastal towns, such as Inveraray, Ayr, Wigtown, Kirkcudbright, Arbroath, Leith and Dumfries.

Merchant banks in Scotland held the steady flow of profit from the sale of sugar and rum. These banks arranged mortgages for major land and slave purchases to be paid off year by year from Scottish accounts. The most opulent of our merchant families risked their wealth in equipping ships with barter goods for the transatlantic slave trade, establishing trusted kin in each corner of the trade linking Scotland, West Africa and Kingston. They spread their risks by joining funding partnerships for boats venturing from the ports of Liverpool, London and Bristol. They developed comfortable rooms in which bartering took place, out of sight of the slave holding dungeons and cages on the West African coast. They set up the slave markets in Kingston, Jamaica and stabilised prices by taking bookings for slaves, which were underwritten by guaranteed loans for purchase. They helped to make Kingston the most important hub of the trade, from which the enslaved were transported to America and other Caribbean islands. Scottish families over several generations played a substantial and lucrative role in trafficking the more than six million Africans who were sold into a life of plantation slavery. In the process, they helped to develop the legal and financial pillars of the British Empire and the resulting modern international capitalism. The risks of poor harvests and possible loss of valuable cargoes crossing the Atlantic were protected by a rapidly developing insurance business. Scotland’s leading role in banking and insurance therefore owed much to the buying, transportation and sale of enslaved Africans. Vigilance in keeping slaves chained down and locked up on board ships kept insurance risks as low as possible. On the plantations, vigilance and a strong record in extracting hard work and preventing escapes helped bankers to assess risk when granting mortgages.

These are just some of the many reasons why not every Jamaican wants to simply forgive the wrongs done to their people. Exactly how much of Scotland’s wealth originated from the sugar and slave trade and all of its associated industries is a matter of debate. It cannot be denied that profits made in Jamaica were transferred to Scotland. This nation therefore bears a significant share of responsibility for the enslavement of Africans, the harm done to the Black population over more than 100 years and Jamaica’s post-slavery poverty. There are groups in Jamaica today who say that Scots oppressed them, bled their country dry, got their money out if they could and returned home. If Scotland gets its independence, these Jamaicans want to put a financial figure on that harm and send the bill for reparations.

During the 1700s and 1800s, the columns of our Scottish newspapers took up Jamaican causes and reported the arrival or non-arrival of Jamaican boats in our ports. There were regular reunions in Glasgow where successful ex-Jamaican adventurers drank to their achievements. They fondly recalled their adventures in the sun and toasted continued prosperity to the island that had transformed their lives. So proud were they of the Jamaican connection that they named their Jamaican estates after their Scottish homes and Glasgow’s streets after people and places in Jamaica. Those who came home with wealth changed the look of our countryside. They refashioned the land they bought and homes they built in Scotland to look much like the grand plantations they left behind.

For many years, itinerant Scotsmen were preferred as overseers, bookkeepers and managers, experts in cracking the whip over the naked backs of the women and men who laboured on the plantations. At the same time, Scots in Jamaica enjoyed sex, both consensual and abusive, with enslaved women, leaving behind or bringing home a great number of illegitimate children of colour. Initially, the children born to white men with black partners scandalised their Scottish families, not because they were black, but because they were rather obviously illegitimate. Many Jamaicans have Scottish names. Their claim to being descended from Scots is easier to establish than the authenticity of a surname, as many Jamaicans researching their roots have found. For over 100 years, there was a large, itinerant population of young Scottish men living on the island of Jamaica. Best estimates calculate this population never dipped much below 20,000, but in the late 1700s and early 1800s could have been much higher. They accounted for about a third or perhaps half of Jamaica’s white residents. Many only stayed for five to ten years, but new adventurers were found to cross the Atlantic and replace them throughout the whole of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Graves in churchyards in Kirkcudbrightshire record 100 or more such adventurers who died in Jamaica but whose families had taken the trouble to chisel their names on the family headstone.

Diaries, letters and local records of births and wills, as well as Jamaican legislation to control ‘mixed-race’ offspring, allow us to estimate the resulting progeny of these young men. Scots were probably responsible for a third to a half of the vast numbers of those identified as ‘mixed-race’ children who were born to enslaved mothers in Jamaica over the years when large numbers of Scots lived there – 30,000 of over 100,000 children would be a rather conservative figure. The British Government required that a census of residents, including enslaved residents, be made from time to time. A figure for these official ‘mixed-race’ and ‘free coloured’ individuals is available for some localities. This figure would include only those children whose fathers had the cash to manumit/free them and all those children born into settled enough partnerships for their fathers to register themselves as the white parent. Thomas Thistlewood, one of the diarists used in my story, did this with only one of his several children, his son John.

Children in the census were a small subset of the children born of ‘black–white’ liaisons over the century. Many of the children of fleeting, coerced or paid sexual encounters, and all of those born to cash-strapped bookkeepers and trades-people, would not necessarily be included here. These children would grow up enslaved and working in the fields. Their claim to Scots parentage gave them no rights, and a specific parent could not be easily verified. Few children of colour were legitimate, as only free mothers could marry a child’s father. Children born to enslaved mothers were owned by whoever owned their mother. Their lighter skin could cause them problems. ‘Brown’ children were thought to be less capable of hard work, less biddable and therefore troublesome ‘field slaves’. Knowing this, and the brutal life in the sugar field, fathers, if they cared at all and had money, found them jobs in or around the great house or paid for an apprenticeship where they might learn a skill. These enslaved children of colour, who were the great majority of those of mixed parentage, had no surnames. They might have known who their father was, they might have used his name, but they did not bear his name legally. Wills of planters show that those children who did have a surname were rarely given their Scottish father’s name. In the African community in Jamaica, family life was rarely stable. The bonds of fatherhood were casually broken by the sale and movement of the enslaved or by white men leaving for home, shifting between estates to find better paid work and having great numbers of female partners. Yet African tradition places great importance on lineage, on belonging to a particular man’s household. Mothers no doubt told children who their fathers were, but proving paternity would be quite another matter. Christian converts chose a surname; most did not choose the name of their owner, for obvious reasons, even if someone from the estate where they lived was their parent.

To defend their fortunes, Scots helped to build and spread the idea that their ‘white race’ was morally, intellectually and culturally superior to the ‘black race’ they controlled. Scottish Members of Parliament, sections of the Scottish Press and many others vigorously and publicly defended this opinion long after slavery was abolished. We have a lot less evidence to help us understand how captured Africans made sense of their lives, how they survived over several generations and did so with more sanity and humanity intact than anyone might imagine. Africans exploited every chink in the planters’ armour to hold on to dignity and ingenuity amongst much sadness and degradation. They used what little free time they had to carve out a landed peasant lifestyle, using the plots allotted to them to grow their own food, which gave them cash from sales and helped to shape their Jamaican future. Planters feared and would have loved to curtail these developments, but they dared not disturb the enslaved population’s food-growing because they feared revolt, the possibility of which was always present. In the end, Black resistance and the legitimate demand for the rights denied to them, along with the unlawful white response, did eventually bring the system to its knees.

Our close liaison with Jamaica helped to make many Scots wealthy. Jamaican money invested in Glasgow and so many other towns made them the handsome places we know today. From the traders who dealt in slaves and merchant bankers who lent the capital to the pioneering planters who borrowed funds, from the Scottish fishermen and linen weavers who fed and clothed the enslaved to the medical schools that produced doctors and academies which trained boys to take up jobs in accounting, navigation and surveying, the gains were widespread. Those who produced the hoes, chains, candles, timber, water wheels, mills, stills, linen goods, furniture, leather and beef that made the outward journey to the West Indies as well as those who refined the returning sugar and rum were eventually drawn into the political battle over slavery. Many took sides simply to defend their livelihoods, but all of them justified their actions using racist argument and fantasies about white supremacy.

The final benefit, the last chapter in my story, was the vast sum of public money paid to hundreds of slave owners, large and small, as compensation after August 1834, when plantation slavery was finally ended in Britain’s colonies. This massive distribution of capital helped to build suburban railways, roads, canals and rental properties in Scotland. It provided some of the funds which underpinned the heavy industries that would make Clydeside famous.

The international cooperation to end slavery, though by no means the only reason why the slave system collapsed, was perhaps the first British example of a modern campaign that united many thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic in an ethical struggle. Those Scots who relied on biblical truths, all those who believed that ‘a man’s a man’ whatever his colour, had a different vision for their nation. They were the backbone of the movement to abolish slavery, playing crucial roles in both England and Scotland. Nothing quite like this great appeal to hearts and minds had ever been attempted before. Because the abolitionists won the argument and changed perceptions irrevocably, Scotland’s view of itself changed too. Eventual acceptance that slavery was incredibly cruel and morally wrong was a judgement on all who took part. New generations were uncomfortable with the levels of violence that had always been needed to enslave people. They rewrote their history to distance themselves from that era and obscure their part in building the system. The proud boast of the Scots in the 1700s – their hard-won wealth earned, as they described it, through a great deal of courage and ingenuity – was carefully hidden from history. The boast was transformed into an account of how enslaved Africans were rescued from slavery by dedicated white Christians.

Bought & Sold places accounts of the better-known history of the abolition campaign in Scotland into the context of the long, hard struggle for freedom from bondage by the enslaved themselves and ferociously cruel resistance to that struggle mounted by Scots in Jamaica. This book includes an account of the development of racist ideas and laws, the use of terror tactics to put down slave revolts and the Scottish planters’ violent attacks on missionaries sent from Scotland, which finally convinced the British Government that the slave system could not be reformed and therefore must be ended.

A powerful longing for a lost heritage and a distrust of white people remained in many Jamaican hearts, with good reason, long after slavery was abolished. People gathered in Augustown on New Year’s Eve 1920 to see a man called Alexander Bedward fly back to Africa from a breadfruit tree. Bedward claimed to have been sent by God to lead Jamaicans to their lost home. That people came to watch in great numbers illustrates the fact that Africa was still significant, that it remained somewhere deep in many Jamaican souls. Though Bedward struck a chord with black Jamaicans, the gathering declined to follow him into the tree until he had properly demonstrated that he really could fly. The crowd may have been sceptical about his flying ability, but most would have agreed wholeheartedly with his idea that, as the old slave saying went, ‘the devil was in the white man’ and should God ever send his only son to earth to save them, Jesus would be black for sure. The authorities were alarmed by such a large gathering of Jamaicans from all over the country. Bedward was arrested for sedition and sent to a mental asylum because lawyers argued he was mad and that it was best not to inflame his followers further.

Scottish culture retained powerful memories too. Scots in Jamaica lived for well over a century with the fear of an uprising amongst the people they enslaved. Ugly, racist views designed to hold down slaves did not end with slavery. The Edinburgh Evening News carried an article on 13 March 1903 headed ‘The Race Problem in the United States’ by T Baron Russell about the ‘the rapid multiplication of the black races menaces the United States’, claiming

If he remains in the States he will overrun them. America must either exterminate the negro or deport him. The former is out of the question, of course. The alternative course would be difficult and expensive, but is not impossible, and the cost will have to be borne.

The St Andrews Citizen of 29 May 1907 explained in a similar vein that ‘our brain cells are fixed in number, and black people have far fewer than white’. Churches were divided. The Christian church in southern states of America continued to put out racist propaganda which was accepted by Scottish papers without question. The Dundee Evening Telegraph of 2 September 1929 relayed with approval, ‘Hidden deeply in the heart of intelligent America lies the dread of the negro problem’.

Only the other day the clergyman of an episcopal church openly told the negroes present that they could not enter his church again. A touch of the tar brush is now sufficient to exclude men and women from churches.

Deeply embedded racism had day to day consequences. At about the same time that Jamaicans gathered to witness Bedward’s proposed flight, officials of the Glasgow branch of the sailors and fireman’s union ruled that no coloured man, even a paid-up member of the union (as many were), would be allowed to sail from the city. The memoirs of ‘Red Clydeside’ leaders at that time, Gallacher, McShane and Shinwell, who was leader of the seaman’s union, did not mention the widely reported incident in which Glaswegians stoned and beat up de-mobbed black sailors who were trying to work their passage home after serving Britain in the First World War. On 5 July 1935, The Scotsman newspaper reported that George Clark, an engineer, and Wilfred Henry Butcher, an apprentice blacksmith, both ‘negroes’ from West Africa, appeared in the Sheriff Court at Dumbarton ‘charged with being stowaways’ on a ship which had arrived into the Clyde from Freetown, Sierra Leone. The men, who spoke excellent English, had stowed away and once the ship was at sea had given themselves up and worked their passage. They were hoping to get to Liverpool to find work. The accused each had a British passport, but the immigration officials in Glasgow were not satisfied that they were British subjects and refused permission for them to remain in the United Kingdom. George Clark told the Sheriff that they had left home because times were bad. Sheriff Burns sent each to prison for 21 days. The Dundee Courier of 4 September 1937 reported the death of Rev William H Heard, an 87-year-old African American bishop from Philadelphia. He was identified as the man ‘involved in alleged “colour bar” difficulties in Edinburgh last month’. Bishop Heard belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and was one of 500 delegates who attended the World Conference on Faith and Order in Edinburgh in the previous month. At the time, he experienced a fruitless search for somewhere to stay. He was eventually helped by the Archbishop of York, who offered to share his room.

It is noteworthy that people of African heritage never settled in Scotland, the land of many of their fathers, in the numbers they did elsewhere in Britain. This was so despite the fact that the Scottish courts ruled in 1777 that should they step ashore in Scotland, they were instantly free and equal citizens, able to live and work in the country. Still, very few came. Scotland extends a warm welcome to those of Scottish descent from all of the white former British colonies. The diaspora has helped Scotland celebrate what it means to be a Scottish Nation and take pride in Scotland’s distinct place in the world. Scots are quick to claim Caledonian descendants in America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but not in Jamaica. As far as I know, no representative of the country was invited to Scotland’s ‘homecoming’ for overseas Scots. That there is likely to be a proportionately larger Scottish gene pool in Jamaica than in other former colonies is an uncomfortable truth.3

Jamaica is just 145 miles long and 50 miles wide. Though it remains a poor country, this tiny island has a global reputation far beyond its size. It continues to produce many of the world’s most powerful athletes and a large body of evocative music. Zachary Macauley, son of the manse in Inveraray, was sent by his father to work in the Jamaican plantations. He later devoted his life to the abolition of slavery and left us a true record of its evils in the hope that this history would never be forgotten. Yet just the other day, in his home town of Inveraray, I picked up a recent publication claiming to be ‘history’ which claimed Scots had never owned slaves. Such views should not surprise us. Our historians have carefully obscured the part played by our banks, insurance companies and landed families in enslaving men and women and using them to extract much of the capital which kick-started our development. We clearly have a long way to go toward wholly understanding our past and how it continues to shape the present.4

Glasgow City Council recently commissioned research from the University of Glasgow into the city’s involvement in Atlantic slavery between c 1603 and 1838. Their comprehensive report uncovers much of the city’s hidden history including; profits from the trade, prominent individuals associated with the city who owned or traded in enslaved people, associated manufacturing profits, gifts to the city from the proceeds of slavery and the political involvement of the city in defence of chattel slavery.5

CHAPTER 1

Seeking a fortune

Not worth a shilling the day he came.1

COLUMBUS DISCOVERED LAND on the far side of the Atlantic in 1492. There followed a long period in which the major European nations fought each other over who would control what we now know as North America and the Caribbean Islands. The English won Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655 and began to settle people there. At this time, the Scots were farmers and sea-going traders. Settlers on the other side of the ocean, in the islands and America, needed many things: nails and hinges, hoes and saws, barrels and blankets, candles and quill pens for writing home. Scottish traders were keen to supply them. A bit of enterprise and lots of courage were needed in order to make the six-week ocean crossing, but money could be made by loading up a small boat with goods to sell and making a return journey with the products of the fertile soil on the far side of the Atlantic. In the year 1707, when Scotland joined England to form Great Britain, Scotland ensured that the union agreement explicitly recognised its participation in England’s colonial trade. Through the Act of Union, Scotland gained the protection of the British tariff system, and her ships the protection of the British navy and the Navigation Acts, which kept out rival traders. Merchants calculated that an investment of £1,000 could be tripled over a couple of voyages to buy West Indian sugar. They were quick to exploit this possibility. The merchants in Scotland’s many ports wasted no time. By the end of the 18th century, there were 100 ships from the Clyde, employing over 1,000 sailors, trading across the Atlantic.

1707 was also the year when Jamaica became a full British colony, and the British government began looking for new residents. For the next 50 years, Scots used their new status as British citizens to arrive or send their sons to take up British Government offers of cheap land in Jamaica. Our story of Scotland and Jamaica begins with these early settlers and Scottish workers, many of whom arrived in the early to mid 1700s.

The island of Jamaica is not much bigger than the county of Argyll in Scotland, and it is much more mountainous. Scots who arrived in the 18th century cleared and cultivated land in Westmorland in the south-west corner of the island. Dugald Malcolm of Kilmartin, Argyll, was a junior landlord of the Argyll clan. He arrived in 1752 with several workers from home; men who could clear land, cut stone and shape wood for building. Letters home to Scotland are proof of a great exodus of young Scots like him from all over Argyll, Ayrshire, Inverness and the North East throughout the 18th century. Malcolm had been a transatlantic trader; he already knew Jamaica. He had also raised hardy black cattle on family land in Scotland. When he bought land in Jamaica, he began with something familiar: cattle raising.