David Alston’s new book explores the prominent role of Highland Scots in the exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the cotton, sugar and coffee plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries. Read an excerpt below.

Slaves and Highlanders
By David Alston
Published by Edinburgh University Press

Historiography is not simply a description of the writing of history − it is an attempt to understand why history is written in a particular way. In this case it must involve an attempt to answer the question: why did Scottish historians not give more attention to the evidence of Scotland’s involvement with slavery? I believe that finding an answer requires enough humility to acknowledge that academics, including historians, are as prone as anyone else to the many biases inherent in human thought.

The study of Scottish history in the second half of the twentieth century was the creation, from almost nothing, of a substantial body of academic work which, allowing for healthy debates within the academic community, nevertheless presented an increasingly comprehensive and coherent account of Scotland’s history, especially for the period after the Union of the Parliaments in 1707. While not all agreed on the answers, Scottish social and economic history focused on key issues of industrialisation, urbanisation, agricultural improvement and radical change in rural communities, internal migration, emigration, the role of women in Scottish society and, especially towards the end of the century, the place of Scotland within the United Kingdom. In the Highlands, mere romanticism for the Jacobites was replaced by hard-edged studies of clearances, emigration and military service. The daunting task which had been undertaken, the success of well-researched and widely read academic studies, and the general coherence of the resulting body of knowledge had the result − as it always does − of establishing an orthodoxy, resistant to the idea that something big and important might have been ignored. If we try to understand why this happened, then we are asking a question, not about history or the study of history, but about the systematic biases inherent in human thought. They are the same biases which led economists and financial experts to ignore the impending crash of 2008 and which created resistance in the medical community to the evidence that most stomach and duodenal ulcers were caused by bacteria rather than stress and lifestyle. Fortunately the intellectual tools which enable us to better recognise such systematic biases have been provided by the relatively new discipline of behavioural economics.

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Some Scottish novelists, perhaps being more subtle storytellers, appear to have had a greater awareness of slavery than the historians. In a review of Arthur Herman’s overly enthusiastic How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Irvine Welsh commented:

‘Herman almost seems to claim that the ‘good’ things in the empire − education, social reform and engineering − were solely the Scots’ doing. The bad bits − racism, slavery, religious indoctrination − were down to others (the English). For example, it seems remiss to refer to Hutcheson, whose A System of Moral Philosophy inspired anti-slavery abolitionists in both Britain and America, while ignoring the compelling evidence of the Scots’ darker role in the slave trade.’

And Welsh also showed an awareness of the role of Highlanders in the ‘bad bits’ of Scottish imperial history.

‘While it’s refreshing to hear such an enthusiastic account of the Scottish ideas and practices that shaped the modern world, we need to offset them with harsher realities. Given the traditional role of Highlanders as mercenaries and soldiers, some cultures’ first contact with Scottishness is more likely to have been on the receiving end of a broadsword, bullet, whip, stick, knife, boot or fist.’

Yet Herman’s upbeat approach remained influential, still enthusiastically and repeatedly quoted in 2014 by Scotland’s then First Minister, Alex Salmond, during the referendum campaign.

In 2003 James Robertson published Joseph Knight, a historical novel based on a Scottish court case of 1778 − ‘Joseph Knight, a Negro of Africa v. John Wedderburn of Ballindean’ − in which the former slave won his right to freedom. Ali Smith described it as ‘a book which doesn’t flinch from the ceremonies of torture, execution, slavery and power, all the foul things people are capable of inflicting on each other in the name of fashionable politics and economic prosperity’.

So, had Scotland’s historians flinched? Not all of them. In the late 1990s I had become aware that, at the University of Aberdeen, Douglas Hamilton was working on his doctoral thesis ‘Patronage and Profit: Scottish Networks in the British West Indies, c. 1763−1807’. He was generous in sharing his research, in which he gave due attention to the networks based around Inverness and the Highlands, and when his thesis was developed into Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1750−1820 (2005) we had the first book devoted to the links between Scotland and the Caribbean. There was, as Professor Kenneth Morgan noted, ‘no comparable study’ and it placed Highlanders clearly in the framework of an extensive Scottish involvement in these plantation economies. Devine’s Scotland’s Empire: 1600−1815, published in 2003, had similarly devoted a chapter to ‘The Caribbean World’ and had begun to raise questions as to the extent and impact of Scotland’s involvement in the slave plantations, in marked contrast to Michael Fry’s The Scottish Empire of two years before.

The 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British colonies should have been the point at which Scotland woke up to its past. In 2006 Iain Whyte published Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 which, although focused on Scotland’s role in the abolitionist movement, also made clear the extent to which Scottish prosperity in the eighteenth century was based on slavery and the slave trade. Yet the material prepared in the same year by Iain Whyte and Dr Eric Graham for a planned official publication– Scotland’s Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Abolition: A Historical Review – was rejected by civil servants in the Scottish Executive as too sensitive. At the same time the Heritage Lottery Fund made grants available for projects which marked the bicentenary but a decade later, in her thesis ‘The end of amnesia?’, Cait Gillespie observed that:

‘Scotland took part in the bicentenary, but it displayed a lacklustre response. Only seven commemorative projects took place in Scotland, compared to hundreds throughout England and Wales, and to a lesser degree Northern Ireland. The National Museum of Scotland did nothing to mark the bicentenary.’

In the same year, Thomas Devine gave a lecture at the Edinburgh Book Festival called ‘Did slavery make Scotland great?’, which grew to become a chapter in his To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750−2010 (2011). At the same time, a team of scholars at University College London, led by Nick Draper and Catherine Hall, had begun a systematic examination of the records of compensation paid to slave owners following emancipation in 1834. As this progressed it showed that the compensation received by Scots was, in proportion to the country’s population, greater than that paid to people in England.

It was not, however, until 2015 that there was a further publication to complement Douglas Hamilton’s Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World and Iain Whyte’s Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery. I am proud to have been a contributor to Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection, a collection of essays edited and introduced by Thomas Devine, which was hailed by Kevin McKenna in the Observer as ‘one of the most important books to have been published in Scotland this century’ and by Ian Bell in the Herald as ‘an illuminating marvel’. There has been much more attention paid to this aspect of Scotland’s past since then, including material directed to a wider audience such as the two-part BBC documentary Slavery: Scotland’s Hidden Shame (2018) presented by David Hayman, who has continued to take an active interest in the subject. And in 2020 the Black Lives Matter movement extended the discussion to even more people.

If all that has happened is to mark a real turning point in the assessment of ‘Scotland’s slavery past’ then it must open new areas of study, begin debate and, in the words of Professor Ewen Cameron, invite ‘a long overdue national conversation’. Unfortunately there is a regressive strand in the discussion of Scottish identity which thrives on the false view that Scotland was a colony of England.

‘Nor is the identification of Scotland as a downtrodden colony any longer confined to the margins of political debate . . . The phenomenon is sufficiently widespread to have attracted the notice of outside observers. The distinguished historian Linda Colley–English-born but based at Princeton University in the USA–recently expressed her surprise at the number of Scots who believe Scotland’s relationship with England to be a colonial one . . . This is not only largely nonsensical as history, but offensive and insulting to many non-white, non-European peoples who did, in fact, find themselves oppressed or even dispossessed by the ‘British’ Empire.’

A consequence of this myth is that many Scots, once again, distance themselves from the reality of their country’s involvement with slavery and some claim instead to be fellow victims with the enslaved of a colonial past. In a single week in August 2020 the National newspaper published contributions which included the historian Michael Fry’s claim that ‘Edinburgh’s part in the Caribbean slave trade was minimal’ and a reader’s comment that ‘the vast majority of Scots were in no position to have either profited or prospered from the slave trade as they were often little better than slaves themselves’. A report by Iain MacKinnon and Andrew Mackillop on plantation slavery and landownership in the western Highlands and Islands, published in 2020, is a useful corrective to this, indicating as it does the extensive impact of wealth derived from slavery on the region and acknowledging that ‘culpability and complicity in the benefits of enslaving other human beings spread throughout the region and down its social order’. We might also remember Douglas Hamilton’s observation that, as the Bill to abolish slavery passed through Parliament in 1833, ‘. . . the preponderance of [pro-slavery petitions] came from the north . . . [and] of the sixteen places named in the petitions, ten came from the Black Isle . . . more than from the whole of England’. I hope that the following chapters will encourage a continued reassessment of the connections between the Highlands of Scotland, the slave trade and the slave-worked plantations of the Caribbean and South America.

Slaves and Highlanders by David Alston is published by Edinburgh University Press, price £14.99 (paperback) and £90 (hardback)