8. Glasgow-West India ‘spheres of influence’: embedding the profits of Caribbean slavery

At the height of Glasgow’s sugar era, James Morrison published a treatise on bookkeeping that included a Dissertation on the Business of the Counting House (1820). Originally written in a Glasgow mercantile academy in 1808, the work opened with a triple-dedication encapsulating the city’s legal-commercial connections – to Gilbert Hamilton, agent for the Bank of Scotland, John More, agent for the Royal Bank, and Walter Ewing MacLae, an accountant specializing in West India bankruptcies. The section on the Glasgow-West India trades contained some remarkable claims:

Of all the various employments calculated to promote public, as well as private prosperity, there is none upon which industry, foresight, and economy, have a more striking influence than that of the Merchant. An imprudent step may not only ruin his fortune and family, but, perhaps, the fortune of hundreds connected with him in Business, and likewise have a tendency to injure the Trade of his Country in general; while, on the other hand, a plan properly digested, and well executed, may not only establish him, but add to the prosperity of all those who are within the sphere of his influence.1

In doing so, the educator publicly acknowledged that the merchants in his midst were fabulously wealthy, but also that Glasgow, Scotland and Great Britain’s economic development was dependent on their continued success. And Morrison had a point, at least in a Scottish context. In 1820, the leading sectors of Scotland’s export-oriented textile economy remained strategically dependent upon Atlantic commerce. In 1820, Europe was Scotland’s principal import and export market. However, of £3.28m imports (by official value), 19 per cent arrived from the British West Indies, compared to 20.4 per cent from Africa, Asia, British North America and the United States combined! Of £5.89m exports from Scotland (by official value), 24 per cent was exported to the British West Indies, with 15 per cent sent to Africa, Asia, British North America and the United States combined. The export goods to the West Indies (mainly textiles) were the mainstay of the Scottish economy.2 West India commerce, and accumulation of mercantile capital, promoted wider public prosperity through the transferral of colonial profits into agricultural, commercial, industrial and philanthropic initiatives. The challenge for historians, then, is to define how deep and how broad the West India spheres of influence really were. This chapter examines the investments in life and wealth at death of Glasgow’s sugar aristocracy, in the process revealing how the profits of slavery influenced the development of local economies and societies up to the present day.

Demographics

Glasgow’s West India merchants lived extraordinarily long lives. In the 1790s, the average life expectancy in Scotland varied between regions: thirty-six in the Western Lowlands and forty-eight in the north-east.3 Adult death rates in Scotland only showed a significant decline from 1870 onwards and by 1912, the average male was only expected to live to fifty.4 Years of birth and death are known in eighty-eight cases of the Glasgow-West India elite, and they lived, on average, to seventy, almost double the expected age in their region at the end of the eighteenth century. These mercantile lives therefore spanned three separate centuries. One of the last born of this group, William Frederick Burnley (1810–1903), died in early twentieth-century Edinburgh. The presence of British Caribbean enslavers in Scotland is just outside living memory.

Their places of death suggest the majority lived, worked and died in the west of Scotland in general and Glasgow in particular.5 James Ewing (1775–1853), for example, was a classic absentee who seemingly never visited his properties in Jamaica. Some died in the Highlands and Dumbarton, while others retired to Helensburgh, such as Archibald Smith (1795–1883), who passed away in a smaller home on the banks of the Clyde. Around 10 per cent of the group died in England. The Malcolms of Poltalloch, for example, were based in London from 1771 but successive generations retained the family estates in Argyll and co-partnership shares in the Glasgow firm Stirling, Gordon & Co. Just two died across the Atlantic: George Parker in New York and Aeneas MacBean in St Thomas in the West Indies. The demographics reveal a mercantile elite that mostly remained domiciled around the west of Scotland for most of their long lives.

Figure 8.1 Marble busts of James Ewing of Strathleven (1775–1853) and James Buchanan (1785–1857). Photograph: the author. © Merchants House of Glasgow.

Glasgow-West India fortunes

This chapter assesses the nature and extent of West India fortunes by examining wills, testaments and confirmation inventories in Scottish courts associated with members of the Glasgow-West India elite who died between 1800 and 1903. Of the initial group of 150 West India merchants in this study, 105 were known to have left confirmation inventories (with seventy-seven associated wills and testaments). This sample of inventories is around 40 per cent greater than that compiled for the most recent study.6 Sampling confirmation inventories – analogous to probate inventories in England – as indicators of personal wealth is an imperfect methodology as there are issues with interpreting a ‘snapshot’ of wealth on death. The sources can underestimate each individual’s holdings in life and might not always accurately represent peak wealth. Moreover, inventories only list moveable goods, such as cash, stock and shares, while heritable property, such as land in Scotland or the West Indies, is not included by value.7 Nevertheless, large samples of personal inventories do offer insights into the distribution of wealth and investments.8 In this case, the inventories suggest the high personal incomes and wealthy lifestyles of West India merchants, in the process revealing major investments across the nineteenth century.

Transatlantic commerce in general and the West India trades in particular did carry a high degree of inherent risk. Natural disasters in the Caribbean such as hurricanes, as well as warfare and the loss of shipping, interrupted trade. And, of course, the enslaved themselves rebelled against their condition, which ultimately expedited emancipation.9 The volatility of the sugar market, and economic and political conditions in Great Britain, all affected business. Chapter 1 illustrated a notably high pattern of bankruptcy among the city’s early West India community. Across Great Britain more broadly, many mercantile proprietors became bankrupt due to the economic decline exacerbated by the abolition in 1807 and emancipation in 1834.10 Overall, around 10 per cent of Glasgow-West India merchants in this study are known to have been bankrupted in the course of a commercial career, although this is most likely to be an underestimate, since just under a third left no inventory at all.11 Nevertheless, over 100 Glasgow-West India merchants retained substantial wealth on death, suggesting most thrived to acquire often immense fortunes which remained with them throughout their lives.

The Glasgow-West India merchants and planters who died between 1800 and 1903 possessed combined wealth valued at £4,806,712 (105 individuals, an average of £45,788). The average wealth was enormous. The sum of £45,788 in 1851 (a midpoint of dates of death) is equivalent to £38.9m in modern values (relative to the worth of average earnings in 2020).12 The rise and decline of average wealth is as would be expected: rising inexorably from 1800 onwards, peaking after 1845 before a steady downward trajectory into the twentieth century (see Table 8.1). Between 1800 and 1839, average fortunes of the West India merchants were higher than those of other Glasgow elites, the cotton masters.13 From 1845 onwards, however, and consistent with Eric Williams’ view that manufacturing replaced the West India commerce that helped create it, the cotton masters left higher average fortunes compared to their formerly wealthier counterparts.

Table 8.1 Holdings on death of 105 Glasgow-West India elites who died between 1800 and 1905.

Source: National Records of Scotland: Wills, Testaments and Confirmation Inventories (see Bibliography).

But what exactly was a West India fortune? Not all the above wealth was derived from slavery, as some individuals held substantial interests elsewhere. James Ewing of Strathleven was at once a West India merchant in Glasgow, an absentee owner of Jamaican plantations, an East India merchant, a shipping agent and invested in industrial concerns in Scotland. His vast estate thus came from multiple sources.14 While it is impossible to ascertain which was the most profitable stream, West India profits were a mainstay among various other concerns. Others hailed from previously landed, wealthy families. Colin Campbell of Jura was a scion of the Lochnell branch of the House of Argyll who inherited landed interests and most likely a substantial personal fortune on the death of his father in 1835.15 While some of his fortune was based upon the West India trades, inheritance and agricultural enterprise would also have contributed. Nevertheless, the social background of those who left inventories suggests only a small minority hailed from ‘gentry capitalist’ families (like Campbell of Jura) who increased their already significant wealth and status through long-term connections with the Caribbean.16 Instead, it seems most hailed from middling families, especially colonial backgrounds.17

Slavery and its commerce certainly propelled some Glasgow-West India merchants and planters into the ranks of the British financial elite. William D. Rubinstein defined those individuals leaving personal assets of £100,000 or more in nineteenth-century Great Britain as the ‘wealthiest of their time’.18 In Glasgow, a super-wealthy group of twelve left £100,000 or more (see Table 8.2), most hailing from families already established in colonial business, supporting the view it took two generations to accumulate great wealth. The highest fortunes were left by Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch (1769–1837), who was worth £549,955 on death, and his son, Neil Malcolm of Poltalloch (1797–1857), who was worth £399,666 on death (they died in London and Brighton respectively). The wealthiest of all Scottish-based merchants, James Ewing of Strathleven (1775–1857), was worth £281,296 on death.19 Of the approximately 900 individuals who died leaving over £100,000 in Great Britain between 1809 and 1839, Nicholas Draper noted around 150 (one-sixth) derived some or all of their fortunes from transatlantic slavery, of which just thirty-five were merchants (c.4 per cent).20 Five of the super-wealthy Glasgow-West India elite died between 1800 and 1839, and since just ten individuals died in Scotland leaving personal property that exceeded £100,000 in that period, half of the nation’s richest men derived at least some of their wealth from West India commerce conducted in Glasgow.21 While Draper suggests that Caribbean slavery was not especially important to great British fortunes between 1809 and 1839, it was a different story in Scotland.

Participation in West India commerce created great Scottish fortunes, but there were no guarantees of success. The bulk of the overall wealth (over half of the assets) was held by the super-wealthy group of twelve (c.11 per cent of the group). On the other hand, the less wealthy (45 per cent) were in possession of just 8 per cent of assets (see Table 8.2). Nineteen left £5,000 or less, personal wealth that would barely have placed them among the middle ranks in Glasgow and Edinburgh (whose average fortunes were estimated to be c.£5,800 in 1822–4).22 Overall, however, almost a third of Glasgow-West India merchants were worth £30,000 and over on death, which meant they left greater fortunes than late eighteenth-century slave-traffickers in Liverpool (of whom just 10 per cent left fortunes exceeding this sum).23 West India commerce was more profitable than trafficking in enslaved people, on average. While comparative evidence of Liverpool’s West India fortunes is scarce, S. G. Checkland argued that the city’s ‘West India men were really in decline, enjoying the last great flush of prosperity’ from the 1790s, while the American traders [in Liverpool] afterwards took the lead.24 Similarly, comparison with Kenneth Morgan’s study of Bristol’s West India merchants suggests that Glasgow-West India fortunes were of higher value and more diversified than those made by Bristolian counterparts.25 Glasgow-West India trades made some fabulously successful. Others became independently rich, while a large minority acquired middling wealth.

Table 8.2 Range of wealth on death of the Glasgow-West India elites who died between 1800 and 1905.

Source: National Records of Scotland: ‘Wills, testaments and confirmation inventories’ (see Bibliography).

The Glasgow-West India elite’s assets were held mainly in Great Britain, with a scattering of investments across the Atlantic world. Of known holdings, 70 per cent were held in Scotland (£3,351,487), over a quarter held in England (£1,313,937) with small holdings in the West Indies (£37,006, or under 1 per cent). Twenty-nine individuals held property in England including two of the individuals classed as wealthiest of their time. As the only individuals whose English holdings were worth more than their respective values in Scotland, however, the Malcolms of Poltalloch – who permanently relocated to England – and Thomas Dunlop Douglas were unusual. Other merchants branched out into international ventures. Merchants such as Archibald Smith of Jordanhill diversified their wealth into the New Zealand and Australia Land Company. While some were involved with East India lobbying in Glasgow before 1830, it seems unlikely there was widespread commercial involvement in the Indian subcontinent.26 The wealth on death of the Glasgow-West India elite does not reveal any sustained investment in East India firms, suggesting that unlike enslavers in post-emancipation England, there was no large-scale ‘swing to the east’.27 The Campbells of Colgrain seem to have been unique: shifting from the West to East India sugar trade in the later nineteenth century, dramatically improving the family wealth.28 At least one merchant firm, Dennistoun, Buchanan & Co., diversified into Argentina and Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1861 and 1888 respectively. Thus, the major fortunes of partners such as James Buchanan of Dowanhill were probably derived from multiple slavery economies.29 Overall, however it seems that international investments were of negligible importance to the Glasgow-West India elite.

West India merchant firms

Merchant firms were the main facilitators of Glasgow-West India fortunes. Forty per cent of this group (forty-three of 105 confirmation inventories) held shares and stock in merchant firms in Glasgow at time of decease (see Table 8.1). Almost one-third – the bulk of the wealth in Scotland – was held in such firms. The average holding was £24,500.30 Of the merchants known to have died between 1800 and 1840, almost half held shares in Glasgow-West India firms, while of those who died after 1840, just a fifth held shares in firms. This significant decrease is explained by merchants removing themselves from business through retirement or bankruptcies after the abolition of plantation slavery in 1834. This process of removal was elucidated in the correspondence of John Campbell, senior, & Co.:

That the West India outstandings, consisting of debts and property in Estates, being greatly diminished in amount by Government Compensation money and other causes, the same extent of capital [£180,000] as formerly is not required [my italics] to hold the property and carry on the business of the concern and the capital shall be accordingly reduced.31

This allowed the partners to pare back their personal investment, and by 1858, the firm was dissolved. Overall, holdings in Glasgow-West India merchant firms fluctuated throughout the early nineteenth century (see Table 8.1). There was a dramatic decline in the 1830s and 1840s. The seemingly large investments in the 1840s and 1850s are explained by the anomalously high holdings of James Ewing (£115,000), who retained an interest in Jamaica estates for life. In general, the holdings of Glasgow-West India firms examined here faded after 1834, in contrast to Anthony Cooke’s vision of increasing holdings in Glasgow-West India merchant houses into the Victorian period. Cooke’s estimates of mercantile holdings increased due to the substantial estates of Thomas and James Richardson, whose firm traded in Mauritius in the East Indies between 1839 and 1872. By including the significant estates of East India merchants with principal interests in Mauritius, Cooke’s estimates of holdings in Glasgow-West India firms were over-stated and a ‘swing to the east’ was cited as evidence of continued investment in the Caribbean.32 In actuality, Glasgow’s West India merchants reduced their personal wealth in associated merchant firms in the aftermath of emancipation, which freed up large reserves of surplus capital for investment in Scotland.

The Glasgow-West India elite and their firms often owned estates in the British West Indies. Over ten inventories referred to shares in plantations or mortgages held over them. On his death in 1853, James Ewing bequeathed Taylor Caymanas plantation and all other lands he owned in Jamaica to a family trust in Scotland.33 However, the possession of enslaved people and the securities over them was far more extensive than these figures suggest. The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project allows the untangling of the Gordian knot of compensation claims by the Glasgow-West India elite when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies on 1 August 1834.34 The Glasgow claims were made for enslaved people resident in British Guiana, Grenada, Jamaica, St Kitts, St Vincent and Trinidad. The major sums were collected for British Guiana.35 A significant proportion of these claims were made in the frontier territories annexed in the second and third phases of colonization in the British Caribbean. Less than half of the surviving Glasgow-West India elite claimed compensation. Of the 150 known individuals, at least fifty-eight died before 1834. Of the remainder, thirty-nine individuals claimed £436,996. Although large-scale, the figures pale in comparison with the £2m collected by members of the London-based Society of West India Planters and Merchants.36 While the Atlantic trades were crucial to the development of Glasgow-West India fortunes, slave-ownership and the compensation awards were not, although the latter provided liquid capital for investment in domestic enterprise.

Landed estates and urban property

From 1760, Scottish ‘improvers’ introduced revolutionary agricultural methods that transformed the countryside, which occurred alongside what T. C. Smout described as a ‘revolution in manners’ (high-consumption lifestyles, especially in foodstuffs, clothing and education).37 New demands put financial pressures on the traditional landed elites, and as a result, estates regularly came to the market. The American War of Independence (1775–83) also lowered land prices, which brought land to auction. Some merchants were bankrupted, while the availability of cheap credit when peace arrived provided others with the opportunity to scoop up estates.38 The rapid accumulation of West India fortunes after 1775, therefore, underpinned a challenge to the hegemony of landed elites in the west of Scotland, both established gentry and colonial.

Existing historiography suggests that Glasgow-West India mercantile landownership was small-scale in a localized area. T. M. Devine’s study of landownership and colonial elites reveals thirty-six West India merchants owned seventy-one properties at some point in their lives.39 Anthony Cooke’s study of the same elites into the Victorian period suggested a decline in patterns of ownership towards death, with forty-one individuals owning forty-three estates across Scotland.40 This study here reveals the West India influx into the Scottish countryside was more extensive than has previously been understood. Cross-referencing records of land transfers in Scotland (‘sasines’), confirmation inventories and contemporary sources, this study identifies seventy-five West India proprietors as owners of 133 landed estates (see Table 2.2).41 Thus, half of the mercantile grouping in this study owned an estate at some point in their lives, and many owned more than one estate across different counties. Some estates, such as Jordanhill in Renfrew, detailed in Chapter 3, were owned multiple times by different owners, often passing hands through bankruptcies or inheritance. The 1780s was the peak decade for acquisition, although peak West India investment came after 1800 (as will be explained below).42 The estates were located mainly in west-central Scotland. Stirling, Renfrew, Ayr and Dunbarton were popular locations, but Lanarkshire was the most favoured location in general and the Barony of Glasgow in particular.43 The West India elite tended to reside in estates around a concentrated area in the west of Scotland, their presence influencing the development of the local economy in different ways.

Not all West India merchants owned landed estates. For lesser merchants, urban townhouses became a primary place of residence, although the most successful maintained both. Ownership of the landed estate, however, was the real marker of success. Of 129 known methods of acquisition, forty-one estates passed through inheritance, often consolidating colonial dynasties over several generations. Some were inherited from fathers involved with tobacco commerce, and over ten individuals inherited estates from fathers involved in the West India trades, and, on occasion, from other family members. William Smith inherited Carbeth on the death of his unmarried cousin John Guthrie in 1834.44 The transfer of land via strategic marriages was rare, with just one recorded example during Glasgow’s sugar era, compared to seven in the tobacco heyday.45 That pairing, however, consolidated a major family inheritance. Around 1783, Moses Steven (1749–1831) was a partner in the Glasgow-West India firm Buchanan, Steven & Co., and successor firm Dennistoun, Buchanan & Co. Wealth secured, he purchased Polmadie on the south side of Glasgow. He married Janet Rowan, the laird’s daughter on neighbouring Bellahouston, an estate he eventually purchased parts of. The entire estate passed into the hands of the Steven children, which, as will be discussed later, had important implications for the city of Glasgow.46

While inheritance was an important means of acquisition for West India merchants and marriage less so, most estates were purchased directly (fifty-five merchants, eighty-seven estates). Most were procured between 1780 and 1819, with the early nineteenth century an important period. West India purchases tailed off at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and declined in the later decades.47 Slavery compensation probably funded some land acquisition, albeit on a small scale. Of the eight known estates purchased after 1834, six were acquired by holders of compensation from the British government, such as Colin Campbell of Colgrain.48 The accumulation of West India fortunes thus had important consequences, underpinning the purchase of new estates across the west of Scotland, especially after 1800.

The influx of West India capital from the 1790s onwards is explained by the length of time it took for merchants to acquire wealth. In 1781, after some twenty years’ experience as a mercantile landowner, James Hopkirk reasoned senior merchants were best suited to this dual role. Becoming a country gentleman at a young age was ‘perfectly wrong’ as early mercantile lives should be ‘wholly devoted to business’.49 Whether by accident or design, many of his peers followed the same maxim. Merchants who inherited estates among this long-lived group did so around the age of thirty-six, while those who purchased tended to procure them almost a decade later in their lives.50 In 1801, for instance, Archibald Smith purchased the estate of Jordanhill, aged 52, twenty-two years after taking up a partnership in Leitch & Smith.51 Not all West India merchants withdrew immediately from commerce and took up a landed lifestyle: a high proportion (twenty-six out of seventy-five West India proprietors, or 35 per cent) retained shares in Glasgow firms on death, transferring colonial wealth to the Scottish countryside throughout their long lives.

Motivations behind mercantile land-purchases varied. The possession of land retained considerable significance in Scotland between 1760 and 1830. An estate of the right size brought social prestige, political influence and a solid income through agricultural rents. These factors partially explain why arriviste merchants were so attracted to the land.52 The social background of West India purchasers provided further insights into the influx. Of the fifty-five Glasgow-West India merchants who purchased directly, twenty-two hailed from the landed ranks, the majority of whom were younger sons.53 A higher proportion were parvenus who reached the landed ranks via West India commerce and new colonial wealth. Within this influx, merchants with interests in Trinidad, Grenada and Demerara were prominent, though the Jamaica interest were the most conspicuous of all.54

John Gordon (1753–1828) exemplifies the Glasgow-Jamaica nouveau riche. The son of a bailie, he took up a partnership in Stirling, Gordon & Co. in 1790, the firm that took his name. In 1808, Gordon acquired Aikenhead for £22,000 (seemingly borrowing from the University of Glasgow to facilitate the purchase).55 However, despite the prominence of those who came to land via West India commerce, individuals who hailed from the landed ranks – both inheritors of estates and those who purchased in their own right – held most of the land overall (forty-one merchants, seventy-eight estates). In other words, the accumulation of Glasgow-West India fortunes helped create a new colonial landed elite, but the major effects were to perpetuate and expand the landed portfolios of established families, many of them already involved with the colonial trades.

Whether established gentry or arriviste mercantile-landowners, the effects of such a rapid transfer of colonial wealth into west-central Scotland’s countryside were spectacular. At the peak of Glasgow’s sugar era in 1814, the noted improver Sir John Sinclair extolled the positive effects of mercantile investment and practices on Scottish agricultural development:

The effects of commerce and manufactures on agriculture ought not to be here omitted. They furnish an advantageous market for the productions of the soil; and thus tend to raise the value of the estates, and the rent of lands. Nay, the opulent merchant is often found a most enterprising improver. And though his experience in agriculture is not commensurate to his capital, yet he often becomes a great benefactor to his country; and in a few years, by his accuracy in accounts, he learns where to spare, and where to lay out his money.56

In addition to debates about the extent of ownership noted above, historians have disputed the importance of West India capital on Scottish agriculture. R. H. Campbell was pessimistic about the importance of colonial capital in general, arguing the wealth was in few hands and while it increased the influence of some families and great estates, other sectors of the economy were only indirectly affected.57 On the other hand, T. M. Devine argued colonial merchants were a significant factor in Scottish agrarian transformation, as they tended to purchase small estates around urban centres, channelling high incomes into agricultural re-organization. In short, there was ‘little doubt’ this colonial flow made a ‘contribution of the first order’ to the Scottish ‘agricultural revolution’.58 Previous conclusions have been based upon both Chesapeake and West India merchants, although this section focuses on the latter in isolation. While the West Indian influence on Scottish agriculture was more extensive than has been commonly understood, the greater effects came after 1800.

In 1814, Sir John Sinclair defined the great Scottish landowners as those who owned estates – of which there were 400 – that attracted rents of at least £2,000 Scots. That same year, just over 1,000 ‘middling properties’ attracted rents between £500 and £2,000. However, the most extensive estates in Scotland – over 6,100 – were regarded as ‘small properties’ with rents under £500 Scots (£12 Scots was equivalent to £1 stg.). It is important to note that great landowners were judged by the extent of the agricultural wealth their estates generated, rather than the size of the properties.59 For comparison, in 1771 there were 785 ‘small’ proprietors in Lanarkshire, including Glasgow, (which was around 90 per cent of all landowners), rising to almost 1,100 in 1814.60 Land tax records for 1771 suggest West India merchants tended to come into possession of small properties.61 Since that was typical in the counties of west-central Scotland they tended to congregate in, this is an unsurprising conclusion.62 However, confirmation inventories of West India merchants on death indicate rental income tended to be large-scale. Indeed, based upon a sample of twenty-five known estate rents, Sinclair would have classified almost 90 per cent of this group as great landlords.63 Though there are issues with using land tax rolls as a baseline (as they may not reflect the actual rental income at that point), this analysis tentatively suggests West India merchants generally came into small properties (as defined by rental income), yet many, even most, subsequently enjoyed the rentier-incomes of great landowners – very likely after ambitious improvement schemes attracted new tenants to the land.

Glasgow-West India improvement programmes were sometimes ambitious and long-term. After purchasing Jordanhill in 1800 at a cost of £16,500, Archibald Smith sunk almost the same amount into improvements.64 While the subsequent value of the estate did not rise with this level of investment, the rewards came via increased rental income. Soon after acquiring his estate, Smith discussed plans for improvement with a nearby estate owner, George Oswald of Scotstoun, and how to increase rents beyond what husbandry alone would bring. The effects were seemingly dramatic. A late eighteenth-century valuation roll listed Jordanhill’s rental income at £266 Scots: a ‘small property’ in Sinclair’s classification. On Smith’s death in 1821, the rental income was £397 sterling (£4,764 Scots): apparently a seventeen-fold increase since 1783.65 The influx of the Glasgow-West Indians stimulated agricultural and urban development in the west of Scotland. However, the effects of West India improvement, and by extension Caribbean slavery, should not be viewed as especially influential in the classic era of Scottish agricultural change. Just over fifty estates were acquired during the ‘agricultural revolution’ (1760–1800). As noted above, most estates acquired by the sugar aristocracy came after 1800 (sixty-eight of 122 known acquisition dates). Even so, especially from the 1780s onwards, West India landownership embedded the profits of Caribbean slavery in the Scottish countryside in a variety of different ways.

Improvement of estates almost always began with the house.66 Confirmation inventories generated on the death of West India merchants provide a record of valuable household effects. Over ninety held goods valued at £131,326, around 4 per cent of the overall wealth held in Scotland. Sixty-one inventories listed holdings in landed estates valued at £96,597 (average £1,583), while thirty-two inventories listed holdings in townhouses valued at £22,142 (average £691). Given that most middling ranks in Glasgow possessed overall wealth of less than £1,000 on death at the time, we begin to understand the grand opulence the West India elites enjoyed.67 Some merchants probably stockpiled aesthetically pleasing goods as investments. After his death in 1846, Robert Douglas Alston’s ‘furniture, pictures, plate and other plenishings’ in Auchinraith estate sold for a remarkable £8,824 at auction.68

The improvement of Scottish rural estates also had important effects on local economies. The everyday work required for building of new mansions and upkeep of estates provided local tradesmen with employment. On his father’s death in 1786, John Smith inherited Craigend castle and immediately rearranged farms and constructed roads. By 1800, ‘the laird having by this time become a West India proprietor, had more money to spend and built a very comfortable suitable house’. After John Smith’s death in 1816, his son James, also a West India merchant, pulled down the barely two-decades-old edifice. He erected a castle and tower that became known as ‘Smith’s Folly’.69 Whether conspicuous extravagance or not, these constructions ensured West India profits seeped into local economies over several years.

Charles Stirling of Kenmure and Cadder (1771–1830), a partner in Stirling, Gordon & Co., was regarded as ‘no less active as an agriculturist than as a merchant’ perhaps due to his famous rebuilding of Cadder House and improvement of grounds.70 In 1813, Stirling commissioned Allan & James Scott, timber merchants at Clyde Street in Glasgow, to provide timber, for which they were paid almost £1,000. These employers probably sourced many dozens of skilled tradesmen and manual labourers from the local area for the work. Over the course of thirty individual months of refurbishment between March 1813 and December 1815, Charles Stirling laid out over £5,000 in wages in less than two years. Masons and carpenters were employed throughout, undertaking the vast bulk of the work, as well as skilled woodworkers and plasterers.71 For comparison, this was equivalent to £4 million in modern wages (relative to worth of average earnings in 2020).72 This level of investment over the thirty-month period of refurbishment would have provided many thousands of hours of employment for around thirty-five masons and carpenters, or many more of less well-remunerated labourers.73 This chapter supports Richard Pares’ claim that ‘West India millionaires [built]…more Fonthills [ie mansions] than factories among them’ yet challenges the view that mercantile investment in land was unproductive.74 While the traditional landed ranks struggled to maintain salubrious lifestyles in late eighteenth-century Scotland, the West India elite that replaced them injected slavery-derived fortunes into improvement and construction schemes in the countryside, facilitating a higher standard of living which served to stimulate developing urban economies.

Commerce: banking, insurance and mercantile credit

Scotland’s eighteenth-century financial networks were structured around public and provincial banks. Mercantile involvement with these institutions – such as the eighteenth-century harnessing of the Glasgow banking system for the tobacco trade – is well-known.75 As noted in Chapter 2, the Glasgow-West India elite had support from Scottish banks and this chapter outlines the quid pro quo of the relationship, assessing capital held in banks as well as wider financial networks. Fifty-nine of the Glasgow-West India elite held c.£870,000 in British banks in shares and account current (13 per cent of all holdings in Britain). Thirty-two individuals held shares in British banks valued at £600,000 (see Table 8.1). A few held shares in English banks, but the vast majority kept their fortunes in Scottish banks, in stock and shares (£553,000) and deposit and current accounts (£273,000). James Ewing of Strathleven was the exceptional case, possessing stock valued at £10,000 in the Bank of England, and investing over £110,000 in Glasgow Union Bank shares on his death in 1853.76 For comparison, investments in commercial institutions in Scotland were lesser in scale. Inventories reveal that thirty-two West India merchants held stock, shares and policies in insurance firms such as North British Life Insurance and Scottish Widows Insurance – worth over £76,000.77 And just eight individuals held around £100,000 in 3 per cent government consols, underlining that the overall wealth was based upon the Atlantic trades and associated commercial, industrial and agricultural investments across Great Britain rather than rentier income from government stock.

Joint-stock banks in Glasgow, in the view of S. G. Checkland, spearheaded the city’s transition to the second ‘money centre’ of Scotland after 1830.78 In the period after slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, there was enthusiastic West India support for such institutions. Indeed, in terms of banking assets in Scotland, there were noticeably contrasting investment strategies. Of the wealth held in account current, one-third was in banks in the west of Scotland, especially Glasgow, while two-thirds were held in Edinburgh public banks (with Glasgow branches): the Royal Bank of Scotland (£100,000), the Bank of Scotland (£60,000) and the British Linen Company (£16,000). In terms of stock investment (£556,000), the opposite is true: a small proportion was held in Edinburgh banks (13 per cent), with the remainder sunk into Glasgow banks, especially in two joint-stocks: the Union (£297,000) and the Western (£84,000). James Buchanan (of Dowanhill), James Ewing and Colin Campbell possessed almost £220,000 worth of shares in the Union Bank when they died between 1844 and 1863. Given the nominal capital of the Glasgow Union Banking Company was £2m when it was established as the city’s first joint bank in 1830 (of which just £287,000 was paid up within four years), the West India influx must have been substantial.

Timing was important too. Of the shares held in British banks by the Glasgow-West India merchants who died between 1830 and 1859 (valued at £444,000), 77 per cent were in the city’s banks. As Glasgow developed into a commercial centre, West India elites provided a substantial influx of capital. This contrasts with the patterns of industrial investments, such as cotton, which tended to be invested in mills outside Glasgow. To summarize, the Glasgow-West India merchants held large reserves of capital in Edinburgh’s secure private enterprise banks, yet speculated larger sums in riskier investments in embryonic companies in Glasgow at a critical period.

West India merchants in Glasgow also provided credit that stimulated domestic ventures across Scotland. As discussed in Chapter 2, analysis of confirmation inventories revealed a web of mercantile credit. Almost half of all West India inventories on death contained over 240 references to outlying credit – bills, bonds, promissory notes – totalling £415,123 (see Table 2.1). For comparison, the average paid capital of provincial banking companies in Scotland in 1810 was £31,000.79 The nature and extent of the loans are significant: this represented around 12 per cent of their overall assets held in Scotland. The vast majority was owed by debtors resident in Scotland, especially Glasgow, Renfrewshire, Inverness-shire and Lanarkshire. A minority were resident in England and Jamaica. In laying out the capital of around thirteen provincial banks, the Glasgow-West India elite took on the role of a major financial network in the west of Scotland.

The credit was laid out almost exclusively after 1800. Almost half the overall loans had known dates of agreement and the average period of loan (between agreement and death of creditor) was just over five years.80 The chronology of outlying credit is important. There were financial crises in Scotland in 1793, 1803, 1809–12, 1815, 1818–19, 1825–6 and 1836–7, which, as will be explained below, created a credit shortage as banks refused to discount bills.81 Since around a third of West India credit with known dates was disbursed in these years, the Glasgow-West India merchants intervened in times of financial crisis. After the abolition of slavery in 1834, large reserves of West India capital stimulated the economy. West India loans disbursed after 1834 tended to be higher value (almost two-thirds of the total value was disbursed after this year). In the peak years of 1834–6 alone, over £76,000 of West India credit flooded onto the domestic market. After slavery was abolished, therefore, Glasgow’s merchants increasingly provided large volumes of short-to-medium-term credit to domestic lenders, a practice which extended into the later Victorian period.

A cross-section of Scottish society borrowed from the West India elite of Glasgow (see Table 2.1). As noted in Chapter 2, loans among the West India community of Glasgow themselves were the most common type of debt, totalling £112,748. At just over a quarter of total outlying credit, the West India elite’s premier debtors were mercantile peers. This type of relationship boosted the reserves of merchants at different times and furthered their overall enterprise. Others loaned capital to individuals outside the merchant fraternity, and it was common to loan among the family. Often serving as an advance on patrimonial inheritance, relatives not involved with the West India trades were promoted into elite lifestyles. Other types of commercial debtors included the general mercantile community and industrialists. As will be described below, most loans to industrialists were made to those involved with the textile industries. The Scottish aristocracy, gentry and minor landowners were also significant borrowers. John Blackburn was a prominent example of a West India supplier of credit to the elites. On his death in 1840, landed elites, including by the Duke of Hamilton and two sons of Baron MacDonald of the island of Skye, owed interest-bearing debts of over £30,000.82 In this way, West India merchants propped up the landed elites with colonial credit. With the decline of the provincial banks and the rise of the joint-stock companies in Glasgow after 1810,83 West India merchants took up some of the slack by offering substantial sums of credit, including in financial crises. In the post-emancipation period, the dissemination of West India capital increased. While the direct investments of Glasgow’s West India merchant capital stimulated local industry, especially textiles, their financial networks had a much broader effect. Glasgow’s ‘sugar aristocracy’ should be principally regarded as a commercial interest, meaning a broad range of their activities – investments of merchant capital, credit and Atlantic operations – contributed to the development of Scottish industry.

Industrialization

Although the exact take-off year of the Scottish Industrial Revolution is a matter of some debate (as early as 1760, or as late as 1778), key aspects are not in dispute: the process began later than the English version, and ultimately progressed more quickly. In its first phase, the leading sectors were based upon the manufacture and export of textiles.84 Whatever starting point is chosen, Scottish economic development was already dependent upon trade with the Americas. From the mid eighteenth century, textile manufacturing – silk, linen and cotton – was the ‘secret spring’ of the Scottish Industrial Revolution.85 Linen – made from flax – was the precursor to the cotton industry, establishing an important transatlantic relationship. According to historian Alastair Durie, the European markets were of ‘negligible importance’ to the Scottish linen trade, while North America and the West Indies were the main export markets after 1750. By 1796, as much as 90 per cent of all exports of Scottish linen went to these two regions. Jamaica was the premier market for linen produced in Scotland.86 Between 1778 and 1785, cotton replaced flax as the raw material powering Scottish industry and added another dimension to the transatlantic relationship.87 Unlike flax that could be cultivated in Europe, including Scotland, cotton was grown by enslaved people in the Americas and imported to Scotland in large volumes, thus providing employment for handloom weavers and in mills, with finished goods re-exported across the Atlantic. Printed textiles – linen and cotton cloth, handkerchiefs and gowns – were shipped out to the colonies, thus stimulating associated industries such as alum mining, bleaching and dyeing.88

Historians are divided on the significance of West India merchant capital to the textile industries. Noting that only a handful of the Glasgow-West India elite held shares in cotton manufactories – alongside the prevalence of capital from other domestic sources – T. M. Devine argued they were unlikely to be a ‘decisive influence’ on the cotton industry.89 Anthony Cooke agreed the number of West India merchants who held investments on death were few, just eight, but they generally made large-scale investments (totalling £142,698). Yet, Cooke remained cautious, noting that direct investments were small compared to the fixed capital of Glasgow cotton mills, which were valued at £1m in 1819.90

Merchant capital contributed to the development of the linen industry, with Virginia merchants prominent in the eighteenth century.91 West India merchants certainly diversified into cottage industries and larger-scale textile enterprise. Archibald Smith employed handloom weavers and in 1799 also established Smith, Hutchison and Co., one of the great Glasgow linen houses.92 The West India elite had a greater impact on the expansion of the cotton industry, investing in several prominent works after 1778. William McDowall provided capital for the establishment of Houston, Burns & Co., a cotton-works established on the rivers Calder and Cart in 1788.93 Robert Dennistoun, Alexander Campbell of Hallyards and Colin Campbell entered into a partnership with Robert Owen in the New Lanark Company in 1810–12, putting up £70,000 (38 per cent) of the £182,000 capital.94 According to Owen, his partners were ‘commercial men carrying on business for profit’ who opposed his plans for ‘increased comforts of villagers’ as well as generous wage levels and education provision.95 After the death of Dennistoun in 1815 and Hallyards in 1817, their shares in Robert Humphrey & Company, a cotton-spinning work in Glasgow, was valued at £21,000.96 As described by Cooke, the Glasgow-West India merchant firm Dennistoun, Buchanan & Co. invested £160,000 in Stanley Mills in Perth after 1823.97 James Finlay and Co. was the largest producer of textiles in early nineteenth-century Scotland, with three cotton mills at Ballindalloch, Catrine and Deanston. In 1792, 60 per cent of Finlay and Co.’s capital stock of £22,000 was held by West India merchants (which was decisive). With capital stock rising to £65,000 in 1800, the West India share (£28,000) was by then around 40 per cent.98

Confirmation inventories reveal that just nine (who died between 1808 and 1847) held shares in cotton enterprises on death: a total of £136,058, averaging c.£15,100 each. On his death in 1828, the largest holder, John Gordon, possessed stock and shares in James Finlay & Co. valued at £68,725: a four-fold increase on his investments in the firm since 1800.99 On his death in 1815, Adam Bogle, partner in Robert Bogle & Co., held over £28,000 in Monteith, Bogle & Co. (equivalent to a third of the firm’s stock of £86,000 in 1810).100 The firm co-owned by Henry Monteith operated Blantyre Mill and diversified into Turkey red (dyeing) works in Barrowfield in 1805. On his death in 1847, Alexander Garden – married to Henry Monteith’s daughter – still held £19,952 in Henry Monteith & Co.101 However, as noted above, financial crises in nineteenth-century Scotland affected medium-size cotton firms, as banks refused to discount bills.102 West India merchants also provided large-scale credit to major works. For example, Archibald Smith loaned £5,000 on bond to Houston, Burns & Co. in December 1800.103 Confirmation inventories reveal the Glasgow-West India elite also financed textile and finishing industries in the west of Scotland. Almost £40,000 was loaned to firms and individuals in Lanarkshire, the majority of which went to linen houses, cotton mills and calico printers in Glasgow. West India lenders stepped into the breach, providing loans in crisis years – especially in the 1830s – which probably limited the harmful effects on the industry.

West India commerce provided large-scale employment opportunities in Scotland. In 1831, Sir John Sinclair noted that the cotton industry was ‘by far the most important in the kingdom in regard to both the number of persons employed and to the value of their labour’. Textile manufacturers were the largest employers in Scotland, comprising 257,900 workers, of which 154,000 were employed in cotton (60 per cent), with the remainder working in linen (30 per cent) and wool (10 per cent).104 Approximately 78,000 handloom weavers, working from home or in small manufactories in rural and semi-urban west-central Scotland, were generally dependent upon the Atlantic trades.105 The majority of Scotland’s labouring population were not culpable in the business of chattel slavery, but by working in industries dependent upon the perpetuation and expansion of the system in the British West Indies, they were complicit in, and benefited from, the integrated Atlantic slavery economy. Glasgow-West India merchant capital was sunk into large manufactories and enterprises that helped sustain employment, in contrast to Bristol’s eighteenth-century West India merchants, who invested in small-scale industries.106 The industries chosen by the Glasgow-West India elites had significant multiplier effects and brought large swathes of the Scottish population into the West India spheres of influence.

The extractive industries were also a major component of Scotland’s Industrial Revolution. However, the Glasgow-West India elite did not have the same enthusiasm for investing in these as they did for textiles. The much smaller investments are probably explained by the low potential for vertical integration: cotton and finished textiles were obvious investments for West India merchants involved with transatlantic commerce, while coal and iron were of less value as an export commodity. West India investments in Scottish coal firms were negligible, with just one merchant, James Martin, holding just over £2,000 in Stevenson coal company on his death in 1842.107 Nevertheless, merchants often promoted the exploitation of mineral resources on their estates. Robert Houston Rae’s estate, Little Govan, was valued at a remarkable £83,000 in 1800, no doubt due to the large reserves of coal seams underneath the land. This attracted lease income of £30,000, accruing to Houston Rae and Andrew Houston.108 The mining of coal seams across Glasgow’s estates continued throughout the nineteenth century. In 1863, James Smith of Jordanhill leased the mineral rights on the Houstons’ land to the Monkland Coal and Iron Company, although the income was only a tenth of the Houston enterprise.109

Iron and alum companies attracted only marginally more interest. The Bogle merchant dynasty held investments in the Shotts Iron Company, a prominent producer of pig-iron. The firm was established in 1801 but floated on the Scottish market in 1824 (capital of £100,000 was fully subscribed within a year).110 On his death in 1821, Robert Bogle junior of Gilmorehill held over £7,700 in the firm.111 Probably inheriting and extending his father’s shares, Archibald Bogle retained investments in the firm valued at over £25,000 on his death in 1858.112 The alum mining industry was closely associated with the development of textile manufacturing, providing natural dyestuffs for printed linens such as handkerchiefs. Two works near Glasgow were of major importance: George Macintosh’s Cudbear Works (established in 1777) and Hurlet & Campsie Alum Company (established c.1805).113 There was West India involvement with both. Hugh Hamilton loaned £3,000 to George Macintosh & Company in 1828.114 There was more significant West India investment in the latter firm. On his death in 1830, West India merchant Charles Stirling of Cadder held shares and stock valued at £24,000 in the Hurlet & Campsie Alum Co., which was the first enterprise of its type in the world.115 While substantial, these investments do not seem to have been decisive.

Overall, West India merchants invested (in life and death) up to c.£500,000 in textile and extractive concerns and provided £45,000 in loans to associated firms and individuals. Textiles were of the greatest interest. Archibald Smith is known to have established a great linen house, while a maximum of around twenty merchants invested in cotton firms. These merchants were usually high ranking, with large investments in cotton enterprise, although disposal before death was not uncommon. The diversification of West India merchant capital was instrumental to the development of some of the great Scottish cotton mills and greatly boosted the personal fortunes of the merchants concerned. While West India merchant capital was not decisive in the establishment of the Scottish cotton industry overall, these merchants were integral at each stage of the process: sourcing and importing cotton, investing fixed capital, providing short- and long-term credit in crisis years and exporting finished goods to the West Indies. The evidence regarding extractive industries, while far from comprehensive, reveals West India investment in only a handful of concerns. While Glasgow-West India merchant capital was important, but not decisive, to the textile-based first phase of Scottish industrialization (c.1770s–1830), the merchants’ Atlantic and financial operations were critically important. Scotland’s Industrial Revolution would have accelerated at a much slower pace, and perhaps begun even later, if Glasgow-West India merchants had not supplied the raw materials, facilitated access to markets and provided investment capital and credit in times of financial crisis. By the second phase of industrialization after 1830, the West India contribution to the development of the iron, steel and engineering industries was of negligible importance.

Shipping, canals and railways

West India commerce and capital boosted the development of Scotland’s transport infrastructure. The Clyde’s rise to a globally renowned centre for the construction of steamships poses questions for the early nineteenth century, although Anthony Slaven argued the skills from traditional shipbuilding before 1840 provided little impetus for the later period. Before 1840, the Clyde was a ‘very minor’ river in terms of the construction of wooden ships. Traditional shipbuilding was an eighteenth-century, innovation, originating with the establishment of the Scotts shipyard of Greenock in 1711. The American War of Independence (1775–83) provided a boost, as it ended the supply of ships and timber from across the Atlantic.116

West India firms in Glasgow certainly commissioned new vessels from shipbuilders along the Clyde in Greenock. In December 1806, John Campbell, senior, & Co. hosted a ‘great entertainment’ in honour of the builders – John Scott and Sons of Greenock – to celebrate the launch of the Grenada, which had been put to sea ‘amid the loud huzzas of a great concourse of spectators’ earlier that day. 117 However, the few investments in ships and shipping companies held by West India merchants on death suggests the ships were held by firms (rather than individuals) as assets.118 It was more common for individuals to invest in the embryonic steamship enterprise.119 Nevertheless, the Glasgow-West India fleet assessed in Chapter 4 appears to have included around 340 individual ships between 1806 and 1834. While the exact proportion of the West India contribution to locally built ships awaits detailed examination, the shipping requirements of Glasgow-West India merchants generated a significant trade with multiplier effects elsewhere. A committee of the Royal Bank in Edinburgh examined ‘Bonds, Debts and Bills lying over at Glasgow’ in 1818 and were of the opinion, due to the extent of bills they received, that West India merchants had a significant impact on local shipping which served to stimulate the local economy:

The West Indian Merchant builds up a ship for that trade, and purchases goods for that Market; he makes Insurances in both, he grants Bills to the Ship Builder and to the Manufacturer who Endorse them to the Wood Merchant, and the Importer of Cotton, & they discount them to raise Money & purchase fresh Cargoes of Timber and Cotton. In this way an extensive West India Trade must require a great deal of money to carry it on and Banks seem to be safe in furnishing it to them. They get the Security in this case of the General Merchant, of the Wood Merchant, and of the ship Builder; in the other case, the security of the General Merchant, of the Manufacturer and of the Cotton Merchant; at least three respectable persons for each advance…It is difficult [for the Bank] to employ money for a short period more profitably & securely than in such discounts. When the ship returns from the West Indies, the Merchant, to enable him to take up the bills granted for her outfit must sell the cotton, the Sugar, the Rum, the Coffee, the Mahogany & other India produce imported, each of these articles probably to one or more different persons or copartneries, from each of whom he obtains Bills. These bills or part of them are offered for discount, if it is thought they are entitled to credit at the Bank, if the situation of the Cash there admits of discount at the time for here, as in the former case, there is reason to expect both profit and safety, the Bills being fairly onerous transactions in the way of trade.120

Joseph Inikori has described how ‘backward linkages’ of shipping and shipbuilding stimulated iron, copper, ropes and wood production, which were important multiplier effects in the British economy in the mercantilist period.121 While there is no evidence that West India merchant capital was a significant influence on the growth of shipbuilding in the west of Scotland before 1840, this banking intelligence suggests the systemic influence of West India commerce upon the wider economy was profound.

West India merchant capital did improve the regional transport infrastructure, especially canals. The Forth and Clyde Canal, which traversed Scotland, resulted from ‘enlightened commercial thinking’, as it facilitated the shipment of produce by Glasgow merchants to Europe and the transportation of agricultural products to larger markets in the west. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘tobacco lords’ John Glassford and John Ritchie were involved at the outset, although the outbreak of the American War of Independence stalled its progress. Building began in 1768 and it took twenty-two years to build the canal at a cost of nearly £394,000. The Monkland Canal allowed deeper exploitation of rich Lanarkshire coalfields and took twelve years to construct, opening in 1793 at a cost of £120,000.122 Naturally, West India merchants invested in both canal systems. The Forth and Clyde Canal allowed the re-export of produce to Europe, while merchants hoped the construction of the Monkland Canal would break the monopoly of coal-masters over transportation. Twenty West India merchants who died between 1805 and 1869 (almost a fifth of all confirmation inventories) held a total of £139,444 in Scottish canals and navigation companies. These included the Forth and Clyde Canal (£86,864), the Union Canal (£26,500), the Monkland Canal (£14,520) and the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal (£1,200). The extraordinary investment held in the Forth and Clyde Canal reveals West India merchants such as Thomas Dunlop Douglas had an integral role in what one historian described as a ‘Glasgow takeover’ of the highly profitable enterprise after 1815.123

The advance of railways gradually made the canal system obsolete. Glasgow’s West India merchants invested in both – a pattern consistent with other British enslavers in the 1830s. The impact of West India capital has been underestimated in previous studies of railway funding; while the contribution of ‘merchants’ has been noted, specific sources of mercantile capital remained undefined due to the ambiguous nature of the occupational description.124 Anthony Cooke noted that colonial merchants and returnees invested in railways after 1834. Thus, for Cooke, merchant capital had an impact in Scotland beyond ‘manufacturing, mining and agriculture’, as laid out in T. M. Devine’s ‘Did slavery make Scotia great?’125 Cooke claimed that West India merchants were ‘actively involved in the “second phase” of Scotland’s economic transformation through substantial railway investment in the 1840s and 1860s’.126 However, the investments by these West India merchants were small-scale in the context of overall Scottish railway investments, which totalled £28 million by 1860.127 This assertion is further reinforced if examined over the longer period, as nearly £47 million had been invested by 1870.128

Glasgow-West India investment was of overall negligible importance to the development of Scottish railways in the Victorian period. In fact, this group invested more in Scottish canals and English railways. Of the fifty-seven Glasgow-West India merchants who died after 1839, approximately one-third (19) held investments valued at £298,498 in British railways. Of this, seventeen held £118,989 in Scottish companies, with five holding investments worth £179,509 in English companies. Thomas Dunlop Douglas was the leading investor in British railways.129 Archibald Smith (1795–1883) was the top investor in Scottish railways, speculating widely in the mid nineteenth century – although it is unlikely the subscriptions were ever paid up in full. The investments he retained on death (c.£19,000) represented a small proportion of the subscriptions he made by 1846 (c.£460,000).130 Large investments of West India capital undoubtedly contributed to the ‘railway mania’ in mid nineteenth-century Britain, although this represented a tiny proportion of the capital raised in Scotland. Speculation by the West India elite stimulated a boom that increased local interest and the value of their own shares, although, in general, this group invested more in Scotland’s canal infrastructure.

Charity and philanthropy

In 1834, the radical weekly The Reformers Gazette represented Glasgow’s ‘sugar lords’ as reluctant contributors to the maintenance of the poor: ‘What a heartless narrow-minded set! – wallowing in wealth, yet grudging a miserable pittance to support their poor helpless fellow-creatures!’131 This section assesses that claim through an examination of testamentary bequests in the wills of the Glasgow-West India elite – with the caveat that testamentary bequests may not actually have reached intended recipients if, for example, the post-mortem evaluation of assets did not cover all bequests. Nevertheless, as will be explained, many such bequests evidently did reach their intended donations, and some are still dispersed today.132

Charity was an essential feature of many religious faiths: donations to the less fortunate were viewed as ‘thank offerings’ for the elevated lives of givers which salved the conscience of the wealthy. By contrast, philanthropy was less rooted in judgement of beneficiaries and intended to improve conditions within existing societal structures. In pre-Victorian Scotland, these two concepts – traditional charity and philanthropy – centred around the parish poor law, education provision, orphaned children, the elderly, the sick and benevolent institutions.133 The donations examined here are consistent with these key functions: only orphanages seem not to have received West India money. Thus, some gifts were intended for the improvement of society overall, while others were designated for a specific purpose based on social rank, sex and age.

The Glasgow-West India elite donated substantial sums in life and death that contributed to improving lives in Scotland, especially Glasgow. One prominent merchant, Charles Stirling of Cadder, donated almost £200 to charity in a twelve-month period.134 In death, twenty-one West India merchants (a fifth of the inventoried group) made philanthropic and charitable bequests valued at £79,000 between 1811 and 1869, the vast majority (by value) in the Victorian period. This was c.2 per cent of their overall wealth held in Scotland. None of the West India merchants bequeathed more than 5 per cent of their personal wealth to charities – most left under 1 per cent – except James Ewing of Strathleven. Among Glasgow’s sugar aristocracy, Ewing’s various bequests (totalling c.£68,000) were truly exceptional: around a quarter of his West India fortune was bequeathed to charitable and philanthropic causes on his death in 1853. From 1819, Ewing was an acolyte of the Revd Thomas Chalmers, whose belief in social bond philosophy in St John’s Parish in Glasgow compelled his followers to assist those less fortunate than themselves.135 Consistent with this, Ewing made substantial donations to the Free Church of Scotland (£18,100) and the Royal Infirmary (£10,000). The largest legacy was £31,000 to the Merchants House.136 For comparison, Ewing’s gifts seem to be slightly more than the Buchanan bequest described in Chapter 6, but just over half of the bequest left by returned Jamaica sojourner James Dick, which was among the largest of its kind in nineteenth-century Scotland.137 In terms of contemporary value and long-term legacy, James Ewing’s donation of £100 to the University of Glasgow in 1828 is equivalent to £433,000 (2016 values). It is estimated to have generated income of around £1.6 million for student scholarships between 1828 and 2017.138 Seemingly minor donations had major implications.

The West India elite sought, albeit rarely, to give something back to the source of their wealth. These gestures often came with the proviso of Christianizing enslaved people and their descendants. Citing his belief in the Established Church of Scotland in 1829, Charles Stewart Parker begged for ‘the forgiveness of God and even of my fellow man and Christians…at many periods of my life I know I have said and done many things which I ought not’. Whether Parker was referring to his status as an owner of enslaved people in Demerara is unknown, but it is possible his bequests to the Auxiliary Moravian Society in the West Indies were intended as atonement.139 But Glasgow-West India merchants mainly donated to institutions across Scotland with the majority (80 per cent of total value) bequeathed to institutions in Glasgow. From the nineteenth century onwards, the ways in which Glasgow’s middling ranks dealt with social problems and the poor dramatically shifted. Throughout the previous century, charitable donations tended to be administered to beneficiaries known to the donors or through the Church, trade guilds and town council. This model endured alongside the establishment of new charitable bodies in the early nineteenth century, which immediately attracted West India donations.140 The Merchants House received the highest sums in the city (£31,325). Some of this was for the maintenance of the institution, such as James Ewing’s £1,000 to the dean of guild ‘for behoof of that Incorporation’, but three separate bequests of £10,000 were intended for dispersal among failing merchants and their families (the latter bequest, Ewing No. 2, was merged in 1909 with the Buchanan bequest as described in Chapter 6). Thus, Ewing’s nepotistic bequests regenerated the mercantile ranks fallen on hard times.141 While the Merchants House received the most capital for dispersal in wider society, the Royal Infirmary of Glasgow was the institution favoured most by West India philanthropists.

An early nineteenth-century shift in the nature of charitable donations (from the giving of personal alms to institutional dispersal) explains why Glasgow-West India merchants were more philanthropic in death than their eighteenth-century predecessors, the ‘tobacco lords’, although it does not explain why they donated more than their successors, the ‘cotton masters’.142 The more extensive West India philanthropy can be explained as an attempt to shape post-mortem reputations. As Katie Donington has noted, philanthropy’s ‘silent power’ allowed many slave-owning donors to reshape their reputations and obtain ‘terrestrial fame’ in perpetuity.143 Consistent with the functions of traditional charity and philanthropy in pre-Victorian Scotland, West India fortunes were bequeathed to kirk parishes for the poor, to institutions for educational provision, the sick and elderly, including through a range of benevolent institutions.144 Gifts were often connected to religious beliefs. Prior to 1845, the Church of Scotland had a crucial role administering relief. Kirk sessions and ministers in locations such as Mouline in Perthshire, Ayr, Alloway and Girvan in Ayrshire as well as Moy and Dallaross near Nairn received ten bequests, especially for the use of the poor. And donations were not restricted to a single sect. James Ewing was a major influence on the advance of the Free Church and evangelical Protestantism across Scotland and abroad. Thus, philanthropic bequests often reflected the religious affiliations of Glasgow merchants which directed where slavery wealth rested in home parishes across Scotland.

There was a rich tradition of voluntary donations to Scottish education; indeed most education provision before 1872 depended on endowments.145 West India merchants bequeathed donations totalling £11,520 that named education or educational institutions in Glasgow and a couple in Ayrshire. James Ewing set aside £10,000 to the Merchants House – Ewing’s Bequest No.2 – to be used for ‘the purpose of educating, training and settling in business the sons of decayed Glasgow merchants’ (and the interest that accrued from this was ultimately gifted to educational institutions across the west of Scotland). Eight other West India merchants left donations totalling c.£1,500. These bequests went to schools, with some bequests designated based upon sex. In 1815 James Smith left £100 to Archibald Millar’s charity school on 151 George Street.146 Founded in 1790, the school was for ‘female children…[and] daughters of reputable parents or who live with reputable people’ who were eligible to attend for three years if they were free from infectious disease and not in receipt of parochial aid (that is, not the poor underclass).147 West India capital thus provided an education for daughters of ‘deserving’ people of Glasgow, an education they could not have afforded otherwise. Less often, gifts to educational institutions were intended to improve life chances of the poor. In 1829, for example, Hugh Hamilton donated £60 to Ayr Academy, some of which was intended for the ‘poor scholar natives of Ayr and Alloway’.148 Other bequests were targeted at specific groups. Charles Stuart Parker’s £500 to the Gaelic school of Glasgow catered for the Highland community of the city. Parker was not a Highlander by birth but frequented the Gaelic Club of Glasgow and married into a prominent Highland-West India family.149

Attitudes to the care of the sick shifted in early nineteenth-century Scotland, explaining why most of the individual bequests (43, or 35 per cent) were left to institutions to improve public health. The Royal Infirmary of Glasgow – founded in 1792 – was the single most popular institution, attracting fifteen separate bequests totalling over £12,000 (over 80 per cent was donated by James Ewing). Given the annual subscriptions in 1842 totalled c.£2,500, this was a considerable sum, yet the contributions were probably not given for entirely altruistic purposes.150 In 1837, West India merchant Patrick Playfair left post-mortem instructions for his bequest of £150: ‘the Barony Parish shall…have right to recommend annually six patients’.151 While most bequests were seemingly intended to improve the premier hospital in the city, these bequests probably catered for the nominees made by the institution’s hierarchy or local parishes rather than the poor.

West India donations also catered for the less able, the dispossessed and the elderly. The Glasgow Blind Asylum was established in 1804, with its first building erected in 1828. West India merchant John Leitch bequeathed £5,000 in the early years.152 In death, others bequeathed six gifts totalling £1,550 to the Blind Asylum between 1834 and 1869. The Glasgow Lunatic Asylum was founded in 1814 and received nine donations from West India merchants between 1815 and 1854 (£2,650).153 The Glasgow Deaf and Dumb Asylum, established in 1819, received £580 in six donations between 1823 and 1869. Around 20 per cent of children from the ‘respectable poor’ were admitted free, no doubt assisted by West India wealth.154 The Glasgow Eye Infirmary was established in 1824 and received three donations totalling £600 between 1845 and 1852.155 The House of Refuge in Glasgow received £2,200 between 1852 and 1853. From 1838, a House of Refuge for women and another for boys were under the same management, catering for criminals, prostitutes and delinquents.156 In 1854, the Night Asylum received £300 from James Ewing ‘for the houseless’.157 The Old Man’s Society received £650 between 1845 and 1869. Gifts from West India merchants to such institutions underline that wealth derived from Caribbean slavery had a wider social impact, improving the lives of a broad group of individuals comprising the most vulnerable of Glasgow society with no direct connections to the Atlantic trades.

This chapter now turns to one of the greatest philanthropic gifts in the history of Glasgow. The Ewing bequests to the city of Glasgow were described by a biographer in 1857 as ‘almost unparalleled’, yet were superseded later in the nineteenth century.158 The Bellahouston bequest was established in March 1892 after the death of Miss Elizabeth Steven. Her brother Moses Steven and her sister Grace had accumulated property valued between £400,000 and £500,000, which was held in trust to be administered by trustees for the benefit of ‘charitable, educational and benevolent institutions’ of the city.159 The initial source of the family wealth was their father, Moses Steven of Polmadie, who, as noted above, was a landed West India merchant in Glasgow. Moses Steven (1749–1831) was in partnership with his first cousin, James Buchanan of Dowanhill, and others in two prominent West India merchant firms in Glasgow: Buchanan, Steven & Co., and its successor firm Dennistoun, Buchanan & Co.160 A West India fortune secured, he purchased a country estate, Polmadie, just south of Glasgow, and married the daughter of neighbouring laird, William Rowan of Bellahouston.161 Steven died in 1833, leaving personal wealth of over £31,000: a mid-ranking fortune below the average of other West India merchants in this study.162

Yet, much of his wealth was in land. In addition to Polmadie, he purchased some plots on the Bellahouston estate, and in 1824 the full estate was bequeathed to his son. His daughters were left £10,000 each with his son as heir (although it is very likely the daughters received slightly less). Moses Steven junior died in 1871, leaving a fortune of £36,872.163 Before his death, he expressed ‘a wish that his fortune, which had come from Glasgow, should go back to Glasgow’, and his sisters carried out this wish. A joint deed of 25 August 1871 executed what was effectively a joint will.164 By 1892, Miss Elizabeth Steven left between £400,000 and £500,000 in trust to be administered for ‘charitable, educational and benevolent institutions’ of the city.165 The bequest established bursaries at the University of Glasgow, with other grants to various institutions within the city boundaries. These included Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Glasgow Western Infirmary, Glasgow Society for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, Glasgow Blind Asylum, West of Scotland Convalescent Seaside Homes, Glasgow City Mission or the Society for Promoting the Religious Interests of the Poor of Glasgow and its Vicinity, Glasgow Royal Asylum for Lunatics, Society for Relief of Indigent Gentlewomen of Scotland, Glasgow Night Asylum and the Kirk session of Govan and Bellahouston ‘for the relief of poor persons not receiving parochial aid’.166 When the Glasgow School of Art commissioned a new building – which ultimately became the Mackintosh building – in 1897, almost half by value (£10,000) of the initial estimated costs of £21,000 came from the Bellahouston bequest. A further £2,500 was granted for an extension scheme in 1926.167 For comparison, these donations are equivalent to £4.91m, relative to worth of average earnings in modern values.168

The Bellahouston bequest continues to be dispersed across the city on an annual basis. In 2019, the Bellahouston Fund was worth just over £5.5m sterling.169 Charitable donations of c.£1.2m were disbursed to organizations ‘within the parliamentary boundaries of the City of Glasgow’ in a four-year period up to 2019, with around sixty-five funded each year.170 Among other recipients, the Scottish Opera, Bellahouston Academy, the National Theatre of Scotland and the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice received grants in 2016.171 West India spheres of influence remain a quotidian, if unacknowledged, feature of life in Glasgow today.

Assessing the proportion of slavery wealth that made up the Bellahouston bequest is impossible. The trust was established via a second-generation mercantile fortune, inherited from a father whose personal wealth derived from multiple sources: West India commerce and landed estates in Glasgow. Slavery-based Atlantic trades provided the principal accumulation of capital which facilitated diversification into landed property, although marriage increased the portfolio. In this case, land was probably of more value than West India commerce, yet the estates would not have been acquired in the first place without colonial profits. Slavery and its associated commerce were principal factors in the accumulation of the Bellahouston fortune and remain an important part of the fabric of Glasgow today.

This chapter has unravelled a broad mosaic of institutions into which capital derived from slavery has historically seeped: religious institutions, women’s and Gaelic schools, universities, hospitals, infirmaries, homeless shelters, asylums. Ascertaining the exact proportions of who benefited most is no easy task. The Reformers Gazette’s representation of a miserly West India elite was not entirely accurate. However, while gifts specifically intended for the poor were common, they tended to be low value. Only around 20 per cent of all testamentary gifts – a total of c.£4,000 – made explicit references to the poor in Scotland. Some gifts, like Wilson’s charity, actively discriminated against those who had been in receipt of parochial aid – the ‘undeserving poor’ – a prejudice not uncommon in pre-Victorian Scotland.172 The irresistible conclusion is that while all ranks of society benefited from the West India elite’s charitable and philanthropic donations, Victorian Glasgow’s middle class, especially those who had fallen on hard times, gained the most.

Conclusion

In a Dissertation on the Business of the Counting House (1820), commercial educator James Morrison noted the successful accumulation of merchant capital created ‘spheres of influence’ in which the prosperity extended outwards: to family and friends and influencing Scottish trade and commerce more broadly.173 Important arenas in which Glasgow-West India merchant capital rested have been assessed here: agriculture, commerce, industry, infrastructure development, charitable and philanthropic causes. West India capital also had a profound effect on Scottish agricultural development, bringing new tenants to the land and employing dozens of tradesmen in construction enterprises. Previous studies have characterized the Glasgow-West India elite as principally transferring capital from Atlantic trades to agricultural and industrial enterprise, especially influencing the development of the Scottish textile industry and railways.174 While the significance of West India merchant capital to the development of railways was negligible, it was of some importance to the Scottish cotton industry. And this study reveals a wider relationship which not only involved the investment of the fixed capital and the facilitation of imports and exports, but also the provision of credit at crisis points. The first phase of Scotland’s Industrial Revolution, principally centred around textiles, would not have progressed in the same timescale, or provided the same employment opportunities, in the absence of an established West India mercantile community in Glasgow. Given West India commerce was so fundamental to wider economic development in the take-off period of Scotland’s Industrial Revolution, it seems these men were proportionately more important to the development of local economies than their respective counterparts in Bristol or Liverpool. West India ‘spheres’ of industrial influence, overall, extended to hundreds of thousands of textile workers but became less important with the rise of heavy industry in the Victorian period.

While West India merchant capital, and its wider processes, had a significant influence on Scottish industrialization, this study suggests a rethink is required. The Glasgow ‘sugar aristocracy’ were a commercial interest first, and an industrial interest second. Indeed, in terms of extent of holdings, the greater investments lay in commerce; wealth held in banking and insurance; and the laying out of large-scale loans across the west of Scotland. The true effects on the development of Scottish banking can only be surmised, but large reserves of West India merchant capital were held in account current, and in stocks and shares, all of which stimulated wider development. The effects of the major loans both taken and loaned by the ‘sugar aristocracy’ are even harder to gauge, but a large cross-section of Scottish society, including many involved with developing industries, were both indebted to them and accrued annual interest from outlying (and often large-scale) loans.

Finally, the greatest effects of Glasgow-West India merchant capital might have come from only a small proportion of their overall wealth: charitable and philanthropic initiatives. In terms of providing employment through the industries they invested in, as well as charity and philanthropy, the West India elites took the profits of slavery to the masses in a way that their predecessors, the ‘tobacco lords’, did not. The legacies of slavery were, and remain, an everyday feature of the west of Scotland, though on a much less significant scale today than in the era discussed here. Nevertheless, institutions and trust funds with antecedents in the colonial period are conduits of slavery wealth and continue to disburse the profits today in Glasgow and across Scotland more broadly. If capital is managed properly – as is the case in many institutions – by only expending income from the principal on an annual basis, these funds remain in perpetuity. The challenge is to identify these pots of West India merchant capital and to ascertain slavery’s collective impact from inception to the modern period. While the effects of Glasgow-West India mercantile ‘spheres of influence’ were profound in the sugar heyday, their reach has gradually contracted as the centuries have passed. Nevertheless, Caribbean slavery and its capital influenced various aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society, and remains a quotidian, if unseen, fact of life in the city of Glasgow today.