Conclusion

By the late eighteenth century, Glasgow was a great commercial metropolis. The city’s eighteenth-century ‘tobacco lords’ had established a system of global commerce centred around the Atlantic trades, utilizing local capital and credit, and making numerically limited but strategically significant investments in industry. While laying the foundations, however, their heyday was all but over by the onset of the Scottish Industrial Revolution in 1778. After the American War of Independence (1775–1783) ended Glasgow’s monopoly of the Virginia tobacco trade, Atlantic traders in the city shifted commercial focus to sugar and the Caribbean, taking advantage of long-term Scottish diasporic networks (which counterparts in Liverpool and Bristol could not do). The West India trades underpinned Scotland’s rapid industrial growth post-1783.

This marked the dawn of a new social order as the Glasgow ‘sugar aristocracy’ rose to prominence as the city’s wealthiest and most influential commercial grouping. Yet this was not an entirely new cohort; some were sons of ‘tobacco lords’, while others married into tobacco families, taking advantage of capital via tochers. The West India trades were largely financed from domestic sources (especially via the wealth of fathers and fathers-in-law already involved with the colonial trades), quickly generating profits that ensured the rise of multi-generational dynasties as younger male relatives, especially sons, became involved. West India commerce often generated considerable personal wealth: some went on to become the richest men in Scotland, with diverse portfolios of personal investments in land, industry and commerce. Many of the men involved became citizens of considerable social distinction with significant political influence, in possession of landed estates, who socialized in exclusive social clubs and married women from elite families. In death, many left substantial philanthropic commitments that improved wider society. But questions remain. How important was Glasgow-West India merchant capital to the commercial and industrial development of the city? To what extent did the West India trades drive regional and national development? What were the effects upon Scottish society? And how important was slavery-derived capital to Scotland more broadly?

R. H. Campbell noted three interpretive positions on the importance of trade to industry during the transformation of Glasgow from a commercial to an industrial city.1 This study adds support to the third: namely that the West India trades were fundamental to industrial expansion after the 1770s, with important continuities after the American Revolution. Major industries in and around Glasgow were dependent upon West India commerce, although this was not the only factor driving change. Nevertheless, the commercial system, and by extension Caribbean slavery, was fundamental to industrial growth from the 1770s up to 1830. At the same time, it must be recognized that West India merchant capital had greater significance in industry (especially cotton) outside Glasgow’s boundaries. As the evidence here underlines, the Glasgow-West India elite invested across successive phases of Scotland’s Industrial Revolution, in cotton and, to a much lesser extent, iron and coal. They also invested in the infrastructure that made the transportation of goods more efficient: canals and, to a lesser extent, the railway system after 1840. Personal investments were rarely a decisive factor, but they were substantial. As Campbell perceptively noted, the merchants’ greatest contribution to the development of Glasgow industry was not in turning into large-scale industrialists, but instead in continuing to work as merchants.2 The linen phase of Scottish proto-industrialization (not exclusively a Glasgow industry) was dependent upon export markets. In the 1790s, over 60 per cent of Scottish linen was exported to North America and especially the West Indies. The cotton phase of Scotland’s Industrial Revolution (c.1778–1800) was reliant upon both imports and exports from the West Indies in particular. In the 1820s, 86 per cent of the cotton workforce in Scotland produced goods for foreign export compared to the 14 per cent involved in production for the Scottish and English market.3 The West India merchants were instrumental to these processes in Glasgow and its hinterlands, which had important multiplier effects for large swathes of the Scottish population, especially in the west-central region.

The greatest effects of the Glasgow ‘sugar aristocracy’ have been characterized in terms of direct industrial investments and wider processes that influenced the development of the Scottish textile industry.4 These effects were indeed substantial, but this study underlines their importance as a commercial, financial and philanthropic interest. The extension of the national banking system to Glasgow (the Royal Bank opened its first branch in 1783, the Bank of Scotland in 1802) was a necessary precondition for the progression of the city’s capital-hungry West India commerce. Merchants held large sums of capital in account current and often invested directly in stock and shares in banks. Assets held by the West India elite on death in British banks, in Glasgow in particular, were more than three times the investments in cotton manufactories, and more than all investments in the transport infrastructure. As Glasgow developed into a commercial centre after 1830, West India merchants sunk over half-a-million pounds into the developing financial infrastructure; this contrasts with the patterns of industrial investments, such as cotton, which tended to be invested in mills outside the city. Glasgow-West India merchants also provided credit to others that stimulated domestic ventures across Scotland. They loaned to their peers, stimulating Atlantic commerce, which retained the profits within the community. Crucially, they intervened in times of financial crisis, providing loans to industrialists and particularly after the abolition of slavery in 1834.

As such, a revision about the significance and nature of West India merchant capital and credit is required: this holistic approach here reveals they invested directly in fixed capital of industrial concerns, but also provided credit for working capital when required. On death, they were owed wealth (including from family sources) equivalent to the capital of around thirteen provincial banks. West India assets in banking and their outlying own credit – a combined value of over £1m – vastly exceeded industrial investments: they must be viewed first as a commercial interest in nineteenth-century Scotland, and second as industrialists. Nevertheless, it is harder to assess the positive effects of loaning credit than to estimate how many people worked in ancillary industries connected to the Atlantic trades.

The wider effects of the West India trades on the Scottish economy and society were five-fold. First, West India merchant capital was invested in commercial and industrial enterprise, which, in the case of the latter, tended to take the form of vertically integrated enterprise (such as cotton firms). In this study, the effects were mainly localized to the west of Scotland. Second, imports and exports facilitated the growth of associated industries (and backward linkages into, for example, shipping) which provided wider employment, especially in cotton manufactories. Third, this study underlines the inextricable connections between West India commerce and banking across the period under scrutiny, initially in Edinburgh but increasingly in Glasgow, which meant banks shared in the profits of slavery via credit dealings, investments and deposits. Further case study research of institutions should elucidate the scale and significance. Fourth, slavery-derived wealth – accumulated by both merchants and planters – was often invested in local economies, sometimes with the explicit aim of improving conditions of local societies through philanthropic initiatives in hospitals and education institutions, or indirectly via landed estates, including the wider effects of improvements and consumption. Many absentee planters across Scotland dealt exclusively with Glasgow merchants and were also dependent on mercantile operations. Fifth, the return of sojourning wealth had the potential to reshape local societies and improve the standard of living of kin and often complete strangers via philanthropy, although some regions received more returns than others.

Glasgow-West India merchants acted as both shipping and recruitment agents, transporting many thousands of Scots to the West Indies. Every decent-sized Caribbean plantation and all of the islands’ mercantile houses employed a bookkeeper, and sometimes more than one, and many of these men arrived with skills and trades acquired in Scotland. This study estimates that up to 16,000 individuals could have travelled from Clyde ports to the West Indies during the period 1806 to 1834, which facilitates a new estimate of between 37,000 and 46,000 Scots travelling to the West Indies between 1750 and 1834. Third-phase colonies in the British West Indies, such as Demerara, became increasingly important destinations into the nineteenth century, thus providing new, lucrative opportunities, although Jamaica remained the principal Scottish outpost. Evidence of the Scots who lived, worked and in many cases died on Jamaica, Grenada, Carriacou and Trinidad illustrates earning capacity and career trajectory. Many profited from the slave economy, and some became owners of enslaved people.

This study set out to understand more about the movement of capital between Scotland and the West Indies. The young men who temporarily emigrated to the colonies were initially intent on the repatriation of capital and a return to the homeland. This crucial difference between emigration patterns to the transient colonies of the Indies and the settler colonies of North America has implications for studies of the economic development of Scotland based on imperial connections. The legal opinion of Lord Corehouse that few sought to remain in the West Indies once they had acquired fortunes is consistent with both contemporary sources and modern historiography. However, this monograph adds nuance to the contemporary and historiographical orthodoxy of the sojourning Scot. Many chose to remain in situ, very likely in the never-ending quest to accumulate more capital, but others chose to remain, especially in Trinidad. In reality, the Scots who went to the West Indies were commercial adventurers, the majority of whom died on the other side of the Atlantic. During their lives, Scottish adventurers in the West Indies conveyed profits via Glasgow merchant houses, particularly through bills of exchange and plantation produce. Many selected the same merchant houses as executors to ensure that wealth was dispersed among beneficiaries at home, often via banks. Scots not only depended on diasporic networks for credit and jobs in the colonies, but they also used Glasgow merchant firms and Scottish banks to repatriate the capital and disperse the profits at home. Scots were agents of ecclesiastical change in the colonies, introducing Scottish Presbyterianism once they were wealthy and influential enough to do so. In turn, Scotland received capital: these men did make fortunes and repatriate them to nineteenth-century Scotland.

The study, therefore, makes several key claims. First, West India merchants were central to the process of industrial and commercial change in Glasgow and the surrounding region in a manner that was unparalleled in other British-Atlantic outports. While the impact of their merchant capital was not decisive for any single enterprise, it influenced several initiatives across successive eras of change. If the city and its West India entrepreneurs are placed in comparative outport context, this group had the most profound impact of all British outports during the Industrial Revolution era. S. G. Checkland argued that Liverpool’s West India elites were in decline in the 1790s, while the American traders afterwards took the lead. For Kenneth Morgan, the narrow specialization of Bristol’s West India elite, allied with entrepreneurial failure, hindered eighteenth-century regional economic development. By the early nineteenth century, there was no local industry of national scale.5 Nicholas Draper has also concluded that, due to the diversified nature of the economy, Caribbean slavery was not instrumental to the development of London.6 By contrast, the Glasgow ‘sugar aristocracy’ underpinned – via direct investments and the Atlantic trade – the development of the city and the west of Scotland for the entirety of the Scottish Industrial Revolution (1778–1830), contributing to Glasgow’s rise to be a commercial centre afterwards. Glasgow-West India commerce, and by extension Caribbean slavery, had a more decisive role, in relative terms, in the industrial and commercial development of the city and wider region than any other Atlantic port in Great Britain.

Second, Glasgow and its hinterlands benefited from a triple influx of West India merchant capital, returned adventuring wealth and the wider commercial processes associated with the Caribbean trades. This was not the case for all Scottish regions. The contemporary view expressed by Thomas Somerville, minister of Jedburgh, that Jamaica was ‘the grave of Scotland’ is confirmed by this study. Even those who had successfully repatriated capital from the West Indies were more likely to die before they returned. On the other hand, Somerville’s position that ‘few added to the stock of national wealth’ is undermined by the excess of £1m identified in Scottish legal records (equivalent to £894.93m in modern values) that can be connected with Caribbean slavery.7 Indeed, this study provides the largest-ever survey of returned fortunes of British adventurers who travelled to the West Indies in the colonial period. While Alan Karras claimed there was little repatriation of Jamaica property to eighteenth-century Scotland, the opposite was true for the next century.8 In fact, as a commercial infrastructure developed and Scots repatriated more and more slavery profits, Jamaica was the premier source of West India wealth for a rapidly industrializing nineteenth-century Scotland. Caution is required. A Caribbean sojourn was high-risk, with only low-to-medium returns generally available. Only 1 per cent of the group of Scots in the West Indies surveyed here left what were regarded as nationally significant fortunes.9 And the three major West India fortunes in this study (Rae in Jamaica, Buchanan in Grenada, Lamont in Trinidad) all had the same thing in common: a longer than average life. Scots were more likely to die young from disease in penury in the West Indies – like Robert McGregor Stirling – than to repatriate wealth to Scotland. Small fortunes of less than £500 were the typical return. In modern terms, however, this was still substantial capital.

Did slavery really make Scotia great?10 ‘Greatness’ is, of course, a subjective term, but the Atlantic trades in general and West India commerce in particular contributed to the industrial and commercial development of central Scotland. But not all regions received the same imperial riches or underwent the same developmental processes. A regional comparison suggests the drain of manpower to the West Indies could be more damaging to local economies than the rare flows of repatriated post-mortem wealth was beneficial for wider development. Scottish adventurers were less likely to return with wealth to the Highlands, for example, than to west-central Scotland. The profits and processes associated with slavery made some, but not all, parts of Scotland economically ‘great’ and may have contributed to the underdevelopment of others. This work offers a model to assess both merchant and sojourning capital in one analytical frame, which can be developed for other regional studies. This should be complemented with research on the effects on local commerce and industry, as well as individual institutions. Historians of other British cities – especially Atlantic outports – are now presented with the challenge of addressing similar questions in a comparative framework.

Third, rather than an abolitionist hub, Scotland was a pro-slavery nation, with large swathes of the population complicit in the Atlantic slavery economy. In an era in which, as Eric Williams claims, the West India economy was in decline, Scotland’s connections with Caribbean slavery dramatically increased, which provided the foundation for the economic transformation of the nation.11 As the abolition movement gathered pace from 1787, many thousands of Scottish people were directly culpable in West India commerce and slavery, while the profits and wider industrial and commercial processes created opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people who became complicit in Scotland’s Atlantic slavery economy. As noted at the outset of this study, when Peter Borthwick, the paid agent of the West India interest, spoke in Edinburgh Assembly Rooms in March 1833, he argued that Caribbean slavery underpinned the economies of British-Atlantic ports:

Then what is your Bristol, your Liverpool, your Manchester, your Glasgow, your Paisley, your Dundee, your eastern end of the great metropolis, even London itself – if you take from them the West India Colonies? Nothing – worse than nothing; one universal scene of beggary and starvation.12

Borthwick’s claims were exaggerated with the intention of gathering public support for the continuation of chattel slavery, although the economy of Glasgow and hinterlands was dependent upon the Atlantic trades up to the end of Caribbean slavery. West India commerce was not the only factor driving change, but it was a transformative force and the most significant in early nineteenth-century Scotland. This mode of commerce underpinned the rise of new textile industries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a result, large swathes of the early nineteenth-century Scottish working population were dependent upon the Atlantic trades in general and West India commerce in particular. The multiplier effects of cotton were truly staggering. Estimates for the 1820s suggest that over 230,000 people in Scotland worked in textile employment (two-thirds of whom were in cotton production).13 Of this, approximately 78,000 were handloom weavers working in homes across Scotland.14 Given the Scottish population was just over 1.5 million in 1801, this suggests that at least 15 per cent (and probably much more) were directly complicit in, and benefited from, the wider Atlantic slavery economy.15 Around Glasgow and its hinterlands in 1819, there were fifty-two cotton mills, sixteen weaving works and eighteen calico printing works in addition to 32,000 handlooms in employment of Glasgow manufacturers. By 1834, it is possible that this group of weavers increased to as many as 50,000.16 This compares to the quarter of Glasgow’s population (39,000 residents) who signed an abolitionist petition in the 1820s.17

West India commerce was not exclusively an elite enterprise, and rank and class were not accurate indicators of participation in the Atlantic slavery economy. Those connected to manufacturing dependent upon the Atlantic trades, for example, may not have understood they benefited from West India commerce, and they did not vocalize support for the cause. However, their employment was dependent upon the continuation of Atlantic slavery. David Livingstone (1813–73), the missionary-explorer, is a famous example of a textile ‘lad of pairts’ who began life in humble origins in the west of Scotland but went on to gain a medical qualification and afterwards became a ‘hero’ of the British empire. Yet, his trajectory was made possible due to employment as an adult cotton spinner just outside Glasgow in Blantyre Mill works – owned by Henry Monteith, who was part-financed by West India merchant capital – an employer that paid relatively high wages.18 While few experienced such a remarkable trajectory as Livingstone, many across the west of Scotland were dependent upon industries powered by Caribbean slavery for sustenance. Not all individuals benefited equally from the profits of slavery, even in Glasgow and its hinterlands. And the Victorian city later had appalling poverty and housing conditions. Yet it is indisputable that individuals within all sectors of society benefited from the opportunities provided by profits of Caribbean slavery.

Finally, the profits of Caribbean slavery were embedded across late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland, and the Atlantic slavery economy was a quotidian feature of everyday life. Many thousands of mothers and fathers would have been accustomed to losing sons to the West Indies, and many others enjoyed improved standards of living due to repatriated wealth. Glasgow offers the best case study of change, as the economy and society were reshaped by slavery and its commerce, providing employment opportunities, disrupting patterns of traditional landownership, transforming the nature of banking, improving the provision and quality of education, revamping the transport and communication systems. In terms of trickle-down, Glasgow-West India philanthropic commitments were smaller in scale than the commercial or industrial investments but had important consequences at the time and now. The poor young lads who attended Buchanan’s Institution – founded on a returned West India fortune – were reckoned to be ‘heavier, healthier and stronger than the average Glasgow schoolboy’.19 Caribbean philanthropy left a verifiable legacy. In this sense, the West India ‘spheres of influence’ remain in Glasgow today: the industrial and commercial investments declined in importance from 1875, but those philanthropic commitments still have influence in the modern period, albeit on a much smaller scale. The University of Glasgow is a case in point. It has disbursed the equivalent of up to £91m, accrued from donations by those associated with Atlantic slavery.20 Some, such as the Ewing prizes (based on the £100 donated in 1828 by Jamaica planter James Ewing of Strathleven) are still awarded annually to postgraduates; these specific awards rotate annually between students in Medieval and Modern History. It is almost certain the income from slavery from the eighteenth century onwards benefited almost exclusively staff and students racialized as white British.21 Other philanthropic funds, such as the Dick Bequest, continue to disburse slavery-derived wealth into Scottish society.22 The West India ‘spheres of influence’ established then set in place inequalities that continue today, although the relative significance of the effects on society has gradually decreased.

This study of Glasgow’s ‘sugar aristocracy’, and Scots across the British West Indies, substantiates and significantly expands upon Eric Williams’ main thesis in Capitalism and Slavery in a Scottish context.23 Glasgow-West India merchant capital, and its Atlantic operations, were central to the origins and progress of the Scottish Industrial Revolution, helping establish and accelerating the process. Indeed, in the absence of West India merchants, this cataclysmic event that transformed the nation would have begun later and progressed at a much slower pace. In a counter-factual analysis, cotton would have likely been supplied via East India merchants in London in any case, but such an irregular supply could hardly have sustained large-scale manufacturing processes before the end of the East India monopoly in 1813. In actuality, Caribbean slavery underpinned textile manufacturing from 1778, a system which employed many thousands of Scots who often had no knowledge of their complicity.

Ironically, Peter Borthwick’s public observations in Edinburgh Assembly Rooms are almost identical to the second of Eric Williams’ claims made around a century later (ie that the slave trade and commerce with the slave economies powered the British Industrial Revolution). Borthwick’s arguments were made in support of the British empire and slavery, while Williams attacked the ideological foundation on which it rested. Borthwick warned of catastrophe on emancipation, while Williams viewed the landmark event as ushering in a new era of British laissez-faire trade dominance. Both pro-slavery propagandist and anti-imperialist historian, however, agreed that the industrial and commercial development of Great Britain and its manufacturing towns and port cities was powered by trade with the West Indies and Caribbean slavery. Not even Borthwick or Williams could have appreciated the true importance of Caribbean slavery to Scottish economic development, at least in some regions. West India commerce shaped Glasgow and west central Scotland in a way unparalleled along Britain’s Atlantic seaboard, with large sections of the population dependent on the continuation of the trades and, by extension, Caribbean slavery. Even today, Glasgow-West India merchant capital, and returned Scottish-Caribbean wealth, improves lives in British society.