Introduction

In the spring of 1833, Peter Borthwick, a paid agent of the West India interest, championed the pro-slavery cause at a series of lectures across Scotland. After boisterous debates with abolitionists in Glasgow in February – at the behest of the pro-slavery London Society of West India Planters and Merchants and the Glasgow-West India Association – he arrived at the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms in March 1833. Although full emancipation in the British West Indies was by then a fait accompli, Borthwick hoped to convince the public of the recklessness of immediate abolition and cited economics as the prime factor for the continuation of chattel slavery:

[I am here to speak] of our brothers and sisters, born at, educated at, reared to manhood at home, and now in the possession of these Colonies, as owners, or rulers, or, in some sort, moral and civil protectors of those beings in bondage. From them, you, the people of Great Britain, draw a revenue of direct income…you have an encouragement to your industry, which is not equalled by any other market…tropical produce…is exported to you in the form of the raw material…it is repurchased by the Colonist…beyond the price he must pay for it in any other market in the world…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 (Cheers).1

While Borthwick mounted a defence of resident planters, the entire system was based upon the maritime carrying trades undertaken by merchants who imported tropical produce, exporting goods such as textiles in return.2 Merchants thus bridged additional factors of production – the landmass of the West Indies, and labour of enslaved people – to create resources for consumption, a process that, according to Borthwick, contributed to the economic development of Great Britain and raised the standard of living of the embryonic manufacturing class. Thus, cotton fields in Grenada and Carriacou and sugar and coffee estates in Jamaica and Trinidad connected with refineries, mills, factories and landed estates in Glasgow, Lanarkshire and elsewhere across Great Britain. While it must have seemed natural to those in attendance that British commerce and industry was powered by the West India trades and, by extension, the labour of 800,000 enslaved men, women and children, exactly how far these connections contributed to economic development, then and now, remains a matter of some debate.

Peter Borthwick situated Glasgow in the appropriate British-Atlantic world context, and contemporary descriptions of the city’s West India merchants as the ‘sugar aristocracy’ are suggestive of their importance.3 Were the individuals that made these trades possible – transatlantic merchants and young men sojourning to the West Indies to acquire wealth – really so important to the economic and societal development? Despite their grandiose title, contemporary publications condemned the ‘sugar aristocracy’ to relative insignificance: as entrepreneurs who occasionally generated large fortunes during Glasgow’s sugar heyday, c.1790 to 1838, yet of lesser overall importance than their commercial predecessors, the ‘tobacco lords’. Indeed, prominent antiquary John Guthrie Smith argued Glasgow-West India commerce was a minor enterprise:

It [the West India trades] probably was never entitled to the consideration it got. Being in few hands, it yielded fortunes that bulked in the public eye, and less showy trades may have been of more real importance…It left behind it no single fortune equal to the largest fortunes left by the tobacco trade.4

Since the author’s father was a West India merchant who was financially ruined, these views might have been skewed by his own background. Nevertheless, as will be explained below, various historians have argued that the West India trades and/or mercantile investments were incidental to British economic development, thus siding with Guthrie Smith.5 Such perspectives are part of long-standing debates about Britain’s industrial growth and the relative importance of endogenous (such as domestic markets and technology) and exogenous (foreign commerce, including with slavery economies) factors.6

This study seeks to understand more about the effects of West India commerce on metropolitan society and economy. At its core, this is a study of mercantile capital in Glasgow which poses several interrelated questions about an era of rapid transformation in Scotland. Who were the ‘sugar aristocracy’ and how did they come to be? How were West India trades financed and undertaken in Glasgow and abroad? This study goes further, examining the Scots who travelled to the West Indies towards the end of Caribbean slavery and ascertaining how commercially successful they were, if at all. Questions remain: what impact did the direct investments of West India merchants and colonial adventurers have on local economies, as well as the wider effects of such processes on commerce and industry? This study, therefore, takes a new approach to illuminate the world of individuals who acquired West India fortunes (both mercantile and colonial), ultimately assessing, in an Atlantic frame, the interconnections between the colonies and metropole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Less than forty years after Peter Borthwick’s claims, Karl Marx theorized in Capital (1867) that state-sponsored colonial expansion and the imposition of chattel slavery were fundamental to the rise of capitalism in Great Britain. The settlement of colonies, and other factors, combined to hasten in ‘hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition’.7 Merchants had a crucial role within the transformation. Merchant capitalism was said to have had a ‘Janus face’, parasitically feeding off older modes of production (such as chattel slavery), thus providing access to new markets and the primitive accumulation of capital which underpinned the development of a new capitalist epoch.8

From the 1970s, the neo-Marxist world economy school examined flows of global trade and profits on a grand scale. Such theorists take a broad view of the development of metropolitan regions in Europe, arguing that unequal relationships underpinned capitalist development in the imperial core while perpetuating the underdevelopment of colonial peripheries from 1450 onwards.9 Immanuel Wallerstein was among the most influential in this school, viewing capitalism as an interconnected entity, a ‘world system’ defined by dependency and underdevelopment.10 Yet, the theory has attracted criticism for the lack of ‘systematic statistical underpinning’ and, for some historians, colonial commerce was but a small part of European economic activity in the early modern period. Indeed, Patrick O’Brien famously concluded that ‘for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral’.11

The view that Atlantic commerce was a significant contributor to British economic activity is also a matter of some debate. It has long been argued that the seventeenth-century Commercial Revolution in England preceded the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution and thus that domestic demand, rather than overseas trade, powered self-sustained growth.12 On the other hand, Kenneth Morgan has noted that the Americanization of eighteenth-century British trade underpinned the Industrial Revolution, with foreign commerce an engine of growth. The demand for manufactured goods for export generated growth and reshaped business institutions, banking and commercial strategies. These processes transformed British-Atlantic commerce from a primarily import-led enterprise to one based on the export of a variety of high-value goods.13 The scale and significance of imports, however, has been questioned. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman examined the role of sugar as an ‘engine of economic growth’ and argued it was not comparable to other domestic industries (echoing the ‘small ratios’ analysis of the transatlantic slave trade: see below). Thus, for these authors, slavery ‘certainly “helped” that Revolution along, but its role was no more than that of many other economic activities, and in the absence of any one of these it is hard to believe that the Industrial Revolution would not have occurred anyway’.14 While this was a seminal argument, the authors have recently been accused of ‘straw man’ scholarship by rebutting a claim that no historian makes (i.e. that slavery ‘caused’ the Industrial Revolution) and critiqued for using the sugar industry as a proxy for the wider Atlantic slave economy.15 Nevertheless, Trevor Burnard remains sceptical about the effects of slavery on British economic transformation, arguing the Atlantic trades represented a ‘small percentage of European gross national product’.16

In contrast to the Eltis-Engerman position, Joseph Inikori argued that commerce with slave-based economies in an Atlantic system dependent on chattel slavery – including Spain and Portugal – had significant multiplier effects not only on English industrialization but also shipping and commercial and financial infrastructure.17 At a roundtable discussion in 2003, Inikori drew support from Pat Hudson and Nuala Zahedieh but criticism from others.18 More recent macro analyses provide further support. Knick Harley underlined the importance of the interaction between chattel slavery, the Atlantic economy and British industrialization but claimed that North America, not the West Indies, made the central contribution.19 Overall, the effects could be substantial. Klas Rönnbäck estimated that direct and indirect economic activities connected with the triangular trade and plantation slavery were equivalent to 11 per cent of Great Britain’s eighteenth-century GDP.20 The two opposing macro analyses of British economic transformation (Eltis-Engerman and Inikori) share a common feature: they are Anglo-centric in focus and their arguments have been accepted as a proxy for overall British economic development.

Chattel slavery was the economic foundation of the North American and the West Indian economies. The system has long been argued to have underpinned the Atlantic trades and British economic growth. Indeed, the publication of Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery in 1944 established a long-term debate about the overall relationship with British industrialization. Marxisant in tone if not approach, Williams defined an exploitative global relationship. ‘Commercial capitalism’, according to Williams, was based upon mercantile monopolies and slavery and underpinned the development of industrial capitalism, which was the foundation for manufacturing.21 Profits from the slave trade and plantation slavery, commerce with the slave economies, as well as private fortunes of the West India interest and those returned from slavery societies, contributed to the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Great Britain, either in a causal role (strong) or as a significant contributor (weak). In this view, however, the slave economy went into terminal decline after the American War of Independence (1775–83). Caribbean slavery became less profitable thereafter and was of declining importance in nineteenth-century Britain. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in 1834 were principally due to declining economic conditions rather than humanitarian agitation.22 For Williams, Atlantic slavery and mercantilism powered industrial capitalism, which in turn destroyed slavery and repositioned Great Britain as a producer of manufactured goods in a new, global nexus.

This study of the Glasgow ‘sugar aristocracy’ is situated in the orbit of the main Williams thesis – effects on commerce and industry – and another regarding the decline of the West India economy (both of these are discussed in more detail below). These themes have become a ‘Williams thesis’ in their own right. In an oft-cited section, the main Williams thesis argued that the trafficking in enslaved people, plantation slavery and associated commerce powered the British Industrial Revolution:

By 1750, there was hardly a trading or manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits provided one of the main streams of accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution.23

Yet, overall, Williams did not view Caribbean slavery and associated commerce as a causal factor in industrial change: ‘it must not be inferred that the triangular trade was solely and entirely responsible for the economic development. The growth of the internal market…the ploughing-in of profits from industry to generate still further capital and achieve greater expansion, played a large part.’24 However, Berg and Hudson went further in a recent study which adopted a truly British scope (incorporating Scotland), with the authors claiming the Atlantic trades were a ‘major causal factor’ in the British Industrial Revolution.25

Eric Williams provided a broad range of examples underlining how the colonial trades influenced, both directly and indirectly, British industries such as textile production (wool and cotton), sugar refining, rum distillation, pacotille (cheap baubles for trade in Africa) and metallurgical industries production as well as influencing shipping, shipbuilding, insurance and banking.26 Nuala Zahedieh’s study of the copper industry has elucidated Williams’ vision of ‘commercial capitalism’ in England. The demand for copper boilers, coolers and rum stills and other equipment in slave economies made it the ‘most dynamic industry’ in the British metal industry, thus chaining ‘thousands of workers in Cornwall, South Wales, Bristol and London to enslaved labour’ while creating vast fortunes for coppersmiths such as William Forbes.27 Although Forbes had no direct connection to slavery, Williams examined the investments made by those who did – especially the West India interest – thus shifting from macro to micro-economics. Although the effects of direct investments were smaller in relation to the wider, systemic processes, merchants and planters sank slavery-derived fortunes into various enterprises which altered the internal dynamics of eighteenth-century Britain.28 This study seeks to understand in greater detail how West India commerce, especially direct investments, affected Scottish economic and societal development.

The first stream of Williams’ capital accumulation, the trafficking in enslaved people (commonly known as the ‘transatlantic slave trade’, although this is an increasingly problematic term), has generated a considerable historiography. The horrifying scale seemingly provided compelling evidence to support the manifesto. Modern estimates suggest that European traders forcibly trafficked over 12 million Africans into chattel slavery in the Americas between 1501 and 1875. British ships imported 3.25m people between 1626 and 1808, the second-highest numbers after Portugal.29 However, the estimates of profits from slave voyages and their relative importance to British economic transformation has been viewed with some scepticism.30 Indeed, Engerman’s conclusions that the profits of the British trafficking in enslaved people were insignificant has become known as the ‘small ratios’ argument.31

However, this debate has little relevance in a Scottish context. The Royal African Company’s trading monopoly from 1660 initially centred the trade in London, which effectively prohibited voyages departing from Scotland before the early eighteenth century.32 Although port records are not comprehensive for the period between the Union of 1707 and the abolition of the slave trade a century later, just twenty-seven ‘triangular trade’ voyages have been verified to have cleared Scottish ports between 1706 and 1766. These voyages tended to be economic failures.33 For comparison, over 1,500 transatlantic slave trade voyages departed from the English port of Bristol alone in the same period.34 Yet, funded voyages do not tell the full story. Scots were heavily involved in trafficking enslaved people via English ships, and had (as yet unquantified) involvement with such trafficking within British and foreign colonies.35 Case studies of individuals such as Richard Oswald and John Tailyour reveal they were complicit in trafficking on a horrifying scale, accumulating major fortunes which improved the Scottish countryside.36 While Scottish slave-traders did accumulate great fortunes from inter-colonial trafficking in enslaved people, and more examples will surely come to light with further research, the systemic effects must have been slight compared to English ports. It was not so much ‘small ratios’ for Scotland, as tiny. Nevertheless, profits from the trafficking in enslaved people was but one stream of accumulation; the wider, systemic effects of plantation slavery were deemed more important to Britain in general and Scotland in particular.

An assessment of the state of the West India economy, and the origins of the wealth and profits of those involved, is crucial to understanding how slavery influenced British development. The ‘golden age’ of sugar in the West Indies (a golden age for planters, not the enslaved), according to the traditional view, occurred in the seventeenth century.37 Noted historian of the British West Indies Richard Pares described the period after the Peace of Paris in 1763 and the outbreak of the American war in 1775 as the ‘silver age of sugar’.38 Plantation profits averaged an annual return of 13.5 per cent on initial investment during this era.39 With such wealth on offer, it must have seemed natural to presume, as Williams did in Capitalism and Slavery, that there was a substantial net in-flow of colonial profits to Scotland and England. But this ran contrary to the wisdom of Adam Smith, professor of logic and moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, who famously stated that Britain’s colonies represented ‘mere loss instead of profit’ in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).40 Smith criticized the closed mercantile system that created a mutual monopoly between Great Britain and its colonies in the Americas. For Smith, while the Atlantic system was inefficient on a national scale, it created vast private profits for special interests. One modern account supported this view, arguing that while the British colonies came at a net cost to Great Britain, the real ‘winners’ of the West India trades were the merchants and planters who organized themselves in powerful lobbying groups.41

Furthermore, according to Adam Smith, the overall commercial system was sustained through metropolitan credit.42 Such agreements between merchants and planters were certainly fundamental to the development of the Atlantic slave economies, although there have been historiographical disagreements about the origins of this wealth.43 Richard Pares initially agreed with Adam Smith: ‘since the colonies absorbed as much capital as they could get, they cannot have done much to build up capital in England and thereby to promote the Industrial Revolution…the planters themselves seem to have been recipients of capital rather than sources’.44 However, at the end of a pre-eminent career cut tragically short, Pares radically shifted position, arguing that the plantations generated their own wealth:

The profits of the plantations were the source which fed the indebtedness charged upon the plantations themselves. In this sense, Adam Smith was wrong: the wealth of the British West Indies did not all proceed from the mother country; after some initial loans in the earliest period which merely primed the pump, the wealth of the West Indies was created out of the profits of the West Indies themselves, and, with some assistance from the British taxpayer, much of it found a permanent home in Great Britain.45

S. D. Smith revisited the house of the Lascelles – the records on which Pares mainly based his conclusions – and cast new light on what he describes as the ‘Adam Smith question’: did the wealth of the West Indies spring from capital advanced by British merchants, or did wealth accrue by planters reinvesting profits on their estates? Disputing Pares’ ‘ploughed back profits’ thesis, S. D. Smith instead concluded Adam Smith’s vision of British riches overflowing into the Caribbean ‘was closer to the truth’. In this view, long-term mortgage capital from British merchants underpinned the late eighteenth-century ‘sugar-boom’ in the West Indies.46

The wealth of late eighteenth-century Jamaica provides evidence of the vibrance of the West India economy on the eve of the American Revolution. Richard Sheridan examined the wealth of Jamaican planters and, by drawing up a ‘balance sheet of empire’, concluded the aggregate wealth of the West Indies was £30 million, with Jamaica comprising 60 per cent (£18 million). Sheridan reasoned that the lucrative West India trade contributed as much as 10 per cent of British national income in this period.47 Sheridan’s figures on the extent of trade were disputed as too optimistic.48 However, by assessing the ‘prodigious riches’ of Jamaican residents, Trevor Burnard revised upwards Sheridan’s capital stock estimates, thus underlining the island’s status as the wealthiest British colony at the outbreak of the American Revolution.49 Yet, it remains unknown how much personal wealth was repatriated to Great Britain. Indeed, Kenneth Morgan’s 1996 call for ‘firmer evidence’ of returned West India fortunes remains open today.50 While historians have provided colonial estimates of wealth acquired from slavery, especially in Jamaica, much remains to be understood about the profits flowing from the island and the West Indies more broadly to the metropole.51 Through the inventories generated on the death of Scots in three islands, this study systematically analyses, in a comparative framework, the importance of slavery-generated wealth repatriated to the metropole in the era of supposed decline.

While few historians disagree that Caribbean slavery was still profitable in 1775, the exact date of decline is one of the most important debates in Atlantic world historiography. Some historians have viewed the era after the American War of Independence as a ‘bronze or even lead age’ for resident sugar planters, although, as will be demonstrated, the view that the West Indies were in economic decline from this point remains contentious.52 In what has become known as the ‘decline thesis’, Eric Williams argued the profits from Caribbean slavery declined after 1783, and perhaps as early as 1763, thus following in the footsteps of his mentor, Lowell Ragatz. In The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, Ragatz located the onset of decline after the Seven Years War (1756–63), but this was qualified. British planter prosperity peaked in 1799, but a glut in sugar production combined with inefficient agricultural practices and planter debt meant increasingly diminishing profits for ‘old Caribbean holdings’ from 1763.53 All historians embrace the general principle of West India decline, yet disagree about causes, the exact starting point and chronology. Seymour Drescher described the abolition of the slave trade as ‘econocide’ as the trade was still profitable in 1807. Thus, decline did not come in 1783 as Williams contends, but after the Napoleonic Wars.54

The view that planting profits entered terminal decline after 1776 has also been challenged. J. R. Ward examined the accounts of twenty British-controlled sugar plantations and concluded that, while profits declined with the American war, profitability rose again in the next decade and depression only arrived in the 1820s.55 It is now accepted that ‘decline’ was dependent on date of colonization and stage of development. David Beck Ryden argued the overproduction of sugar in the West Indies and concurrent fall in prices from 1799 initiated decline. The narrative of decline was promoted by vociferous Jamaica planters via the London West India Committee – whose profits were diminishing – although planters in newer colonies continued to fare better into the nineteenth century.56 Indeed, absentee slave owners with interests in British Guiana and Trinidad constituted a ‘new and important fraction of “the planter class”’ in nineteenth-century Britain.57 Overall, most historians – even if divided on overall impact – agree on the later chronology of decline. Nicholas Draper dated the origins of decline to the 1820s.58 Trevor Burnard corroborates the Ward–Draper position.59 Thus, the process of decline was underway by the 1830s and in all likelihood began during the previous decade.

The importance of Caribbean slavery and its commerce to British industrialization is even more hotly disputed among historians. Based on the assumption of the in-flow of wealth to Great Britain, Eric Williams noted important streams of capital accumulation; national wealth generated via commerce (eg providing the government with income from duties, and the multiplier effects from ancillary industries); and the accumulation of personal fortunes by merchants, planters and sojourners. While historians assessing the importance of slavery to national wealth remain divided, micro-level studies of the personal investments of enslavers suggest a considerable impact. Through examples of prominent absentee West India families such as the Beckfords and the Pennants, Williams traced investments in British institutions and country estates.60 However, for Williams, the direct investments of the West Indians were but a minor part of the transfer into industry, a position that contemporary Richard Pares agreed with: ‘West India millionaires [built]…more Fonthills [i.e. mansions] than factories among them’.61 Accepting Pares’ conclusion in 1992, Pat Hudson was generally sceptical of the importance of the West India interest’s direct investments in industrial enterprise while maintaining that the slavery system more broadly transformed British industry and commerce.62 Estimation of the respective proportions of West India fortunes that rested in consumption or industry awaits detailed quantitative assessment but Williams viewed the process as a distinctly eighteenth-century phenomenon. After 1783, Williams envisioned an ‘outworn interest, whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective’. Decline, therefore, had a transatlantic dimension.63 Thus, while noting the social, cultural and political prominence of the West India interest in eighteenth-century Britain, the narrative was one of declining economic and political influence, and wider relevance, after 1783.

Nicholas Draper and the historians involved with the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project modified this interpretation by arguing that the patterns illuminated by Williams in the eighteenth century continued into the next. Overall, they concluded that Britain’s slave economy was a ‘significant contributor’ to the remaking of national commerce and to a lesser extent industry (especially cotton and railways) up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet, their work underlined the importance of private wealth, as slave owners invested heavily across British society, including in the cultural and political spheres.64 However, while absentee slave owners were vitally important to the infusion of slavery-derived capital into the fabric of British economy and society, colonial merchants represented a more regular channel of slavery wealth into local infrastructure and industry.65 Since not all slave owners were merchants and vice versa, the study of merchant capital benefits from a focused, regional approach. This study takes up the mantle thrown down by the LBS study, examining Glasgow-West India merchants and their investments up to emancipation and beyond, assessing their relative importance into the Victorian period.

The paid agent of the West India interest, Peter Borthwick, naturally argued the West India colonies were crucial to the development of London and outports along the western seaboard of Great Britain. The importance of mercantile activity to the development of British ports can be gauged through case studies, which will also provide a comparative framework for this study. London, of course, was the premier Atlantic port in Great Britain. With a population approaching 1 million by 1801 (a rise from around 600,000 in the previous century), London stood alone in Britain. Transformed into the leading commercial hub of seventeenth-century Europe, imperial trade initiated ‘adaptive innovations’; the accumulation and improvement of capabilities; the improvement and diversification of manufacturing in London and hinterlands; improvement of transport networks; and a major boost in education which ‘raised England to technological leadership in Europe’.66

Perry Gauci argued the ‘ingenuity and courage’ of individual merchants underpinned London’s spectacular growth after 1660, while noting the importance of large conglomerates such as the East India Company.67 London remained the premier sugar refinery centre in Great Britain on the eve of the American Revolution.68 By the 1790s, the West India trades were estimated to be the third highest of London’s overseas trade (by value), with substantial mercantile capital sunk into infrastructure such as the West India and London dock companies. Draper concluded the ‘slave economy permeated every almost every aspect of London’s commercial life’, yet, due to the diversified nature of the economy, was not instrumental to the development of the metropolis (although was not marginal either).69 Given London’s role as a trade hub, West India fortunes were often generated with the intention of removal elsewhere. The Hibbert mercantile dynasty was based in Manchester and London, expropriating wealth from Jamaica which fanned out via the family to philanthropic institutions and country estates in Lancashire, Warwickshire and elsewhere. Prominent Scots, such as Richard Oswald of Auchincruive, implemented a similar business model in the mid-eighteenth century, transferring wealth from the metropole to Ayrshire in Scotland.70 Yet, while London remained the dominant imperial centre and source of mercantile fortunes, as the eighteenth century progressed the port’s relative share of national commerce declined, partially explained by the concomitant rise of three major outports along Britain’s western seaboard.

British outports developed various specialisms throughout the eighteenth century. Bristol specialized in the sugar trade, Liverpool in the slave trade and Glasgow in tobacco.71 Measured by volume and value of trade as well as population size, Bristol was the premier outport at the opening of the eighteenth century. Over the next century, the population rose over threefold from 20,000 to 64,000 in 1801. Initial port specialism in the tobacco trade was superseded in terms of imports by Glasgow in the 1720s and Liverpool in 1738. Similarly, Liverpool took over as the main British slave-trading port in the 1740s. Bristol’s merchants increasingly focused on West India trades, and it remained the leading sugar outport for ‘virtually all of the eighteenth century’. Liverpool only really challenged Bristol’s position as premier English sugar port after 1799.72 The profits of the slave trade powered Bristol’s eighteenth-century ‘urban renaissance’, and the West India elite invested in land, commerce and industry.73 David Richardson estimated that 40 per cent of Bristol’s income in 1790 was directly connected to slavery-related activities, a figure that does not take into account the multiplier effects of colonial investment.74 However, while the concentration on valuable sugar imports generated vast fortunes, such narrow specialization – allied with entrepreneurial failure – hindered regional economic development. Bristol evolved as a consumption centre and, unlike Liverpool and Glasgow, did not develop into an entrepôt for foreign trade. Thus, although Welsh industry received a boost, there were few multiplier effects and Bristol was a minor export centre by the mid-nineteenth century.75

In 1660, Liverpool was a minor English port with no transatlantic commerce of note. Late seventeenth-century commercial expansion was powered by American and West India merchants and by the mid-eighteenth century, the port was pre-eminent among British outports. The thriving economy promoted, and was in turn stimulated by, population growth and associated urbanization. In 1702, the population of Liverpool was 6,000, rising to 30,000 in 1750 and just over 80,000 in 1801. It reached a remarkable 375,955 in 1851. With the development of commerce, the transport system improved, which helped the growth of new industries and facilitated trade connections with the manufacturing hinterlands of Manchester and Lancashire.76 The port became the centre of the British slave trade in the mid-eighteenth century, the profits from which could be substantial.77 But, as Sheryllynne Haggerty noted, the trafficking in enslaved people was only one part of Liverpool’s Atlantic economy, and perhaps relatively insignificant compared to the American trades. Voyages were high risk and not always profitable.78 Beyond the major fortunes made by some of its inhabitants, Jane Longmore doubts whether Liverpool ‘derived entirely positive gains from its participation in the slave trade’. While the north-west’s industrial production received a boost, Liverpool’s own manufacturing base was closely associated with the slave trade, rather than the cotton industry, and when abolition passed in 1807, it destabilized the sector and left a limited workforce unable to shift into other industries.79

The direct trafficking in enslaved Africans was arguably of lesser importance to Liverpool’s development than either the West India or Virginia trades.80 Liverpool was the premier British tobacco outport in 1740, but lost this position to Clyde ports for almost a half century afterwards. Liverpool once again became the top outport for tobacco after 1792.81 As such, the American War of Independence transformed Liverpool’s ‘empire at home’ in an entirely different way compared to Glasgow.82 The importance of the American market afterwards increased, and Liverpool’s West India boom ended in the 1790s. According to S. G. Checkland, the city’s ‘West India men were really in decline, enjoying the last great flush of prosperity’ while the American traders profited from expansion.83 Despite the relative decline in the city’s West India economy, paradoxically, some merchants, such as John Gladstone, became very wealthy by complementing American trading with expansion into Jamaica and British Guiana.84 While the Liverpool-West India interest were a declining economic force from the 1790s, West India firm Sandbach, Tinne & Company was one of the principal mercantile claimants of slave compensation in Great Britain.85 By 1834, American traders powered Liverpool’s nineteenth-century rise to ‘second city’ of the British Empire and industrial England’s ‘main gateway’ to the Atlantic world.86 Overall, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the systemic effects of Atlantic trade and merchant capital promoted the development of English ports and their hinterlands, which in turn influenced local commerce, and to a lesser extent industrialization, although the impact varied regionally.

The current English debate about the influence of slavery and the Atlantic trades sets several questions for the incipient historiography of Scottish involvement. Would Scotland have developed at the same rate or within the same timescale in the absence of colonial connections? Scotland had a contrasting trajectory from England, and colonial commerce had a more significant role in its economic transformation. The Scottish nation occupied an anomalous place in Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. It was peripheral to England yet it underwent ‘development by invitation’ after joining with the imperial core in 1707.87 Scots were present in colonial America and the English Caribbean from the early 1600s, but the nation did not possess a formal empire of any significance that would have encouraged large-scale transformation.88 Sharing a monarch with England from 1603, Scots were nominally present in the embryonic English Atlantic world with some trading privileges, yet Scotland was effectively classed as a ‘foreign nation’ under the terms of the Navigation Acts from 1660.89 With growing constitutional conflict, exacerbated by the failed Scottish imperial scheme at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, free trade with the English empire became the lure to coerce Scottish politicians into accepting proposals that led to the Union of Parliaments.90 For Allan Macinnes, the Incorporating Union of 1707 provided Scots with access to the largest common market in history up to then and opened an array of opportunities for Scots in war, manufactures (both products and markets) and trade in the established English empire.91 But it was not unrestricted access. Andrew Mackillop has underlined the composite nature of a British empire subsequently governed by a miscellany of regulatory monopolistic frameworks.92 While the British-Atlantic world was open territory to Scots and their trading companies, London-based monopolies such as the East India and Hudson Bay companies administered some zones thereof. Scottish employees infiltrated Asia and Canada via company involvement, although traders, Glaswegians in particular, freely operated in the Caribbean and North America. This invitation did initiate economic development, but, importantly, free trade was offered only in imperial zones already established as slavery societies.

Consistent with the preference of twentieth-century British historians to explain the Industrial Revolution via internal forces, histories of Scottish industrialization in that period also tended to be inward-looking in nature.93 The trivialization of both mercantile capital and overseas trade in relation to Scottish economic development is exemplified by R. H. Campbell’s seminal Scotland Since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society (1965), a standard university text for many decades. Campbell endorsed a vision of Scottish ‘enclave economy’ which marginalized the importance of tobacco commerce which supposedly only influenced a small part of the wider economy. He noted ‘significant [mercantile] involvement’ in the cotton industry, Glasgow banking and the linen industry, although these processes were not deemed of any importance. Instead, the effects of the Atlantic system on Scottish development were of a more ‘general and indirect kind’, such as repatriated colonial fortunes – although these were reckoned to have little impact on the national economy.94 Surveys by Henry Hamilton, Christopher Whatley and others acknowledged the importance of transatlantic commerce (albeit ignoring the importance of slavery) yet prioritized internal factors to explain economic transformation.95

Historians of Scotland have only recently incorporated transatlantic slavery into surveys of economic development. T. M. Devine’s corpus of work bridged the gap between endogenous and exogenous explanations, prioritizing the latter over the former. From the 1970s onwards, Devine emphasized the ‘vital contribution’ of mercantile investments and the tobacco trade to Scottish economic development, while remaining sceptical that colonial trade in general represented the ‘deus ex machina in the process of [Scottish industrial] change’.96 However, this position was qualified. Although taking notice of Eric Williams in his early publications, Devine was sceptical about the relevance of the latter’s arguments for most of his career.97 As recently as 2004, he claimed there was ‘little evidence’ for the claims in Capitalism & Slavery and its ‘patent exaggerations’ had supposedly marginalized the issue of empire in the historiography of economic growth.98

There has been an explosion of interest and a notable historiographical shift since then. In 2005, Douglas Hamilton’s study of Scots in the Caribbean positively cited Williams in a Scottish context.99 Five years later, in his last-ever lecture after a forty-year career, Devine apologized (‘Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’) for the omission of chattel slavery in his landmark study The Tobacco Lords, first published in 1975. In 2011, Devine posed the question ‘Did slavery make Scotia great?’ which underlined the centrality of chattel slavery to Scotland’s economic growth. Invoking Eric Williams’ imports/exports/personal profits model, Devine argued three aspects of the transatlantic relationship are of interest in a Scottish context. First, economic growth was rapid from c.1760 while dependent on imports of sugar, cotton and tobacco grown by enslaved people. Second, exports of manufactured goods – such as textiles – were shipped from Scottish ports to the Americas, clothing the enslaved. Third, colonial merchants, planters and returned sojourners sunk profits into productive enterprise. In Devine’s view, therefore, Scotland provides ‘fertile ground’ for historians in the Williams school.100 In 2015, Devine seemingly arrived at a conclusion: ‘slavery…[was] integral to the weft and woof of the national past from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries’.101

The differences between English and Scottish demographic change and economic development mean that the vision of Atlantic commerce powering industrial change, and by extension the Williams thesis, is more persuasive in a Scottish context. First, England’s Commercial Revolution evolved from the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and thus preceded the Industrial Revolution (c.1760–1830).102 Yet, rapid economic growth in Scotland only followed after the Incorporating Union of 1707. In contrast to England, Scotland’s Commercial Revolution (1730 onwards), Agricultural Revolution (1760s until 1800) and Industrial Revolution (c.1770s–1830) occurred almost concurrently.103 Second, the Scottish population was relatively small compared to that of England. In 1755, the Scottish population was 1.3m, rising to 2.6m by 1841.104 Overall, Scots comprised around 14 per cent of the British population between 1801 and 1831.105 For comparison, the population of the British West Indies in 1829 was almost 800,000 (of which 90 per cent were enslaved people).106 The relatively small rise in Scottish population between 1755 and 1801 (0.6 per cent per annum) and the low-wage economy, according to Christopher Whatley, meant that the stimulus of overseas trade had more significance than the domestic market.107 Third, beginning in 1778, Scotland experienced industrial growth at a quicker pace than England, despite starting from a more modest base. Thus, from the 1770s onwards, Scotland witnessed an industrial revolution – compared to English evolution – which was inextricably connected with the enslaved people of North America and the British West Indies.108 It seems transatlantic merchants played a proportionately more significant role in the Scottish Industrial Revolution compared to England. And nowhere more so than Glasgow.

Glasgow’s Atlantic system was established in the seventeenth century. Granted royal burgh status by the king in 1611, this legal framework confirmed and extended pre-existing trade privileges. Foreign trade was long seen as an economic panacea in the Atlantic port, and the city’s merchant fraternity created a vibrant economy.109 As the river Clyde that passed through what is now the city centre was too underdeveloped to facilitate large-scale maritime commerce, Port Glasgow and neighbouring Greenock on the west coast of Scotland became the favoured satellite outports of Glasgow’s merchants.110 A maritime infrastructure for large ships was not established in Glasgow’s boundaries until after 1800.111 Despite the restricted access under the terms of English Navigation Acts from 1660 onwards, prerogative powers granted to colonial traders encouraged the founding of the city’s earliest sugar refineries, which generated the first industrial fortunes.112 However, at this point, overall trade was small-scale as tax duties and privileges conferred on the select few allowed them to monopolize a lucrative industry.113

After the Union of 1707, the markets opened. Early sugar pioneers the McDowalls and Millikens returned to the west of Scotland with slavery-derived wealth from the Caribbean.114 But the rise in volume of the Virginia tobacco trade was the remarkable story. By the 1740s, Glasgow and Clyde ports (Port Glasgow and Greenock) were the primus inter pares in the European tobacco trade. By 1758, more tobacco was imported to Clyde ports than all other British ports together.115 At the peak of Glasgow’s tobacco monopoly, 1770–4, Scottish exports annually to the thirteen American colonies were valued at £298,922 (official values), almost 10 per cent of the overall British total.116 T. M. Devine’s The Tobacco Lords examined the Glasgow merchants trading with planters in the Chesapeake region of America between 1740 and 1790. These elite merchants based their commercial success on landed enterprise at home as well as colonial trading, the profits of which underpinned investment in Scottish agriculture and industry. Devine concludes that while direct mercantile investments were limited in number, they were of major significance in developing consumer industries and adding to Scottish exports.117 Indeed, the tobacco lords’ preferred ‘store system’ – which involved the direct purchase of plantation produce in the colonies – was a ‘sophisticated and innovative forward purchasing system’ which allowed Glasgow merchants to set purchasing prices of tobacco in Virginia as well as the price of manufactured goods made in Scotland.118 The exchange of goods promoted an urban economy in Glasgow that developed solely to serve the needs of the planter class.119 While the direct investments of tobacco merchants were limited, the wider trades were important to regional industrial and commercial development, including banking.

Following the loss of trade with the thirteen colonies at the onset of the American War of Independence, Glasgow’s colonial merchants consolidated their existing Caribbean interests. While the American trades did not completely collapse, the West Indies was the main focus of Scotland’s Atlantic commerce after 1790.120 Crucially, West India merchants increasingly imported cotton during the American War and as a result, prices almost halved between 1776 and 1780. Low costs helped increase production at a moment when new technology was available, which stimulated what became large-scale industry.121 Nevertheless, the role of the West India merchants in Scottish economic transformation has been represented in traditional historiography as a simple addendum to the more lucrative tobacco trade of the previous half-century.122

T. M. Devine’s pioneering study of the Glasgow-West India elites in 1978 examined the social background, investments and political influence of over seventy-five Caribbean merchants. While tracing an influx of capital to landed estates and local industry, this study argued that the contribution of West India merchants was unlikely to be a ‘decisive influence’ on the regional cotton industry.123 After a thirty-year hiatus in interest, Anthony Cooke examined a smaller group of sixty-four West India merchants of Glasgow with a longer chronological lens, deploying a comprehensive analytical model to trace mercantile investments. Two claims are of relevance to this study here. First, the Glasgow-West India merchant capital was invested in Scottish industry from 1803 (especially cotton) and deemed of significance into the Victorian period (especially railways). Second, the average holdings in Glasgow-West India merchant firms supposedly increased after 1834, suggesting the continued importance of mercantile activities in the post-Emancipation West Indies. According to Cooke, the study developed the ‘Williams thesis about the importance of slavery and slave grown products to industrial development in Britain’.124 Perhaps so, but by including the substantial estates of merchants with principal interests in Mauritius, and others with no connection to Glasgow, Cooke’s estimations of the city’s West India merchant capital were inflated by including East India fortunes and returned sojourning wealth that improved other areas of Scotland.125

Instead, this study here a) examines the scale and significance of Glasgow-West India merchant capital via the private fortunes of the city’s resident merchants and planters, and b) assesses returned sojourning wealth of Scots in the West Indies in a transatlantic frame, tracing the origins of fortunes and repatriation to Great Britain. This provides a consistent definition of West India fortunes, both mercantile and colonial, with analysis undertaken in a comparative, regional framework.

While Virginia and West India merchants were of great significance to the transformation of the west of Scotland, until fairly recently the influence of absentee slave owners across the country had almost gone unnoticed. Nicholas Draper’s The Price of Emancipation has radically transformed understanding of Scottish slave ownership on the emancipation of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834.126 The overall dataset was gathered mainly from a ‘Parliamentary Return’ which lists all the awards that were finalized by 1838, when 93 per cent of the total compensation of £20 million had been distributed.127 As such, it represents a census of British slave ownership taken on 1 August 1834. It has been estimated residents of Scotland received c.£2 million of the overall compensation total in what was probably the peak time of Scottish slave ownership. Indeed, Draper demonstrated that Scots comprised just 10 per cent of the total British population, yet those resident in Scotland represented around 15 per cent of all British absentee slave owners in the compensation list (much higher than numbers in Ireland). The high numbers of Scots travelling to the Caribbean, and their propensity to return to the homeland, provides context for this disproportionate over-representation.128

Slave ownership was not always material to the work of West India merchants, although they occupied an integral position within the wider slave economy and acted as conduits of slavery wealth into Scottish society. This study – the first book-length examination of Glasgow’s ‘sugar aristocracy’ – starts with two broad questions in transatlantic context: what did Scots, especially Glasgow merchants, ‘give’ to the West Indies? And what did the British West Indies (and by extension, slavery and the Atlantic trades) contribute to Scotland, and especially Glasgow, in return? This study, therefore, attempts a new approach: an examination of metropole and colony in a single analytical frame, showing the making of each by the other.

Chapter 1 traces the emergence of Glasgow’s West India mercantile elites, revealing this group were much larger than previously recorded. This monograph is centred around a sample of 150 West India merchants in Glasgow who subscribed (either personally or via firms) with the Glasgow West India Association – one of the major pro-slavery lobbying groups in Great Britain – between 1807 and 1834. This chapter traces the social and geographical origins of this group, assessing how the wealth from Caribbean slavery reshaped Glasgow society including through marriage. The ‘sugar aristocracy’ were an elite group atop the West India community, with an old Jamaica clique at its core, although colonial nouveaux riches from new colonies – especially Demerara, Grenada and Trinidad – ensured they dominated local politics. Chapter 2 deals with the financial and commercial networks, including a survey of West India firms: the legal entities that made these trades possible. Much remains to be understood about the Glasgow-West India elite’s sources of capital, credit and broader connections with Scottish banking. This study establishes the importance of local sources of start-up finance – including fathers already involved with the colonial trades, amid a nexus of inter-firm mercantile loans – as well as credit sourced from individuals across society and banking institutions which was secured upon landed estates and urban property. Chapter 3 provides a detailed case study of two West India firms, Leitch & Smith and Jas. & Arch. Smith & Co., that operated in Jamaica and Grenada from 1776 until the late nineteenth century. These firms integrated the Atlantic economy into interests in cotton, banking, insurance and landed estates. Chapter 4 examines patterns of recruitment, migration and labour that combined to ship out many thousands of young Scots across the Atlantic. This establishes Glasgow’s role as a nineteenth-century Atlantic hub, in which there was a focus on West India commerce which served to reshape the educational systems and labour market. New estimates of Scots departing for the West Indies are provided, establishing a framework to examine colonies with a large Scottish presence. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 present case studies of Jamaica, Grenada and Trinidad. These three islands were colonized in three consecutive centuries, thus allowing comparisons of Scottish practices of settler-colonialism, presence across each island, levels of wealth accumulation and repatriation. Estimations of fortunes have been established by the systematic analysis of 138 confirmation inventories of Scots lodged in Scottish courts. Together, these chapters revise the pessimistic arguments about the return (or lack thereof) of sojourning fortunes put forward by Alan Karras, placing such wealth repatriation in a comparative framework which allows assessment of impact on Scottish regions. Chapter 8 unravels the life, wealth and death of Glasgow’s ‘sugar aristocracy’ up to the end of Caribbean slavery and beyond. This analysis is based upon over 100 mercantile inventories which reveal personal fortunes as well as patterns of wider investments. As was typical of their counterparts across Great Britain, these merchants purchased landed estates and invested in manufactories, especially cotton mills, but also sunk capital into banks and often took on the role of banking houses, loaning capital within the mercantile community and beyond. While T. M. Devine and Anthony Cooke have viewed the West India elite in terms of industrial investments, this study establishes their importance as a commercial interest. Collectively, this monograph underlines the importance of West India merchants – the trades they made possible and capital they generated – to the development of industry and especially commerce during a period of rapid transformation. Set in the era of supposed decline, this is the story of those who embedded West India commerce into regional societies and economies and, in doing so, made chattel slavery a quotidian feature of life in modern Scotland.