Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean

Product Information

Mr Macwhirter seems set on making some point about a contrast between Scottish and English involvement in slavery or responses to racism. And so he tells us that “most working class Scots… were being ruthlessly exploited themselves”. By the late 1820s Miller’s hand, which had held the knife, wielded a stonemason’s chisel. His lungs had been damaged by stone dust and he had left off labouring in quarries for the less demanding but skilled trade of carving gravestones. Two of his elegant inscriptions referred to the West Indies. One stone in Cromarty was erected by ‘JOHN MUNRO ESQ late of Demerara’ to the memory of his father, who died in 1825; the other was a memorial to ‘DANIEL ROSS of Berbice’, who died in 1827. I had heard of Demerara, on the north coast of South America, but not of neighbouring Berbice, both now part of Guyana. So it was not only the wealthy who were involved in or benefited from slavery and “ordinary Scots” were there in large numbers. What about more recent times?

Member of the University of the Highlands and Islands Foundation, 1997–2001 and of the University Court 2013–2017 So the notion that Scottish involvement is less important for Scots being a “junior partner” holds no water. Trustee of Nigg Old Trust (a body dedicated to preserving the old parish church of Nigg and its Pictish cross-slab), 1998–2018. For links to my transcripts of parts of the extensive correspondence of the Robertson family (part of the Traill Papers in the National Library of Scotland) follow these links:When the new Museum of Scotland opened its doors in 1998, to “tell the country’s history from earliest times to the present day”, there was not a single mention of slavery.

Christian Robertson (1780–1842) and a Highland network in the Caribbean: a study of complicity' in Scottish Highlands and the Atlantic World: Social Networks and Identities (Edited by Chris Dalglish, Karly Kehoe, Annie Tindley), EUP 2023. And because Scots were so disproportionately present on the plantations, if we want to make comparisons between Scotland and England, then this was much more – not less – of an issue in Scotland.All of them are ‘work’– if by that is meant things to which I have devoted serious and sustained effort. But civic Scotland still had a lot of catching up to do in establishing the truths about its involvement with slavery. Mr Macwhirter rightly praised some examples of Scottish civic response to racism, such as Glasgow’s support for the anti-apartheid struggle and its granting of the Freedom to the City to Nelson Mandela in 1981.

Post Graduate Certificate in Education (with distinction) [St Mary's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1981] Very rapid and splendid fortunes’? Highland Scots in Berbice (Guyana) in the early nineteenth century' in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness (2006)When I think what museum experiences have been special to me in recent years, then I recollect not the big museums, but the small scale and the individual, the Museum of Cromarty based in an old courthouse . . . or the Inverness Miners’ Museum in Inverness, Nova Scotia . . . They have preserved a sense of integrity in what they do and communicate effectively the meaning and experience of life in the past just as powerfully as they do information about it. And at the same time they were appearing in the new British colonies of Grenada, Tobago and St Vincent in similar, disproportionately high numbers. Convener of Management Committee of Highlands and Islands Forum, 1987–1990. An organisation promoting an integrated approach to conservation and development in the Highlands and Islands. While Mr Macwhirter rightly rejects the notion that the British Empire was “essentially English”, he takes the line that Scots were junior partners in the Empire, and while wealthy Scots were implicated in the slave trade he claims “it is not clear how many ordinary Scots benefited from colonial wealth”.

Full-time volunteer at Great Georges’ Community Arts Project, Toxteth, Liverpool June 1971–September 1972. A combination of youth work and arts activities in an area of multiple deprivation and racial tension.

David Alstonis a Historian and Independent Researcher. He is the author of Ross & Cromarty: A Historical Guide (1997) and My Little Town of Cromarty: The History of a Northern Scottish Town (2006). He was a Highland Councillor and from 1991–2003 was curator/manager of Cromarty Courthouse Museum. He has published articles on the Highlands and Slavery including ‘Very Rapid and Splendid Fortunes: Highland Scots in Berbice (Guyana) in the early nineteenth century’, in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, (2007) and wrote a chapter in the T.D. Devine edited collection ‘ Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past’ (EUP, 2015). Founder member of and part-time volunteer with Play Workshop, St Katherine’s Community Centre, Aberdeen 1973–76. Just what is the contrast here supposed to be? Were English, or Welsh, or Irish workers not exploited? This Portfolio is based on a model suggested by the late Professor Charles Handy, formerly of the London School of Economics. It is an attempt to describe how the different parts of my life fit together to form what is, I hope, a balanced whole.