Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean

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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. Part of the perniciousness of slavery was the way in which it permeated society and drew in otherwise well-intentioned young men, leading them into the systematic and casual brutalities which were essential to the running of a slave plantation. Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) – Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year 2022.

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.

All of them are ‘work’– if by that is meant things to which I have devoted serious and sustained effort. 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: I have raised a family of three children, now in their thirties, and created a home in a restored nineteenth-century merchant’s house in the small town of Cromarty (pop 720). I regard the community, and not just the house, as my home.

Flat people’ as E M Foster called them, were those who had only one dimension to their lives. He preferred rounded people. I would now call them portfolio people, the sort of people who, when you ask them what they do, reply, ‘It will take a while to tell you it all, which bit would you like?’ Sooner or later, thanks to the re-shaping of organisations, we shall all be portfolio people. It is good news. Post Graduate Certificate in Education (with distinction) [St Mary's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1981] 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. I research the role of Highland Scots in the slave plantations of the Caribbean, especially Guyana, before emancipation in 1834. I am one of the first Scottish historians to draw attention to the prominent role of Scots in the slave trade and the plantation economies of the Caribbean. 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”.In this case it can only feed in the myths which still circulate about Scottish slave-ownership – that Scots did not engage in the slave trade, that Scots were enslaved in the colonies, that Scots are “innately” more egalitarian. Founder member of and part-time volunteer with Play Workshop, St Katherine’s Community Centre, Aberdeen 1973–76. Trustee of Nigg Old Trust (a body dedicated to preserving the old parish church of Nigg and its Pictish cross-slab), 1998–2018.

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”.The truth is that Scots, in proportion to their population, punched well above their weight in the Empire. 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 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. But civic Scotland still had a lot of catching up to do in establishing the truths about its involvement with slavery. The example is given of Sheriff Donald Macleod of Geanies, portrayed along with some of his silver and described as “a highly respected local figure, typical of those whose adoption of Enlightenment ideas influenced life all over Scotland”.