What is it about?
Looks at the emergence and eventual disappearance of a Scottish merchant elite trading in slave grown products from the Caribbean such as sugar and cotton. Examines their origins, education, political allegiances, patterns of landownership and wealth, based on a study of wills and probate inventories, contemporary biographies, and lists of government compensation to former slave owners after Emancipation.
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Why is it important?
Demonstrates how wealth from the Caribbean was invested in the cotton manufacturing industry in Scotland and later in railway development in the UK and overseas. Further develops the William's thesis about the importance of slavery and slave grown products to industrial development in Britain.
Perspectives
This article casts an important light on an elite group who were highly influential in promoting industrialisation in Scotland. It examines the links between Caribbean slavery and early industrialisation in Scotland, which have been largely ignored until recently. The article is part of a wider exploration of Scottish middle class elites by the author, including the Scottish cotton masters, who overlapped to some extent with Glasgow West India merchants.
Mr ANTHONY JOHN COOKE
University of Dundee
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An Elite Revisited: Glasgow West India Merchants, 1783–1877, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, November 2012, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2012.0048.
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