Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean

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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. The truth is that Scots, in proportion to their population, punched well above their weight in the Empire. 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. 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”.

Hugh Miller (ed. Michael Shortland), Hugh Miller’s Memoir: From Stonemason to Geologist (Edinburgh, 1995), 107. Compare this with his account in Hugh Miller, My Schools and Schoolmaster (Edinburgh,1993), 134, first published 1854. So the notion that Scottish involvement is less important for Scots being a “junior partner” holds no water. 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. All of them are ‘work’– if by that is meant things to which I have devoted serious and sustained effort.And at the same time they were appearing in the new British colonies of Grenada, Tobago and St Vincent in similar, disproportionately high numbers. 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 Alston is one of those most valuable people: a historian committed to local history and the possessor of a startling intellect, most of which has been devoted to the town . . . His enthusiasm for Cromarty fills the room as soon as he walks in.

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”. I have studied full-time at the Universities of Aberdeen (1970-77), Oxford (1977-80) and Newcastle (1980-81), and part time at the Universities of Leicester and Dundee. 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 have played an active role in our small town and believe it is in many ways a model for other small communities. Among other things, I was chair of the local Harbour Trust and consider one of my successes is to have kept the harbour accessible to all as a focal point for the community. By using risk/benefit analysis, and with the advice of David Ball (Professor of Risk Management at Middlesex University), we have kept alive the local tradition of ‘harbour jumping’.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). No mention of his slave plantation in Guyana. Tea, taverns and music displayed a sugar box, sugar tongs, and snuff boxes – but makes no link; and the gallery devoted to powering the textile trade has little mention of cotton and none of slavery. 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 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. 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. Member of the University of the Highlands and Islands Foundation, 1997–2001 and of the University Court 2013–2017 A Forgotten Diaspora: The Children of Enslaved and ‘Free Coloured’ Women and Highland Scots in Guyana Before Emancipation' in Northern Scotland, Volume 6, Issue 1 (2015)

Christian Robertson (1780–1842) and a Highland Network in the Caribbean: A Study of Complicity' inChris Dalglish, Karly Kehoe & Annie Tindley (eds.), Scottish Highlands and the Atlantic World: Social Networks and Identities (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)