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    Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750–1820
    Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750–1820
    Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750–1820
    Ebook454 pages6 hours

    Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750–1820

    By Douglas Hamilton

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    This is the first book wholly devoted to assessing the array of links between Scotland and the Caribbean in the later eighteenth century. It uses a wide range of archival sources to paint a detailed picture of the lives of thousands of Scots who sought fortunes and opportunities, as Burns wrote, ‘across th’ Atlantic roar’. It outlines the range of their occupations as planters, merchants, slave owners, doctors, overseers, and politicians, and shows how Caribbean connections affected Scottish society during the period of ‘improvement’. The book highlights the Scots’ reinvention of the system of clanship to structure their social relations in the empire and finds that involvement in the Caribbean also bound Scots and English together in a shared Atlantic imperial enterprise and played a key role in the emergence of the British nation and the Atlantic World.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateJul 19, 2013
    ISBN9781847796332
    Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750–1820
    Author

    Douglas Hamilton

    Douglas Hamilton is a Lecturer in History at the University of Hull

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      Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750–1820 - Douglas Hamilton

      Eighteenth-century Scotland

      The Windward archipelago and the eighteenth-century Caribbean

      INTRODUCTION

      In 1786, an Ayrshire man prepared to leave Scotland to take up the post of book-keeper on Charles Duncan’s plantation near Port Antonio in north-east Jamaica. The man was an aspiring poet, and he wrote of his misgivings about venturing ‘across th’ Atlantic’s roar’ in the weeks before his departure. In the end, his poetry saved him. As he waited for his ship at Greenock, word came that the first edition of his work, published in Kilmarnock, had been greeted with acclaim in Edinburgh, and that a second edition was to be commissioned. Jamaica was thus denied a book-keeper as Robert Burns went on to become a key figure in Scottish literature.¹

      Although Burns’s later experiences were not typical of those of most Scots in this period, many others did consider careers in the Caribbean, and, as this book shows, thousands actually went. There were a number of reasons why they did so: Burns, for example, wrote odes of farewell to Mary Campbell and at least two other women. More prosaic explanations were outlined forcefully by James Baillie from Inverness, who became an influential West India merchant, planter and politician: ‘I am astonished that any Person can think of Injuring there children so much Who are not born to Independant fortunes, as to keep them after their Education in so compleat and in such a miserable country when they have such a Country as Grenada, St Vincent or the other West India islands to send them to, or what do you think of the East Indies for a change?’²

      Baillie wrote in the context of the expansion of the British Empire in 1763, but the limitations of the Scottish economy he alluded to had led Scots to seek advancement abroad since the middle ages. Whether merchants in a Scottish community in Danzig, Vere or Brugge, or soldiers and officers in the service of foreign monarchs, notably in France and Scandinavia, Scots had a well-established tradition of overseas employment. From the sixteenth century, Scots also began to look to the Atlantic, trading to Iberia and the Azores.³

      Early in the seventeenth century Scottish adventurers began to develop more distinctly imperial ventures in the Atlantic, beyond the plantation of Ulster. Short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempts were made to establish a New Scotland colony, or Nova Scotia, on the North American seaboard throughout the 1620s and then, in the 1630s, Scots imperialists turned their attention to Africa. In 1634 Charles I granted a thirty-one year charter to the Scottish Guinea Company to trade with, and explore further, the African coast from the Senegal River to the Cape of Good Hope.⁴ The enterprise was wound up around 1639, and its failure, following on the heels of the hand-over of New Scotland, along with the Cromwellian interregnum between 1649 and 1660, caused Scottish imperial ambitions in the Atlantic to atrophy for thirty years. During this period, Scottish involvement in the Caribbean was largely restricted to the involuntary transportation of captured Scottish soldiers to Barbados and Jamaica.

      The restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 saw renewed attempts by Scots to establish their own colonies. Charles II received representations for the settlement of Scots colonies in Barbados and St Lucia, and he offered the island of Dominica to Scotland in 1671. There were further proposals in 1678 for the settlement of St Vincent by Scots.⁵ While these plans came to naught, there was increasing Scottish involvement in the English Caribbean in the period immediately after the Restoration. In 1667, Lord Willoughby, governor of Barbados, wrote to the Lords of Trade in London requesting the free transfer of Scots to that island: ‘If your Lopps. shall open a trade in Scotland, for the transportation of the people of that Nation hither, and prevent any accesse of Irish in the future, it will accommodate all the ends propounded and abundantly gratify his Matys. good subjects here.’⁶

      The numerical strength of the Barbadian militia had declined from the 1650s, and Willoughby’s determination to bolster it with three or four thousand Scots was, to a considerable degree, based on a fear of a revolt by the ‘Creolised generation’ of enslaved Africans.⁷ In the context of the second Anglo-Dutch War, which drew in the French in the Caribbean theatre, it was also predicated on their Protestantism. As Willoughby put it, ‘I am for the down right Scott who I am certain will fight without a crucifix about his neck’.⁸ The demand for Scottish ‘servants’ continued into the early eighteenth century. In 1701, George MacKenzie petitioned the Barbados council for payment for ‘several Scotch servants’ brought to the island. This desire for Scots was equally apparent in North America. Indeed, demand was so great between 1665 and 1685 that the English Privy Council granted over twenty-six special warrants to allow ships to carry Scottish indentured servants to the English colonies.⁹

      Yet it would be a mistake to assume that all Scots in the Caribbean before the Act of Union were either exiles or indentured servants. Several, despite the difficulties of being Scottish in an English colony (and therefore foreign nationals), were able to enter the islands’ elites. In the last years of the seventeenth century, Thomas Maxwell was repeatedly elected speaker of the Barbados assembly, and he was later appointed a member of the council. His perceived Scottishness was challenged: when Governor Grey recommended him to the Council of Trade and Plantations in January 1700, he noted that Maxwell was ‘of a Scotch name, but English born: of admirable parts and a considerable estate’. But Maxwell did maintain Scottish links, notably with his distant relation Sir James Maxwell of Pollok.¹⁰ Scottish nationality could also be conveniently ignored. In 1699, a patent was issued allowing Alexander Skene to take the influential post of island secretary in Barbados, ‘provided he proved his qualifications, it being objected that he is not a native-born subject of England, Ireland or the Plantations’.¹¹ It is clear from this that while Scots were sometimes able to get ahead, their status as foreigners, despite sharing a monarch, could be an effective barrier to them. They remained reliant on English concessions.

      In addition to those Scots in Barbados, it has been estimated that there were over 200 Scots on the islands of Nevis, Montserrat and Antigua in 1678. Others were to be found living in or trading with Dutch colonies. Robert Milne, from Auchlie near Aberdeen, for example, went to Holland about 1696, and then travelled to Curaçao with Captain Grieve in 1698. In total, perhaps 4,500 Scots went to the Caribbean in the second half of the seventeenth century, that is, before the Act of Union.¹²

      This increasing involvement in the empires of other countries did not diminish Scots’ efforts to establish colonies of their own in this period. The most successful and long-standing Scottish settlement was founded on the American mainland, at East New Jersey from 1683. Contemporaneously with the East New Jersey settlement, a group largely composed of landowners and merchants from south-west Scotland planted a short-lived colony in Carolina between 1684 and 1686.¹³ The least successful ventures, in terms of the losses sustained, were the endeavours of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies to establish a colony at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. The attempts to found settlements at New Edinburgh and Fort St Andrew between 1698 and 1700 were the most ambitious of all the seventeenth-century Scottish schemes, and aimed to establish a settled Scottish entrepot between the two great trading oceans of the Pacific and the Atlantic. Their failure, so devastating in loss of life and capital, had serious economic and political implications for Scotland, and also had the effect of increasing the population of Jamaica, whence some of the survivors fled.¹⁴

      It is clear that in Scotland the idea of imperial engagement was not just an eighteenth-century phenomenon. Significantly, these early imperial undertakings were conceived and led by members of the Scottish gentry and nobility, along with those from mercantile and professional backgrounds. It is equally apparent that Scots from other social ranks were involved (as indentured servants) in imperial ventures. An emerging tradition of transatlantic migration and enterprise predated the Act of Union of 1707 and existed, albeit in a relatively minor way, alongside the more substantial migrations to north and east Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic.

      After 1707, the balance between European and Atlantic involvement swung decisively to the west. Access to the English empire after 1707 created new opportunities that were seized upon by Scots. The first acquisition of new land in the Caribbean after the Act of Union, in St Kitts in 1713, offered the chance for Scots to obtain land in the new British empire. The second decade of the eighteenth century saw two Scotsmen as governors of St Kitts, Walter Douglas and Walter Hamilton. During this period, Scots were prominent among the grantees receiving estates of over 100 acres.¹⁵ The beleaguered refugees from Darien swelled Scottish numbers in Jamaica, and formed the basis of a considerable Argyll community of the western part of the island.

      In the North American colonies, the Scottish presence grew similarly in the first half of the eighteenth century, perhaps most notably in the Chesapeake, where Glasgow merchants played an increasingly important role in the tobacco trade from the 1740s. In 1735, a Highland community had been established at New Inverness, later Darien, in Georgia. This was followed by Highland settlements in New York in 1738 and at Cape Fear, North Carolina, in 1739.¹⁶

      In the context of this tradition of Scottish imperial activity, the upsurge in Caribbean enterprise and settlement after the acquisition of the Windward Islands in 1763 appears as part of an important upward trend in imperial involvement, not as a stunning new departure for Scottish people and their capital. Nonetheless, the volume of migration to the Caribbean, and its significance for Scotland and the West Indies, was considerable. The book argues that Scots like James Baillie were disproportionately numerous in the Caribbean, and that they were extremely successful across a range of activities including planting, trading, medicine and politics.

      Contemporary observers were certainly aware of a Scottish presence. A resident on Rhimesbury plantation in Jamaica believed that ‘of the Europeans the Scotch are most numerous, as well in Kingston as all over the island’. Janet Schaw, a Scottish ‘lady of quality’, found a ‘whole company of Scotch people, our language, our manners, our circle of friends and connections, all the same’ during a visit to Antigua in 1775. Edward Long, the cantankerous Jamaican planter-historian, remarked, ‘This hospitable alacrity to assist and befriend their countrymen, in a place where they might otherwise become destitute of support, and sick of life, produces likewise an event very favourable to the colony, by inviting into it frequent recruits of very able hands, who add not a little to its population and strength.’¹⁷

      This notion, which contemporary observers liked to call ‘clannishness’, was central to the Scottish experience in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. For those writers, it was an aspect of Scottish social organisation to be admired because it redounded to the advantage of the islands. ‘Clannishness’ underpinned the networks that Scots employed to organise themselves in the islands. For Scots, the real significance of the networks lies not so much in ‘clannishness’, but in their relationship to clanship. The bonds were an adaptation of the longstanding forms of social relations based on regional and familial connections outlined in Chapter One. Their groupings evinced a flexible notion of kinship that allowed pragmatic alliances to sit alongside more traditional biological bonds. The fluidity of these social relations enabled Scots to accommodate non-Scots within their Caribbean networks. This challenges the perception sometimes advanced by historians that Scottish networks represented a display of (sometimes invented) ethnic solidarity in the face of an alien culture.¹⁸ That these social forms were being adapted to an imperial setting at the same time as they were under attack in Scotland adds a particular resonance.

      The idea of the ‘network’ is often used by historians as a convenient short-hand for groups of people bound together by a range of interests; they were, as Zoë Laidlaw puts it, ‘mechanisms which were consciously utilised by their members to benefit themselves or others’.¹⁹ In the pre-industrial world, these mechanisms took different forms and had different purposes. There were professional connections: Laidlaw highlights three different networks arising from common military service, humanitarianism, and the scientific community. Pearson’s and Richardson’s examination of groups of investors in fire insurance in Liverpool, Manchester and western England between 1776 and 1824 emphasises that it was ‘practical experience of working together in a business environment which highlighted common interests and facilitated resource pooling’. Previous contacts in slave trading in Liverpool, or in manufacturing in Leeds and Manchester, led to cooperation in insurance. Networks could also be based on other bonds. As Charles Tilly argues, the ‘most effective units of migration’ were ‘sets of people linked by acquaintance, kinship and work experience’. Peter Mathias reminds us that the ‘family matrix was so often central to the operations of business’, not least as a means of reducing risk of various kinds. The importance of family ties in business is reinforced by scholarly studies of merchant communities in both northern and southern Europe, notably Ida Bull’s essay on immigrant merchants in Trondheim. Meanwhile, J. C. Sola-Carbacho’s work on Madrid merchants has emphasised the importance of paisanaje, or sense of community based on local association, among migrant groups in the Spanish capital.²⁰ It is clear that many groups of people employed networks based on ties of kinship, local association or profession to raise capital, facilitate communication and recruit employees across a range of functional areas, most notably in business, and so in a sense Scots were not unique. But they were distinctive.

      This study shows not only that did Scottish networks exist throughout eighteenth-century West Indies, and especially in the period after the Seven Years War, but that the cohesion within these groupings was not based simply on Scottishness. Although the networks were, at their hearts, based on a local or familial link with Scotland, they were by no means exclusive. Scottish involvement in the Caribbean empire played a crucial role in forging a unity among Britons during the eighteenth century. This book also argues, following Long’s assertion of the value of Scots in Jamaica, that the networks were critical to the success of Scots in the islands. The networks provided opportunities, for employment, for investment and for advancement; and they provided security for those taking their chances, in two ways. At one level, the welcoming embrace of friends or family in the Caribbean was, as we will see, of great importance for Scots stepping off the boat in Kingston, St George’s or Scarborough. They also provided economic security, through the availability of capital backed up by heritable Scottish security or Scots partnership law. This was not just a tale of success, however. Making money in the Caribbean was risky: high mortality, the threat of indebtedness and the difficulties of repatriating money all meant that not all Scots fulfilled their ambitions in the islands. This book explores these themes through a study of Scottish involvement in planting, trade, medicine and politics.

      Although it is a study in Atlantic world history, this book draws on a number of (often distinct) historiographical traditions. Since the 1960s, the explosion of scholarly interest in Scottish history has promoted a sophisticated understanding of Scotland’s past. An increasingly important part of this literature has assessed the role of Scots and Scotland abroad. This includes localised and specialised studies of aspects of Scottish emigration and enterprise around the world, some of it written by historians of Scotland, some by other historians working in Scotland, and some by historians of the countries in which Scots settled.²¹ The general interest in Scottish overseas expansion, however, has tended to focus on North America, the antipodes or Africa. The tropical empires of the eighteenth century, and the Caribbean in particular, have received far less scholarly attention.²²

      This outward-looking Scottish history fits with a general shift in British historiography that leans away from purely anglocentric approaches in three senses. The first is that as a shared enterprise, empire helped to integrate the peoples of Britain. Not only did the pursuit of imperial gain bind the interests of the Scots and the English together, but the mobility required of them forced them to live side by side, in the colonies, in the port cities and in the corridors of power. Secondly, it suggests that in looking for centres of imperial power, the search ought not to stop at London. From what follows, it is clear that Glasgow and the English outports all witnessed the rise of local elites whose business relied on empire. For medical education, Scotland, and especially Edinburgh, was the hub of the empire. Thirdly, the implication behind J. G. A. Pocock’s assertion that British history in the eighteenth century ‘must be thought of as the history of four realms’ is that the Atlantic, far from being a barrier between Britain and its colonies, was actually a link.²³

      The Atlantic world has been subject to considerable scholarly attention, taking its cues from the work of Bernard Bailyn, D. W. Meinig, Ian K. Steele and others. Taken collectively, important work from the mid-1990s has helped to focus Bailyn’s ‘view from the moon’, and this study aims to clarify it still further by arguing that Scots and their overseas interests can tell us a great deal about the way in which the Atlantic world was created.²⁴ It seeks to understand the relationship between an integral and important part of an imperial power and a colonial sphere. This relationship was about exchanges of people, goods and ideas, and it impacted right across both regions to transform the social, economic, political and physical landscapes. A study of Scottish–Caribbean connections suggests that they were among the key bonds forging a transnational maritime world of exchange. In short, it argues that these connections, and the Atlantic world of which they were part, existed, and changed the lives of the people who experienced them. It does this by assessing the role of Scots on the plantations and as merchants, doctors and politicians in the islands. The final chapter considers the repatriation of people and capital from the Caribbean, and their impact on developments in Scotland. But the book begins, as did the eighteenth-century adventurers to the Caribbean, in Scotland.

      Notes

      1 J. Mackay, RB: A biography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1992), p. 200; R. B. Sheridan, ‘The role of Scots in the economy and society of the West Indies’, in V. Rubin and A. Tuden (eds), Comparative perspectives on slavery in New World plantations (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), p. 97. The line comes from ‘Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary?’

      2 NLS, MS5515(161–2), Liston papers, James Baillie to Mrs Ramage, 24 July 1775.

      3 G. G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and Scandinavia, 800–1800 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990); Simpson (ed.), The Scottish soldier abroad, 1247–1967 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992); Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996); T. C. Smout et al., ‘Scottish migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in N. Canny (ed.), Europeans on the move: Studies in European migration 1500–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 76–112; S. W. Murdoch, Britain, Denmark-Norway and the House of Stuart, 1603–60 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000); R. Law, ‘The first Scottish Guinea company, 1634–39’, Scottish Historical Review, 76, 2 (1997), 189; J. L. Israel, ‘A conflict of empires: Spain and the Netherlands, 1618–1648’, Past and Present, 76 (1977), 48–9, 51–4.

      4 N. E. S. Griffiths and J. G. Reid, ‘New evidence on New Scotland, 1629’, William and Mary Quarterly, 49, 3 (1992), 492–508; Law, ‘The first Scottish Guinea company’.

      5 NAS, GD205/40/13/3, Ogilvy of Inverquharity papers, warrant from Charles II to Sir John Nisbet, 10 July 1671; GD205/40/13/4, Duke of Lauderdale to Sir John Nisbet, 22 July 1671. I am grateful to Allan I. Macinnes for these references. See also NAS, GD103/2/4/42, Society of Antiquities; D. Dobson, Scottish emigration to colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 74, 76.

      6 G. P. Insh, Scottish colonial schemes, 1620–1686 (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson & Co., 1922), appendix D, Barbados correspondence, p. 231.

      7 R. S. Dunn, Sugar and slaves: The rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 75, 87, 124, 257.

      8 Insh, Scottish colonial schemes, appendix D, p. 230; A. P. Thornton, West India policy under the Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 130.

      9 CSP, vol. 19, p. 737, minutes of the council in assembly of Barbados, 2 September 1701; I. C. C. Graham, Colonists from Scotland: Emigration to North America, 1707–1783 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), p. 9

      10 W. Fraser, Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollok (Edinburgh: 1863), vol. 1, pp. 370–2. On Maxwell see CSP, vol. 15, p. 296; vol. 16, p. 110; vol. 18, p. 44.

      11 See CSP, vol. 18, p. 31.

      12 ACA, Baillie Court: propinquity books, vol. 1, pp. 586–9, 19 January 1722. I am grateful to Marjory Harper for this reference. See also Smout et al., ‘Scottish migration’, p. 87.

      13 N. C. Landsman, Scotland and its first American colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 103, 275–8; L. G. Fryer, ‘Robert Barclay of Ury and East New Jersey’, Northern Scotland, 15 (1995), 1–17.

      14 D. Armitage, ‘The Scottish vision of empire: Intellectual origins of the Darien venture’, in J. Robertson (ed.), A union for empire: Political thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 97–117.

      15 R. B. Sheridan, Sugar and slavery: An economic history of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1974), p. 158.

      16 Landsman, Scotland and its first American colony, p. 11; J. M. Price, ‘The rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake tobacco trade, 1707–1775’, William and Mary Quarterly, 11 (1954), 179–99; T. M. Devine, The tobacco lords: A study of the tobacco merchants of Glasgow and their trading activities, c. 1740–1790 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1975); A. W. Parker, Scottish Highlanders in colonial Georgia: The recruitment, emigration, and settlement at Darien, 1735–1748 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

      17 Anon., An account of the island of Jamaica, with reflections on the treatment, occupation and provisions of the slaves (Newcastle: S. Hodgson, 1788) p. 7; J. Schaw, Journal of a lady of quality, being the narrative of a journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal in the years 1774 to 1776, ed. E. W. Andrews and C. M. Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923) p. 81; E. Long, The history of Jamaica, or general survey of the antient and modern state of that island (1774; London: Frank Cass, 1970), vol. 2, p. 286.

      18 A. L. Karras, Sojourners in the sun: Scottish migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 120–1; Landsman, Scotland and its first American colony, pp. 141–62.

      19 Z. Laidlaw, ‘Networks, patronage and information in governance: Britain, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, 1826–1843’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2001, p. 48.

      20 Laidlaw, ‘Networks, patronage and information’, pp. 48–86; R. Pearson and D. Richardson, ‘Business networking in the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 54, 4 (2001), 657–79; C. Tilly, ‘Transplanted networks’, in V. Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration reconsidered: History, sociology and politics (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 79–95; P. Mathias, ‘Risk, credit and kinship in early modern enterprise’, in J. J. McCusker and K. Morgan (eds), The early modern Atlantic economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 16; I. Bull, ‘Merchant households and their networks in eighteenth-century Trondheim’, Continuity and Change, 17, 2 (2002), 213–31; J. C. Sola-Corbacho, ‘Family, paisanaje, and migration among Madrid’s merchants (1750–1800)’, Journal of Family History, 27, 1 (2002) 3–24.

      21 The range includes: G. Donaldson, The Scots overseas (London: Robert Hale, 1966); D. S. MacMillan, Scotland and Australia 1788–1850: Emigration, commerce and investment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); J. D. Hargreaves, Aberdeenshire to Africa: Northeast Scots and British overseas expansion (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1981); J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Essay and reflection: On Scotland and the empire’, International History Review, 15 (1993), 714–39; McKenzie, ‘Empire and national identities: The case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), 215–31; N. C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and province in the first British empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001); M. Fry, Scottish empire (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001); A. I. Macinnes et al. (eds), Scotland and the Americas: A documentary source book (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2002); E. Buettner, ‘Haggis in the Raj: Private and public celebrations of Scottishness in late imperial India’, Scottish Historical Review, 81, 2 (2002), 212–39; A. Mackillop and S. Murdoch (eds), Military governors and imperial frontiers c. 1600–1800: A study of Scotland and empires (Leiden: Brill, 2003); T. M. Devine, Scotland’s empire, 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003).

      22 R. B. Sheridan, ‘The rise of a colonial gentry: A case study of Antigua, 1730–1775’, Economic History Review, 13, 3 (1961), 342–57; Sheridan, ‘The role of Scots’; A. L. Karras, ‘The world of Alexander Johnston: The creolization of ambition, 1762–1787’, Historical Journal, 30, 1 (1987) 53–76; Karras, Sojourners in the sun; R. A. McDonald (ed.), Between Slavery and Freedom: Special Magistrate John Anderson’s journal of St Vincent during the apprenticeship (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). This lacuna has been only partly filled by M. Quintanilla, ‘The world of Alexander Campbell: An eighteenth-century Grenadian planter’, Albion, 35, 2 (2003), 229–56.

      23 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1994); K. Wilson, The sense of the people: Politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); A. Murdoch, British history 1660–1832: National identity and local culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); K. Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); D. H. Akenson, If the Irish ran the world: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997); C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian: The British Empire and the world, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 15; P. J. Marshall, ‘A nation defined by empire, 1755–1776’, in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The making of British history (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 208–22; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The limits and divisions of British history: In search of the unknown subject’, American Historical Review, 87, 2 (1982), 330.

      24 B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the west: A passage in the peopling of America on the eve of the revolution (London: I. B. Tauris, 1987); B. Bailyn, ‘The idea of Atlantic history’, Itinerario, 20 (1996), 19–44; D. W. Meinig, The shaping of America, vol. 1: Atlantic America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); I. K. Steele, The English Atlantic 1675–1740: An exploration of communication and community (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); important studies include: D. Armitage and M. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); A. Games, Migration and the origins of the English Atlantic world (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); D. Hancock, Citizens of the world: The Integration of the British Atlantic community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); E. H. Gould, The persistence of empire: British political culture in the era of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the OIEAHC, 2000).

      CHAPTER ONE

      Scotland in the eighteenth century

      During the eighteenth century, Scotland experienced a series of profound economic, social, cultural and political changes. Industry and agriculture were transformed, moving Scotland from a relative economic backwater (in European terms) to a country that witnessed innovations in agricultural and industrial production able to rival those anywhere on the globe. Fostered by financial developments at home, Scotland began to play a key role in the vast commercial complex of the Atlantic, the profits of which in turn fired further growth, and set Glasgow on track to become the second city of the British Empire. The Enlightenment illuminated Scottish culture and society from philosophy to farming. More broadly it confirmed the place of Scottish intellectuals at the forefront of European thought, and had explicit ramifications in the world beyond Europe. Politically, too, Scotland underwent wholesale changes during the eighteenth century. In 1700, Scotland had been an independent political entity nursing the wounds inflicted on its Exchequer by the failure of the Darien scheme. By 1800, it was an integral part of a Great Britain that was locked in combat with Scotland’s former ally, France.

      Yet this picture of the blossoming of Scotland in the space of 100 years is somewhat problematic. Despite the eulogies of the 1790s that gloried in the advances made in Scotland, these transformations did not follow a pattern of untrammelled progress, but brought traumatic dislocations for many of Scotland’s citizens.¹ The upheavals in patterns of landholding and manufacturing produced dramatic demographic changes that had fundamental implications for society as a whole. The path towards a politically integrated Britain was strewn with obstacles. The continuance of distinct Scottish traditions in law, education and religion ensured that complete integration was unattainable. But even more modest pretensions of unity were undermined at times by Jacobite rebellions, Scottish resistance, the uneven implementation of the rights of Britons and Wilkesite English resentment of Scottish success.

      Scots were drawn to the Caribbean in disproportionately high numbers during this period, and especially after 1763. This chapter considers the manner in which social, economic and political developments in Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century affected the ways in which Scots engaged with the Caribbean. It assesses the society from which these adventurers to the West Indies came and asks which Scots, in terms of their social backgrounds, were drawn to the Caribbean, rather than other parts of the empire. Finally, it considers how far their Scottish backgrounds affected the manner of their participation in the Caribbean.

      Economy: changes on the land

      Scotland was an overwhelmingly rural society in the eighteenth century. Despite the beginnings of industrialisation, more than two-thirds of the Scottish population were rural inhabitants in 1820.² Yet this did represent a decline in the countryside population and is symbolic of the shift towards more urban areas that began in the second half of the eighteenth century. This shift, along with other changes in rural society, had profound implications for the scale and nature of Scottish imperial activity.

      Across Scotland, to a greater or lesser extent, agricultural practices were fundamentally re-ordered. It is also clear that some of the basic processes of change were substantially the same in the Highlands and the Lowlands. Since the 1980s, the mythologised image of traditional, backward Highland society being shunted into economic progress by clearance and capitalism in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 has been effectively undermined. It is now apparent that the process of clearance and moves towards more commercialised agriculture were begun by the Highland chiefs themselves before the Forty-Five.³ This change was marked by a series of characteristics. Firstly, it was predicated on a shift in the nature of landholding from land held by chiefs in trust for the clan towards the introduction of legal title. This enabled clan chiefs to reinvent themselves as proprietors and as landed gentry. It also allowed them to impose commercially led imperatives on the land that involved the restructuring of patterns of settlement. Before the process of ‘improvement’ was inaugurated, communities tended to reside in bàile (traditional townships), which comprised a number of tenants farming communally under the direction of a tacksman. The phasing out of tacksmen, who acted as a kind of lesser gentry operating between the clan elite and its followers, and the transformation of communal farms into single tenancies, allowed landlords to develop large farms for the raising of black cattle or sheep. They also ushered in greater primary reliance on the payment of money rents to increase the revenue of the estates. As multiple tenancies were phased out, improving landlords introduced innovations that one authority has viewed as being as significant as the creation of sheep or cattle ranches. The establishment of crofting communities and planned villages allowed estates to branch out into activities more properly denoted as industrial rather than agricultural. These new communities exploited quarries and fishing grounds, and specialised in the production of kelp.⁴

      In the Lowlands, where estates were usually more geared towards arable farming than their Highland counterparts, similar transformations took place. The process of change began during the seventeenth century, and took place over a longer time than in the Highlands. There was a general shift towards more commercially driven agriculture along with greater emphasis on money rent.⁵ Although multiple-tenant farms never completely predominated in the Lowlands, the process of consolidating land into larger single-tenant units advanced in the later eighteenth century.⁶ The ferm-touns and cot-touns, previously important centres of rural life in the Lowlands, were, like the bàile in the Highlands, swept away to make room for single tenancies. Social stratification was an important result of the greater significance attached to individual landholding as property. Although these tenancies and land held by owner-occupiers might form only very small farms, the emphasis on individual landholding relegated

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