Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean

by David Alston, Juanita Cox-Westmaas (Foreword by), Rod Westmaas (Foreword by)

Overview

Scots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from these crimes against humanity in the Caribbean Islands and Guyana, some reluctantly but many with enthusiasm and without remorse. Their voices are clearly heard in the archives, while in the same sources their victims’ stories are silenced – reduced to numbers and listed as property.
David Alston gives voice not only to these Scots but to enslaved Africans and their descendants – to those who reclaimed their freedom, to free women of colour, to the Black Caribs of St Vincent, to house servants, and to children of mixed race who found themselves in the increasingly racist society of Britain in the mid-1800s.
As Scots recover and grapple with their past, this vital history lays bare the enormous wealth generated in the Highlands by slavery and emancipation compensation schemes. This legacy, entwined with so many of our contemporary institutions, must be reckoned with.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474427319
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2021
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Alston is 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).

Juanita Cox-Westmaas completed her PhD in Caribbean Studies with a focus on Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) and the Shaping of his Novels, at the University of Birmingham in 2013. She is editor of Creole Chips and Other Writings (2018). Other publications include Buried in the Landscape: Edgar Mittelholzer's Creative Gene(sis)/Geni(us), and Revolting Subtexts in Aje, L., Lacroix, T. and Misrahi-Barak, J. (eds) Re-imagining the Guyanas (2019) and introductions to republished Peepal Tree editions of Mittelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder (2009) and The Life and Death of Sylvia (2010). She was Research Fellow on the project National, Identity and Belonging: An Oral History of the Windrush Generation and their Relationship to the British State (1948-2018) and is currently a Visiting Fellow.

Rod Westmaas has carried out independent research into the history of Guyana in archives situated in Guyana and at The National Archives (Kew) and has spoken about his findings at academic and public events, and his experiences of migration and sense of national identity.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations, tables and maps; Acknowledgements; Standard abbreviation used in the text

Foreword by Rod Westmaas and Juanita Cox-Westmaas　

Chapter 1. Jumbies

Part 1: The African slave trade, the English ‘sugar islands’, and Scots in the expanding EmpireChapter 2. The slave tradeChapter 3. Jamaica – ‘As much gold as will fill a flagon’ Chapter 4. The Ceded Islands – GrenadaChapter 5. A family of Highland carpenters in the Ceded islands　Part 2: Northern Scots in Guyana on the ‘last frontier’ of EmpireChapter 6. Guyana – A last frontierChapter 7. Guyana – Voices of the enslavedChapter 8. Guyana – The ‘free coloured’ momentChapter 9. Guyana – The merchant houses　Part 3: Entangled histories – the legacies of slavery in the North of ScotlandChapter 10. Northern Scotland – InvestmentsChapter 11. Landowners, Caribbean Wealth, and Highland IdentitiesChapter 12. Enslaved Blacks and black servantsChapter 13. Children of colour　Part 4: ReckoningsChapter 14. ‘It is always easier to remember victims than to cope with the difficult issue of perpetrators.’

Afterword. Ghosts in our bloodIndex

Editorial Reviews

Slaves and Highlanders is an essential read for all Highlanders (and Scots).

Joan Michael

This is an essential book for all those interested in the Black history of Scotland.

University of Edinburgh Journal - Peter B Freshwater

I think it is a superb book.

Black and Asian Studies Association - Marika Sherwood

Alston has become an expert on Scottish involvement in the slave trade, slave ownership and the slave-worked plantations in South America, the Caribbean and beyond. This book is a firm rejection of the revisionist history that pretends Scotland had little or nothing to do with slavery… The subject matter is admirably clearly set out. The research is comprehensive and compelling. The multiple histories are fascinating and at times harrowing. But the writing is superb. David Alston has produced a very timely, extraordinarily easy book to read that I will be referring to regularly… In case you need to ask – I’d say this is very highly recommended indeed.

Writerly Witterings - Michael Jecks

This is a mighty book […] It interweaves global history with local history, and while it interrogates in great detail the available evidence, it does not shrink from asking broader questions […] A sobering, challenging but thoroughly compelling read.

Northwords Now - James Robertson

In profound parts, as painful as it is plaintive, Dr Alston’s dedicated work offers powerful glimpses of the victims and perpetrators of widespread abuses, the bloody terror and casual horror of everyday estate life and the brutally suppressed revolts.

Stabroek News - Indranie Deolall

A landmark book on the links between slavery and the north of Scotland.

The Scotsman - Alison Campsie

This is an important book [...] Alston’s book is timely and forms a revisionary contribution not only to Scottish history, but to our wider understanding of the centrality of slavery in the shaping of the West on the back of enslaved Africans.

Family & Community History - James Walvin

This is an excellent example of a scholarly book: detailed, well-documented, judicious, clearly structured and carefully argued. Meticulous throughout. At the same time, it is a deeply disturbing, sometimes shocking work, and not easy to read.

Scottish Review - Andrew Hook

Essential reading […] comprehensively demolishes cosy assumptions […] Alston demonstrates his mastery of his subject by matching and splicing his encyclopaedic local knowledge of personalities and locations with the wider stories of the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery and its victims. […] A thorough and comprehensive sweep that nails down, unequivocally, the involvement of the Northern Scots in the despicable business of slave trading and slave plantation ownership. Alston’s personal close connection with his landscapes comes through in his strong empathy with his characters and engenders sensitivity for the moral issues raised by the legacy, both at home and abroad

Scottish Local History - Eric J Graham

This is a powerful and thought-provoking book that opens a vital conversation on our understanding of the Highlands, both in the past and with implications for the present; and as a result changes our perspective of Scotland as a whole. The depth and meticulousness of the research was incredibly impressive; Alston lets the facts speak for themselves – and they take the breath away.

Highland Book Prize - Jenny Niven

Slaves and Highlanders successfully argues that Scotland’s slaving past is still affecting the present. Whether or not one’s ancestors actively participated in the slave trade or plantation economies for profit, the Highlands have suffered and benefited. Historians have an obligation to unsilence the past. But as Alston clarifies, all of us—historians and citizens—must acknowledge the inherited legacy and reckon with the ugly truths of complicity as a preliminary step towards reparative justice.

Scottish Historical Review - Peggy Brunache

Slaves and Highlanders will become a staple of undergraduate reading lists on Scotland and Atlantic slavery and will be widely read by the general public.

Eighteenth-Century Scotland - Stephen Mullen

David Alston's Slaves and Highlanders is necessary reading for our moment, with the racial reckoning in global headlines resting on an honest reckoning with history. Alston illuminates the Scottish role in slavery, the slave trade and empire in the Caribbean with a moral commitment to the 'half glimpsed figures' at its margins. This is microhistory at its best, for it conscientiously excavates individual lives in the Highlands to reveal how those lives were intimately connected to the fates of forgotten others in the colonized world. Alston's ethics in telling the full truth is matched by a prose style that is evocative and lucid, with an excellent eye for humanizing detail.

Gaiutra Bahadur

A major contribution to the field of Scottish studies, and in the era of the Black Lives Movement, so very relevant. [...] I can only say Read. The. Book.

The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer - Frances Singh