Slaves and Highlanders
Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean
David Alston
Foreword by Juanita Cox-Westmaas, Rod Westmaas
Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year 2022
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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
I think it is a superb book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This book is published at an important juncture in British history as Scots continue to flirt with potential independence from the United Kingdom, while a reckoning with the legacies of England and Scotland’s conjoined imperial past promises to be a regular feature in political debates over the next decade at least. As authorities increasingly seek to acknowledge the impact of slavery on Scotland’s institutions and wider regions, Slaves and Highlanders will prove essential reading where those discussions look towards the Scottish Highlands.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
A landmark book on the links between slavery and the north of Scotland.
This is an essential book for all those interested in the Black history of Scotland.
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.
Slaves and Highlanders is an essential read for all Highlanders (and Scots).
