Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean

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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. The truth is that Scots, in proportion to their population, punched well above their weight in the Empire. With Caroline Vawdrey: East Church, Cromarty: A Guide (Scottish Redundant Churches Trust, 2012) and The Port of Cromarty Firth: the first forty years (CFPA, 2014)

Nor did the “S”-word appear in a whole section called The Spirit of the Age, which emphasised the positive role of Enlightenment ideas, influential at home and spread by Scots who travelled abroad. The fallen meteor: Hugh Miller and local tradition’ in Michael SHortland (ed), Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science (Oxford University Press, 1996) For links to my transcripts of parts of the extensive correspondence of the Robertson family (part of the Traill Papers in the National Library of Scotland) follow these links: The great historian Tony Judt, born in the working-class Jewish East End of London, once said: “The job of the historian is to make it clear that a certain event happened.This Portfolio is based on a model suggested by the late Professor Charles Handy, formerly of the London School of Economics. It is an attempt to describe how the different parts of my life fit together to form what is, I hope, a balanced whole.

And listen here to a 28 minute radio documentary revealingScotland's legacy of slavery andsex on theplantations of Guyana. The programme shows thatas a consequence there were, in proportion, more mixed-racechildrenin 19th-century Inverness then there are today. Reported by Daniyal Harris-Vajda, Produced by Chris Diamond for BBC Good Morning Scotland, developed by Arlen Harris. Transmitted in March 2019. And at the same time they were appearing in the new British colonies of Grenada, Tobago and St Vincent in similar, disproportionately high numbers.

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. In this case it can only feed in the myths which still circulate about Scottish slave-ownership – that Scots did not engage in the slave trade, that Scots were enslaved in the colonies, that Scots are “innately” more egalitarian. 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.

My colleague Donald Morrison and I have called on the Scottish Government to ensure the return of this slavery-derived wealth to Jamaica. Our campaign has the support of Professor Verene Shepherd, who heads the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies Founder member of and part-time volunteer with Play Workshop, St Katherine’s Community Centre, Aberdeen 1973–76. Member of the University of the Highlands and Islands Foundation, 1997–2001 and of the University Court 2013–2017Very rapid and splendid fortunes’? Highland Scots in Berbice (Guyana) in the early nineteenth century' in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness (2006) 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. And because Scots were so disproportionately present on the plantations, if we want to make comparisons between Scotland and England, then this was much more – not less – of an issue in Scotland. Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) – Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year 2022.

The Guyana Maroons, 1796–1834: Persistent and Resilient until the End of Slavery' in Slavery & Abolition (2023) at https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2165065 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’. A ‘menagerie of young heathen’: Enslaved children in a Scottish household and the legacy of the childhood trauma of enslavement All of them are ‘work’– if by that is meant things to which I have devoted serious and sustained effort. Trustee of Nigg Old Trust (a body dedicated to preserving the old parish church of Nigg and its Pictish cross-slab), 1998–2018.

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. 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.