For Argyll recently published article on the source of the fortune of Argyll’s Malcolm family, then of Poltalloch, now of Duntrune Castle. The historian, Professor Tom Devine, to whom we referred in this piece, is talking in Inverness this Saturday night (24th October), asking: ‘Did slavery make Scotland great?’
His thesis is that Scotland’s economic growth in the 18th and early 19th centuries may have been fuelled by the Scots plantation owners’ use of slaves. The Jamaican sugar plantations were an example of where this happened, with several Scots families, including the Malcolms, as major plantation owners.
Professor Devine is an expert researcher in this subject and is on the record as challenging Scotland to accept this uncomfortable strand of its history – and to add to its definition of the Scottish diaspora those with Scottish names and, often but not exclusively, no Scottish blood. Slaves were usually given the surname of their owner.
Devine says: ‘I detect a much greater confidence in Scotland in the last 10-15 years and I think a more confident and mature democracy has to look at its past warts and all’. He has also been at some pains to make it clear that his use of the word ‘great’ does not refer to anything other than growth of material wealth.
If you read the “Christian Watt Papers’ she mentions how the Fraser family built their posh Victorian mansions with money made from the slaves in the West Indies.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0