Slavery is defined as the buying and selling of people as commodities. Slaves had no rights, being the property of their owners. The British trade in slaves was mainly from West Africa to North America and the West Indies.
The ships that took slaves from West Africa could conveniently return to Britain loaded with tobacco, sugar, cotton and other American commodities. The trade in slaves was abolished by a British Act of Parliament in 1807, but the condition of slavery itself wasn’t outlawed in Britain till 1838.
After the 1745 Rebellion many defeated Scots Jacobites fled the country to the West Indies to become slave masters on plantations. They were also attracted to the American South, where states such as Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia were developing plantation economies. The Lowlander Robert Burns was one of many others tempted by such prospects: in 1786 the author of ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ almost emigrated to Jamaica.
Glasgow’s ‘Tobacco Lords’ and merchants profited from the slave trade, as did the merchants of London, Liverpool and Bristol.
Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835) was the son of a Scottish slave owner in Jamaica and his slave mistress Rosanna; he became one of the first black activists in Britain. Joseph Knight was another slave, born in Africa but sold in Jamaica to a Scottish ‘owner’. In 1769 his master took him to Britain, where he ran away from him. When his ‘owner’ then had him arrested, the sheriff of Perth set him free because ‘the regulations in Jamaica, concerning slaves, do not extend to this kingdom’. This view was upheld by the Court of Session in Edinburgh.
Find out about Scotland's role in the slave trade and in its abolition.
Keep up to date