Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past

Scottish history has been subjected to sustained revision over the past generation. Many uncomfortable episodes and themes have been exposed but the one major exception has been the nation’s involvement in slavery. This superb collection opens the field to intense academic scrutiny, suggests new areas of investigation and invites a long overdue national conversation. -- Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh * Ewen Cameron *
Thomas Devine’s impressive team of scholars confirms, individually and collectively, the pervasive and ubiquitous influence of Scots and Scotland on the shaping of Atlantic slavery. This pioneering volume also has a resonance far beyond slavery, underlining the impact of slavery on Scotland itself. Here is a book which ultimately demands a broader reappraisal of modern Scottish history. * James Walvin, author of Crossings. Africa, the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade *
‘The bones are rattling once more in Scotland’s closet and they are throwing down a challenge to our cultural and civic authorities. The full extent to which this nation was involved in the most brutal form of human trafficking has been laid bare in one of the most important books to be published in Scotland this century. Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past (The Caribbean Connection) is a collection of essays by academics who have begun properly to study and analyse Scotland’s part in the African slave trade and why the country has been in complete denial about it since slavery was abolished in 1807.' -- Kevin McKenna * The Guardian *
'Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past is an illuminating marvel.' -- Rosemary Goring * The Herald *
‘Scotland’s involvement in and relationship to slavery has long been hidden in full sight. Several Jamaica Streets were evidence of wealth made in the sugar and tobacco trades and few Scots, reading his biography, do not breathe a sigh of relief when Robbie Burns decided not to take the manager’s job on a plantation – the type of job which tempted many young Scots to wealth or an early death. This valuable collection of essays draws together the wide variety of work done in recent years to explore the many aspects of Scotland’s links with slavery that need to be set alongside the ‘enlightenment’ contribution to the abolition of chattel slavery, and Scotland’s reputation as the ‘abolitionist nation’.’ -- R. J. Morris, University of Edinburgh * The Journal for Edinburgh History *
The history of eighteenth-century Scotland will never look the same again...' -- Thomas Christopher Smout