Like any country, Scotland has its fair share of national myths that function to reassure ourselves of our inherent humanity and, perhaps, moral superiority. I do not mean this cynically; it is something that people do in building their sense of individual and societal identity. The myths are, in that sense, as much aspirational as anything else.
For a long time the Scottish self-mythology has denied the role of Scots in the 18th century transatlantic slave trade, even though the evidence is all around us, right there in plain sight. A process of demythologisation has been underway for some time now amongst historians and activists, but it is only now slipping into the public consciousness. David Hayman presented an excellent two-part documentary Slavery: Scotland’s Hidden Shame on BBC2 last year, and the database of slave owners in Britain, compiled by UCL from the compensation records and used by David Olusoga as the basis of his short series Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, showed that Scotland had the highest per capita number of slave owners of anywhere in Britain, often widows and ministers.
I’ve been interested in the presence of people of colour in early modern Scotland for some time, and a couple of years ago conceived of a project to find them in the records. This turned out to be difficult because they are rarely identified as such unless by a descriptor (for example Peter the Moor, one of the King’s tabronars), and, a commonplace of research, the wealthy leave archives but the poor leave few records unless they get into trouble. In this spirit I am fond of Harry Domingo the Moor in Aberdeen, hauled before the Kirk Session 16 January 1607 for ‘sounding the trumpet within the kirk.’
It was partly because of this interest that I took a course on 16th and 17th Century Scottish Handwriting run jointly by Edinburgh University and the National Records of Scotland in order to get into the primary records and see for myself what might be found. I was encouraged in this by Professor John Cairns of Edinburgh University who, with Hector MacQueen and the late David Sellar, ran one of my favourite courses from my law student days: Scots Law and the Western Legal Tradition; had I done that course when I was a lot younger, the course of my life might have been different.
Professor Cairns has been at the forefront of the demythologisation of Scotland and slavery, and recently gave a short public lecture course on Slavery and the Law in 18th Century Scotland. I managed to get to two of the lectures and was pleased to find they are being put on line. So far only the first two are up but I’d recommend them to you if you have a couple of hours to spare. Links below.
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