Glasgow, the Clyde and Slavery

Although the number of slave voyages departing from Scottish ports was low, Scots were involved in the slave trade in many ways, as crew on slave ships to the West of Scotland's cotton magnates, tobacco lords, and sugar barons. Enriched through the trade and the wealth it produced, remarkably, the owners of enslaved people were enriched again by a government compensation scheme attached to the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act funded by massive public borrowing finally paid off by British taxpayers in 2015. This new book offers an overview of locations in Glasgow and the Clyde area connected to slavery and the slavery-base economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By doing so, it seeks to illustrate the huge part slavery played in shaping the region.