The profits derived from slavery were fundamentally important in the great transformation of Scotland from a rural to an urban-based society.
Even a generation ago such a view would have been deemed bizarre, if not heretical, a gross calumny on Scotland’s Victorian belief in itself as a nation in the intellectual and religious vanguard of the campaign to end the slave trade.
However, in one of the chapters in my new book, To the Ends of the Earth, I argue the case not only for that role, but also that the Scots were deeply involved in the 18thcentury slave-based economies of Virginia, Maryland and the British islands of the Caribbean.
The Oxford Companion to Scottish History published as recently as 2001, confirmed the