Centring transatlantic slavery in Scottish historiography

Abstract

The historiography of Scotland's connections with transatlantic slavery across the British Empire has flourished in the last 20 years, promoting wider public discussion and civic recognition. Nevertheless, the view that historians of Scotland omitted slavery from Scottish historiography remains part of popular discourse. This article adds nuance by considering the absences and eventual centring of slavery in Scottish historiography. In the 1960s, it was argued by historians that foreign trade-and by extension Atlantic slavery-had a limited effect on the economic development of 18th-century Scotland. However, studies of the Atlantic trades and merchant capital undermined that orthodoxy in the 1970s, although works of that era that addressed Scotland's Atlantic economy tended to acknowledge slavery only in tokenistic fashion, if at all. Nevertheless, whilst slavery was not centred in these works, they established the view that Atlantic commerce and merchant capital were central to Scottish economic development. In the last 25 years, slavery has been centred in Scottish historiography and earlier works have taken on new significance. Studies after 1997 have revealed the involvement of Scots with the slave trade

Scotland, Atlantic slavery and the Scottish National Party: From colonised to coloniser in the political imagination

“…Devine's work from 1971 onwards, by contrast, illustrated the broader significance of merchant capital and the Atlantic trades to Scottish agricultural and industrial development. It was to be, however, another 40 years before chattel slavery was accepted as the foundation that supported these revolutionary processes (Mullen, 2022b). Since the late 1990s, the scholarship around Scotland's connections with Atlantic slavery has been transformed.…”

Risks and representations: Creating consensus narratives about risk with pregnant women involved with child protection systems in Aotearoa New Zealand and Scotland

“…Recently a more nuanced conversation and ‘the growing presence of the colonial past within contemporary Scottish politics’ (Mullen and Gibbs, 2023: 14) can be identified. This appears to be leading to a more realistic appraisal of the ways in which Scotland and Scottish people have benefitted economically and socially from systems of colonialism and slavery (Mullen, 2022; Mullen and Gibbs, 2023). Child welfare and protection systems can be read as tools in the continued oppression of marginalised, racially minoritised and poor families (Murray et al, 2023).…”