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