LEGACIES OF SLAVERY IN GLASGOW’S SOUTHSIDE

Anyone who has been to Glasgow will probably have heard the phrase ‘People Make Glasgow’, but, as one placard at the Black Lives Matter demonstration on Glasgow Green put it recently, enslaved people made Glasgow. By the late 1700s, Jamaica was Britain’s wealthiest colony. About one-third of Jamaican plantations were owned – and many more were run – by Scots, including the Glasgow Plantation in the west, and the Galloway, Caledonia, Nairn, Clydeside, Wallace, and Hampden plantations. Although Scots comprised only ten per cant of the British population, fifteen per cent of enslavers compensated after the abolition of slavery were Scottish. Most of these merchants profited by produce, mostly sugar and tobacco (Glasgow sometimes traded more tobacco than all the English ports combined), but also sugar and cotton, grown by enslaved people. Others sold people into slavery. At least nineteen ships left Greenock and Port Glasgow in the 1700s carrying up to 3,000 people into slavery. It was only in 2015 that Britain finally finished paying compensation to the descendants of enslavers. Scotland evidently benefited a great deal from the profits of the slave trade.

So how do we learn from our past? Statues, grand buildings in the city centre, streets named after slaveholders (such as Buchanan, Dunlop, Ingram, Wilson, Oswald, Cochrane and Glassford), or plantations (Jamaica, Antigua and Tobago) have become the focal point of recent interest in the city’s past links to the transatlantic slave trade. There have also been calls to re-name these streets and remove statues of those who directly benefited from slavery. In 2018, the University of Glasgow published a report on ‘Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow’, estimating that the institution had benefited from the equivalent of up to £198 million from the profits of slavery, via gifts and bequests, in the 1700s and 1800s. In 2019, Glasgow City Council became the first local authority in Britain to commission an academic study of the city’s links to transatlantic slavery. Since then, there have been calls for black Scottish history to be taught in schools and for a slavery museum in Greenock. You can learn about ‘Legacies of Slavery in Glasgow Museums and Collections’ (online), largely displayed in the