Stenlake Publishing - Glasgow, the Clyde and Slavery
Glasgow, the Clyde and Slavery
Author : D. Pettigrew ISBN : 9781840339604 Cover : paperback Price : £14.95
Few now can be unaware of the growing awareness and soul-searching about Britain’s historical links with the Transatlantic slave trade, with, it seems, a new slave trade story appearing in the news almost every week. This is all the more remarkable because the period in question began with a Royal Charter endorsing the trade in 1663 and ‘ended’ with the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Slavery itself continued in most of the British Empire until 1834, and the apprentice system that replaced it in the period up to 1840 was not much better. 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-based economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By doing so, it seeks to illustrate the huge part slavery played in shaping the region and how the involvement of past generations lingers with us today.
