Historian | Archival Researcher | Cultural Writer
Paris, France
In recent years, Emma-Jane has spent much of her time looking at the records that connect Caribbean slavery to Scotland, especially Glasgow, Highland families, merchant partnerships, plantation credit, private estates, universities, churches, and other places where money could move from one world into another.
extractsUnderneath that work is an earlier career in publishing, translation, cultural programming, and documentary research. She worked for many years between Paris, Italy, and the Caribbean, often around catalogues, private collections, family papers, house histories, exhibition texts, and research files prepared for owners, curators, publishers, or institutions.
Her first professional life was in books and cultural work: assistant editor at a small Paris art publisher in the late 1990s, followed by translation of French and Italian catalogue essays through the early 2000s.
She worked as a freelance researcher for exhibitions, family collections and house histories across Palermo, Rome, Paris, Martinique and Guadeloupe, developing long-form archival work for curators, institutions and private collections.
She returned to formal study at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, focusing on historical anthropology and memory, followed by research periods at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, the Université des Antilles in Martinique, the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill and the University of Glasgow.
She collaborates with scholars, archivists and translators working in Atlantic history, Caribbean studies, Scottish history, historical anthropology, genealogy and provenance research, including researchers based in Paris, Bordeaux, Fort-de-France, Bridgetown and Glasgow. She has worked especially with colleagues whose research concerns plantation archives, slave compensation records, merchant correspondence, family papers, Highland estate records, parish registers and the translation of French, Italian and English archival material.
Her current book, provisionally titled The Highland Ledger, begins with MacKinnon’s Estate in St John, Antigua, and follows that record back into Scotland, not as a general story about “clans and slavery” but through named families, claims and properties: the MacKinnons of Antigua; MacLeod of MacLeod and Mackenzie of Gairloch, both connected through marriages into slavery wealth; Cameron of Locheil and Mackintosh of Mackintosh, whose links to Jamaica were more direct; Daniel Campbell’s purchase of Islay and part of Jura after profits from tobacco, sugar and slave trading; the Gordons of Cairness and the Georgia estate in Jamaica, where men from the estate were involved in the uprising led by Samuel Sharpe in 1831; the Gordons of Cluny, whose Tobago money helped remake Cluny Castle and later supported purchases in South Uist, Benbecula and Barra; and the Glasgow material around Lucky Hill, Robert Cunningham Graham, Caribbean students at Old College, and gifts made to the university by men whose families had profited from enslaved labour. The book is built from compensation schedules, parish registers, merchant letters, slave registers, estate rentals, marriage settlements and university records, with chapters moving between Antigua, Jamaica, Tobago, Glasgow, Skye, Islay, Ross-shire and the Outer Hebrides.
Her published work includes: "Private Papers and Public Silence: Caribbean Slavery in Family Archives", "Glasgow Credit and the Plantation Economy", and "Highland Estates, Compensation Records and the Caribbean", appearing in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues and journals concerned with Atlantic history, colonial memory and the social life of archives.
I am always glad to hear from historians, archivists, translators, family researchers and members of clan societies who are working on these questions, especially where there is a wish to reconnect Highland family history with its Caribbean and Atlantic records. I began this work in the nineteen nineties, partly through publishing and archives, and partly through my own experience of growing up in Glasgow with family history on both sides of this story. That has made the work personal, but also slower and more careful. If you are working with estate papers, compensation records, family documents, oral history or clan material connected to the Caribbean, you can contact me by email or through LinkedIn.