The Highland Ledger - chapter sectionAntigua / Scotland
MacKinnon's Estate, Emancipation, and Highland Memory
We established earlier that the relationship between Highland families and Caribbean slavery cannot be treated simply as a matter of distant investment or occasional colonial connection. The case of the MacKinnons makes this especially clear, since MacKinnon's Estate in the parish of St John, Antigua, was not only a property attached to a Scottish family name but also one of the sites through which slavery, compensation, inheritance and clan status became connected. At the same time, we have to be careful not to read the estate only from the side of the owners. The testimony attributed to Juncho, an elderly woman formerly enslaved on MacKinnon's Estate, reminds us that emancipation on August 1, 1834 did not simply replace slavery with security, and that freedom could also mean the loss of housing, provision grounds and material support. In this section, therefore, we examine MacKinnon's Estate as both a Highland family case and an Antiguan labour history, using compensation records, published 19th-century testimony, plantation references and later biographical material on William Alexander Mackinnon to ask how far this estate allows us to connect clan identity, colonial property and the practical limits of emancipation. In doing so, we also consider whether the MacKinnon example should be understood as exceptional, or whether it points to a wider pattern in which Scottish family histories preserved the language of inheritance while leaving the conditions of Caribbean labour largely outside the family narrative.
Institutional history extractGlasgow / Caribbean
University of Glasgow and Reparative Justice
According to its advocates, the University of Glasgow's reparative justice programme was meant to do more than acknowledge that an old institution had received tainted money. First, as the university's own report made clear when it was published in September 2018, Glasgow had a public history of abolitionism, including petitions to Parliament and the honorary degree awarded to William Wilberforce, but it had also received significant financial support from people whose wealth came in whole or in part from slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. In part this was an argument about institutional honesty: the same university could educate James McCune Smith, a formerly enslaved New Yorker who became the first African American to receive a medical degree, and still have benefited from donors connected to West India wealth. But it was also an argument about what acknowledgement was supposed to produce. The university accepted recommendations that included scholarships for Afro-Caribbean students, a memorandum of understanding with the University of the West Indies, an interdisciplinary centre for slavery studies, a named professorship, a commemorative plaque at the Gilbert Scott Building marking the former site of Robert Bogle's house, and a Hunterian exhibition on the links between its collections and racial slavery. In this section, therefore, the book examines Glasgow not simply as a case of institutional guilt, but as a test of whether archival disclosure can be converted into policy, partnership, naming, teaching and money. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the later Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research, through which Glasgow and the University of the West Indies committed to raising at least £20 million in research funding over 20 years, and asks how far this model changed the terms on which universities in Britain could speak about slavery, responsibility and repair.
Comparative chapter draftHighlands / Islands
Highland Clearances and Slavery-Derived Capital
According to much of the older writing on the Highland Clearances, the removal of tenants from the Highlands and Islands was explained mainly through agricultural improvement, landlord debt, population pressure, sheep farming and the collapse of older clan obligations. In part this remains necessary, since the Clearances cannot be reduced to a single cause, nor can every landlord involved be described as a slave-owner. But it is also increasingly difficult to treat the north of Scotland as if its land market stood apart from the Atlantic economy. MacKinnon and Mackillop's work on the west Highlands and Islands shows that 63 estates were bought by significant beneficiaries of slavery-derived wealth between 1726 and 1939, with 37 of those purchases taking place between 1790 and 1855, the main period of clearance. Taken together, these purchases amounted to more than 1,144,000 acres, or more than one-third of the west Highlands and Islands; when older clan families who inherited land but had slavery connections are added, the figure rises to more than 1,834,000 acres, more than half the region. In this section, therefore, the book treats the Clearances not simply as a domestic Scottish event, but as one point at which Caribbean capital, compensation money, estate purchase and landlord power met. The case of John Gordon of Cluny is central here: he received £24,964 in compensation for his Tobago estates, later acquired Benbecula, South Uist and Barra, and became closely associated with enforced emigration from those islands to Canada in the 1850s. In doing so we ask how far slavery-derived wealth changed not only who owned Highland land, but what could then be done with it, and whether the language of improvement helped to make both Caribbean exploitation and Highland displacement appear as separate, respectable and administratively ordinary events.