Introduction

In 2018, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery opened an exhibition titled The Remaking of Scotland: Nation, Migration, Globalisation 1760–1860, in which hangs Henry Raeburn’s 1798 portrait of Aberdeen-born Sir William Forbes of Callendar (1743–1815). Originally intended to hang 5 feet off the floor and to be viewed from a distance of 22 feet, this imposing full-length portrait ‘forcefully conveys Forbes’ ambitious self-regard’. Displaying Raeburn’s dramatic use of lighting, a rope-cord ties back a plush red curtain to reveal a rolling pastoral landscape, and illuminate Forbes perusing papers on a table, which may politely hint at the commercial source of wealth of the new occupant of the fourteenth-century mansion. The new exhibition notes that ‘the transformation’ of the period ‘came at great cost. The new imperial economy was built on slavery and warfare, while industrialisation … ravaged the natural envi-ronment.’ Indeed, Nuala Zahedieh argues that Forbes’ success was a ‘global story which puts flesh on Eric Williams’s thesis’ that British industrial capitalism was nurtured by Atlantic slavery. In the 1770s, Forbes first profited from the Caribbean slave-sugar industry by developing intimate links with a number of West Indian plantation owners, and later East India Company officials. West Indian plantation owners, and later East India Company officials.