ALONG THE MUDDY COAST of Demerara, on the north coast of the South American continent, some of the slaves whose forced labour made others rich could earn a little cash for themselves and their families by catching large prawns. These were hawked around the scattered plantations houses and in the only larger settlement, Georgetown. Today we might call these shellfish Norway lobsters, Dublin Bay prawns or langoustines but the slaves, with what one imagines was a bitter irony, noted ‘the habits of these creatures in clinging one to the other’ and called them ‘Scotchmen’.

There was a large Scottish presence in Demerara, and in neighbouring Essequibo and Berbice, which had all been Dutch possessions until they were surrendered to British forces in 1796. The three colonies were not formally ceded by the Netherlands until 1814/15, later united in 1831 to become British Guiana, and now form the Republic of Guyana. They have received even less attention than the islands of the British Caribbean in accounts of Scotland's role in the British Empire, despite being the only British colonies in South America. Indeed, they often seem to be glimpsed only in peripheral vision, unexpectedly not islands although part of the West Indies and in the Caribbean.

Research led by Nicholas Draper on the records of compensation awarded to slave owners at emancipation in 1834 now clearly demonstrates the importance of British Guiana at the end of colonial slavery, when there were 84,075 enslaved people held there. This was an eighth of the 655,780 enslaved in the colonies of the West Indies but, as a result of the demand for labour in the sugar plantations, these slaves were valued disproportionally highly at £4.28m, amounting to more than a quarter of the total compensation subsequently paid by the British Government. The equivalent value of this sum, expressed as comparative purchasing power in 2015, is £367.7 million. Other means of calculating comparative value would give a higher sum. In both the number of enslaved at the time of emancipation and in the amount of compensation paid, British Guiana was second only to the long-established colony of Jamaica.