THIS VOLUME AS A whole and many of the individual chapters within it explore the importance of slavery to Scotland. This chapter, by contrast, primarily addresses the importance of Scotland to slavery. It is based on work undertaken by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) project at University College London which allows us, for the first time, to locate Scotland within the totality of slave ownership in the United Kingdom and hence to gauge the relative importance of Scotland within overall British and Irish colonial slave ownership at the end of slavery. This last is an important qualification that readers need to bear in mind in assessing the evidence presented here, which reflects the end-position of slave ownership in the early decades of the nineteenth century and does not include analysis of the ownership patterns in the preceding two centuries of British colonial slavery. Nevertheless, the work of LBS to date both provides an overall context in which to place consideration of Scotland's role in colonial slavery and establishes an empirical framework for a synchronic comparative ‘four-nations’ approach to British and Irish colonial slave ownership.

The title of our project, Legacies of British Slave-ownership, was consciously chosen. The team comprised historians of England, steeped in English economic, social, cultural and political history and not equipped to do the same type of work in analysing national and local elites in Scotland (or Ireland or Wales) as we have done for England. But the single metropolitan archive at The National Archives in Kew which was the foundation of our work captured the universe of slave owners across all four nations (and indeed across the Caribbean), and we adopted the same practices of recording, classification and digitisation for the records of all slave owners resident in Britain and Ireland. As a result, we have accumulated, organised and published data from the four nations which we believe is of considerable value to those who can use it better than we can ourselves. We fully recognise that the connections between Scotland and slavery have been and continue to be the subject of active work based on archives in Scotland and the Caribbean.