Global adventuring became a way of life for Scots in the seventeenth century. In the wake of the Treaty of Union, which incorporated Scotland and England from 1707, the traditional continental sojourning of Scots as soldiers and scholars was pressed into service of the inchoate yet expanding eighteenth-century British Empire. Scots became prominent in the British Army and Royal Navy. They also served with distinction on religious missions and in academic institutions that brought together enterprise and enlightenment. Enterprise, if not enlightenment, was a key feature of Scottish engagement in the tobacco and sugar trades from the Americas, in the tea, coffee and silk trades from Asia and in the slave trade from Africa. In the process, the high incidence and extent of Scottish mobility fostered identities that can readily be depicted as multi-polar or multi-faceted. To be understood, these identities must be weighted with respect to time and space and by the ways they were given particular focus by competing Scottish and British patriotisms originating in the internecine rivalry of Jacobites and Whigs, which was confessional and territorial as well as factional and political.

Scottish Jacobites sought the restoration of the house of Stuart exiled at the far from ‘glorious’ Revolution, the sundering of the Treaty of Union and the removal of the Presbyterian establishment in the Kirk that had been accomplished in 1689–90 and reaffirmed in 1707. British Whigs upheld the Revolution, the Union and, from 1714, the succession of the house of Hanover as monarchs.

In narratives of the great abolition campaigns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Scots often appear as powerful anti-slavery advocates. Scots churchmen and intellectuals (like James Beattie) pronounced against slavery for moral reasons while others, notably Adam Smith, attacked it as an archaic and inefficient economic system. Zachary Macaulay and William Dickson were active and high profile members of the central abolition campaign, which mobilized public outrage against a dreadful institution. The work of these and less well-known individuals encouraged Scots of all stamps to announce their opposition to slavery from the later eighteenth century through petitions, public meetings and the purchase of anti-slavery merchandise. As a result, an image has emerged of Scotland and of Scots as ‘abolitionist’ that in many ways conforms to, and even goes further than, a wider British view of itself as the world's great anti-slavery nation, its vast slave holdings notwithstanding. Nonetheless, amidst the deluge of parliamentary petitions clamouring for an end to the slave trade and then for emancipation, other Scottish voices, which argued for the retention of the trade and slavery, remained audible throughout the fifty-year long abolition campaigns.

This chapter examines these anti-abolitionist responses to the campaigns against, firstly, the slave trade and, secondly, against slavery itself. In doing so, the chapter shows three things. Firstly, it argues that anti-abolitionism was organized and disseminated through networks of West India planters and merchants and their allies.

Executive Summary

Renewable energy can provide a host of benefits to society. In addition to the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, governments have enacted renewable energy (RE) policies to meet a number of objectives including the creation of local environmental and health benefits; facilitation of energy access, particularly for rural areas; advancement of energy security goals by diversifying the portfolio of energy technologies and resources; and improving social and economic development through potential employment opportunities. Energy access and social and economic development have been the primary drivers in developing countries whereas ensuring a secure energy supply and environmental concerns have been most important in developed countries.

An increasing number and variety of RE policies–motivated by a variety of factors–have driven substantial growth of RE technologies in recent years. Government policies have played a crucial role in accelerating the deployment of RE technologies. At the same time, not all RE policies have proven effective and efficient in rapidly or substantially increasing RE deployment. The focus of policies is broadening from a concentration almost entirely on RE electricity to include RE heating and cooling and transportation.

RE policies have promoted an increase in RE capacity installations by helping to overcome various barriers. Barriers specific to RE policymaking (e.g., a lack of information and awareness), to implementation (e.g., a lack of an educated and trained workforce to match developing RE technologies) and to financing (e.g., market failures) may further impede deployment of RE.