Murky slavery past is in plain sight for anyone looking carefully
A walk through Edinburgh's historic city centre is a joy regardless of season or weather.
Yet scrape below the surface of the majestic New Town and it's not difficult to find evidence that pre-Enlightment the Athens of the North benefited handsomely from the horrors of the slave trade.
By 1817, thirty two percent of Jamaican plantations were owned by Scots.
When slavery was abolished in 1833 the British government paid 3,000 slaveholders £20 million in compensation, today’s equivalent of £2.4 billion.
The Slave Compensation Commission listed 320 addresses in Edinburgh belonging to 148 individuals.
Peter McClagan of Great
King Street was paid £21,480 in respect of 407 slaves he held at a plantation in British Guiana, about £2.6 million in today’s terms.
William Alexander, Lord
Provost of Edinburgh in 1753, owned four ships which often returned from colonies with rum, muscovado sugar, rice and mahogany and Leith was a major port for receiving tobacco from American slave plantations.
James Gillespie’s School was founded with money left by the eponymous shop owner who made a fortune selling Virginian tobacco and snuff from his premises at
231 High Street.
The Countess of Stair was reported to have the first black servant in Edinburgh, a man named Oronoce, who lived in her home in 1740 at what is now the
Writers' Museum.
Bute House in Charlotte Square, the official residence of Scotland’s First Minister, was home to John Innes Crawford in the 1790s. Crawford inherited his father’s Jamaican estates including the Bellfield sugar plantation and several hundred enslaved people. Annual revenues from the estate was £3000 (£363,000).
A stone in St John’s Church in Lothian Road is believed to mark the only known Edinburgh grave of an enslaved person. Malvina Wells was born in Grenada in 1804 and spent most of her life working as a servant to the well-connected McCrae family at 33 Great King Street. Malvina died aged 82 at 14 Gloucester Place on 22 April 1887.