In 1944, Eric Williams published Capitalism and Slavery, a book whose argument and significance continues to provoke interest and controversy. One of Williams's claims that still garners pointed responses from scholars is the idea that revenues generated from slavery in Britain's West Indies colonies during the eighteenth century played a significant role in laying the economic foundations for the Industrial Revolution in Britain itself. Beginning in the 1960s, a series of historians of economic change, industrialization, and the transatlantic slave trade began to analyze and take on the “Williams thesis.” They were, by and large, highly critical of his conclusions. More recently, and especially in light of the incredibly important Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project based at University College London, which traces the funding provided by the British government in the 1830s to slave owners and their dependents as compensation for emancipating slaves, scholars have sought to rethink the “Williams thesis.” It is now far more generally accepted that the economic contribution of slavery to Britain was much more significant and complex than previously understood.

In many ways the essays in Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection, edited by T. M. Devine, are in this newer tradition of scholarship. According to Devine, Scotland's connections to slavery, particularly in the West Indies, has been misunderstood and under-studied by both scholars of slavery and of Scotland. Although Scotland's important role in commercial and social networks of the early modern Atlantic world has been the focus of many studies in the past decade, the complex relationship that existed between Scotland and slavery in the British colonies has largely been ignored or, worse, downplayed by historians of Scotland. According to Devine in one of his introductory essays, this tendency of slavery to be elided from the Scottish imagination stems in large part from the fact that historians have overemphasized the role of Scots in the story of abolition and emancipation. This volume seeks to correct this tendency by exploring the multiple ways that Scotland was deeply connected to slavery in the Caribbean from the seventeenth century onward.

The essays in this volume cover a wide variety of topics, including representations of slavery and the West Indies in modern Scottish literature, case studies of Scots in particular colonies, a consideration of Scottish merchant houses with interests in the West Indies, the role of Scottish surgeons on slave ships, and the persistence of anti-abolitionist thought among prominent Scottish politicians well into the nineteenth century. The volume contains eleven essays, versions of which were first presented at a conference in Glasgow in 2014. The list of contributors is impressive, including experts, like Devine, on Scotland and empire and well-established scholars of slavery and empire such as Nicholas Draper and Catherine Hall (both main contributors to the Legacies project), as well as scholars whose research focuses specifically on Scotland and the Caribbean, such as Stephen Mullen, David Alston, and Stuart M. Nisbet. The essays are all relatively short (around twelve to fifteen pages) and very readable, and they offer useful contributions that often suggest new avenues for future scholarly exploration.

The best essays in the collection are those that demonstrate clear connections between Scotland and the Caribbean. Nisbet's essay on the origins of Scottish ownership of enslaved Africans in the Leeward Islands is a valuable contribution, recovering the experiences of individual Scots who found economic and social success as slave owners in the colonies. Eric Graham's chapter explores the various commercial networks of Scots involved in plantations in Jamaica and the ways in which clan identity and geographic origin continued to matter in the West Indies. Many Scottish slave owners were incredibly successful and sent significant amounts of wealth back to Scotland, which is emphasized in David Altson's essay on Scottish plantation owners in British Guyana in the late eighteenth century. Using the Legacies database, Draper traces that wealth in Scotland, as well as among Scottish families elsewhere in Britain at the time of emancipation, concluding that Scots were actually overrepresented among British slave owners by the 1830s relative to their overall population. All of the essays make it clear that Scots played a significant role in creating and maintaining the system of slavery in Britain's colonies for the better part of two hundred years, and that Scotland itself benefitted significantly from such a system.

I do have a few criticisms of the collection, keeping in mind it is always a bit difficult to review an edited volume as a whole. As mentioned earlier, the individual essays are all fairly short, which makes them quite readable. On the other hand, none of the essays offer any real in-depth or sustained analysis of the topics at hand, and they are mostly exercises in historical recovery. As a result, some of the “big picture” significance about the subjects is less evident than it might otherwise be. In addition, the chronological scope of the volume is fairly limited. Although a few essays have brief discussions of Scottish involvement in British colonies in the seventeenth century, the vast majority of the essays focus on the period 1750–1834. This leaves questions about the origins of Scottish connections to slavery, and to the West Indies colonies in general, unaddressed. It also conforms to the usual chronology about Scottish involvement in the British Empire, which has traditionally been understood as a phenomenon that accelerated in the wake of the Seven Years' War. That being said, this collection offers a valuable place to start for those interested in exploring the many points of intersection between Scotland and slavery. The volume is an important contribution to understanding the multiple ways slavery had a major impact on the British economy and society, broadly speaking.