Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean

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In profound parts, as painful as it is plaintive, Dr Alston’s dedicated work offers powerful glimpses of the victims and perpetrators of widespread abuses, the bloody terror and casual horror of everyday estate life and the brutally suppressed revolts.

When I think what museum experiences have been special to me in recent years, then I recollect not the big museums, but the small scale and the individual, the Museum of Cromarty based in an old courthouse . . . or the Inverness Miners’ Museum in Inverness, Nova Scotia . . . They have preserved a sense of integrity in what they do and communicate effectively the meaning and experience of life in the past just as powerfully as they do information about it.The great historian Tony Judt, born in the working-class Jewish East End of London, once said: “The job of the historian is to make it clear that a certain event happened. While Mr Macwhirter rightly rejects the notion that the British Empire was “essentially English”, he takes the line that Scots were junior partners in the Empire, and while wealthy Scots were implicated in the slave trade he claims “it is not clear how many ordinary Scots benefited from colonial wealth”.

All of them are ‘work’– if by that is meant things to which I have devoted serious and sustained effort.Scottish Slave-owners in Suriname: 1651–1863’, Northern Scotland, 9 (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)