Ann McKechin MP

Labour Member of Parliament for Glasgow North

Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

20 March 2007

Those of us who have been present in the Chamber today have enjoyed an informative historical analysis of slavery and our country’s part in it. The right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), a colleague of mine on the International Development Committee, mentioned the role of my city, Glasgow, in the slave trade. Any hon. Members who have visited Glasgow will probably have attended or at least passed by the impressive neo-classical façade of our gallery of modern art in Queen’s street. The building has had a varied history. Until a few years ago, it was the Stirling library and it has also been a telephone exchange, a bank and a stock market, but when it was originally built in 1778, at the then staggering cost of £100,000, it was the town house for William Cunninghame, a prominent Glasgow tobacco baron.

Cunninghame headed one of the three major syndicates that controlled the flow of tobacco into Scotland. He developed a string of outlets and representatives in the tobacco colonies, which bought tobacco from the planters and stored it until his ships arrived. His trading system was one of the most efficient and swift in the north Atlantic and it yielded enormous profits. The tobacco barons of Glasgow were the London billionaires of their day. Cunninghame’s mansion is one of Scotland’s finest houses, but it stands today as a reminder of our city’s links to tobacco cultivated by enslaved people, and the profits tobacco yielded to the major Scottish merchants who dominated the trade throughout Western Europe.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Glasgow was a poor town on the wrong side of a poor, isolated country on the fringes of Europe. Scotland’s main trading partners were the Baltic states across the North sea and Scotland’s ruling classes had been bankrupted by their investment in the disastrous Darien scheme in 1690. But by the end of that century Glasgow was transformed into the second city of the empire, at the forefront of the new industrial society.

The greatest rate of development, outpacing anything seen in the rest of the United Kingdom, occurred between 1740 and 1790, when Glasgow found its niche in the business of slavery. Slaves were never auctioned in Glasgow, but the city benefited by directly supplying the American colonies with manufactured goods, linen cloth and iron, without which they could not survive. The ships then returned to the UK with colonial goods, mainly tobacco from Maryland and Virginia, but also sugar and other exotic products from the Caribbean. For that, the traders had the Navigation Acts to thank, which were the backbone of the British Empire until they were repealed in 1799. Essentially, all manufactured goods to be consumed in the British empire had to be produced in Britain and conveyed between Britain and its colonies in British ships. In that fashion, British shipping and British industry were promoted to the detriment of the colonies, which was one of the main reasons behind the American Revolution.

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