Anyone who has been to Glasgow will probably have heard the phrase ‘People Make Glasgow’, but, as one placard at the Black Lives Matter demonstration on Glasgow Green put it recently, enslaved people made Glasgow. By the late 1700s, Jamaica was Britain’s wealthiest colony. About one-third of Jamaican plantations were owned – and many more were run – by Scots, including the Glasgow Plantation in the west, and the Galloway, Caledonia, Nairn, Clydeside, Wallace, and Hampden plantations. Although Scots comprised only ten per cant of the British population, fifteen per cent of enslavers compensated after the abolition of slavery were Scottish. Most of these merchants profited by produce, mostly sugar and tobacco (Glasgow sometimes traded more tobacco than all the English ports combined), but also sugar and cotton, grown by…