Chemistry and slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

The Scottish Enlightenment has long been identified with abolitionism because of the writings of the moral and economic philosophers and the absence of slaves in Scotland itself. However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves. In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, I argue that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.

KEYWORDS:

• Scottish Enlightenment
• slavery
• history of chemistry
• Atlantic history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Adam Ferguson, Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1769), part V, chapter 10, section 3, p. 138.

2 Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (Glasgow, 1755), Book 3, p. 204.

3 Adam Smith, ‘Lectures on Jurisprudence: Report of 1762–3’, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, eds. R. L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, and P.G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), vol. 5, pp. 112–4.

4 Michael Guenther, ‘A Peculiar Silence: The Scottish Enlightenment, Political Economy, and the Early American Debates Over Slavery’, Atlantic History, 8.4 (2011), 447–83.

5 C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists 1833–1861, (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981), p. 19.

6 The literature on agricultural improvement in eighteenth-century Scotland is extensive and multi-faceted. G. E. Fussell wrote on agricultural improvement in England and the rest of Great Britain from 1921 until 1971. Most pertinent to this essay is G. E. Fussell, Crop Nutrition: Science and Practice Before Liebig, (Lawrence, Kan.: Coronado Press, 1971). On the socio-economic history of the Improvement movement, see T. M. Devine, ‘Social Responses to Agrarian ‘Improvement’: The Highland and Lowland Clearances in Scotland’, in Scottish Society, 1500–1800, ed. R. A. Houston and Ian Whyte, (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). And Neil Davidson, ‘The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 1: From the Crisis of Feudalism to the Origins of Agrarian Transformation (1688–1746)’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4.3 (2004), 227–68. On patronage and politics in Scotland during the improvement movement, see Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). On Lord Kames’ interest in agriculture, see William Christian Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). On agricultural lecturers see Charles W. J. Withers, ‘William Cullen’s Agricultural Lectures and Writings and the Development of Agricultural Science in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, Agricultural History Review 37.2 (1989), pp. 144–156. And Matthew D. Eddy, ‘The Aberdeen Agricola: Chemical Principles and Practice in James Anderson's Georgics and Geology’, in New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry, ed. by L. M. Principe, Archimedes New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, 18 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 139–56.

7 Henry Home, Lord Kames, The Gentleman Farmer Being An Attempt to Improve Agriculture, by Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles, (Edinburgh: Printed for W. Creech, and T. Cadell, 1776), ix.

8 Stuart M. Nisbet, ‘Early Scottish Sugar Planters in the Leeward Islands, 1660–1740’, Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection, ed. by T.M. Devine, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

9 T. M. Devine, ‘Scotland and Transatlantic Slavery’, in Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection, ed. by T. M. Devine, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 11.

10 Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 113.

11 Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, p. 114.

12 Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 49.

13 William Cullen, ‘Students of the College of Chemistry’, EUA IN1/ACU/C2/1, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh. For a prosopographical study of Cullen’s American students based on this resource see: Whitfield Bell Jr., ‘Some American Students of ‘That Shining Oracle of Physic,’ Dr. William Cullen of Edinburgh, 1755–1766’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 94.3, Studies of Historical Documents in the Library of the American Philosophical Society (Jun. 20, 1950), pp. 275–81.

14 Keith Archibald Forbes, Bermuda’s Town of St. George <http://www.bermuda-online.org/seetown.htm> [accessed 12 December 2017].

15 C. H. Currey, ‘Forbes, Sir Francis (1784–1841)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University <http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/forbes-sir-francis-2052/text2545>, published first in hardcopy 1966 [accessed online 12 December 2017]. And Patrick O’Flaherty, ‘Forbes, Sir Francis’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7, (Toronto: University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003), <http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/forbes_francis_7E.html> [accessed 11 December 2017].

16 Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, pp. 122–6.

17 See for example Joseph Black, Experiments Upon Magnesia Alba, Quicklime and Some Other Alcaline Substances (Edinburgh: Printed for J. Balfour, 1756). John Walker, ‘An Account of a New Medicinal Well, Lately Discovered Near Moffat, in Annandale, in the County of Dumfries’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 49 (1757), 117–47. Donald Monro, ‘An Account of the Sulphureous Mineral Waters of Castle-Loed and Fairburn, in the County of Ross; And of the Salt Purging Water of Pitkeathly, in the County of Perth, in Scotland’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 62 (1772), 15–32. Matthew Dobson, ‘A Description of a Petrified Stratum, Formed From the Waters of Matlock, in Derbyshire’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 64 (1774), 124–7.

18 Thomas Dancer, A short dissertation on the Jamaica bath waters: to which is prefixed, an introduction concerning mineral waters in general; Shewing the Methods of examining them, and ascertaining their Contents, (D. Douglass & Alex. Aikman, 1784), p. 1.

19 Ibid, p. 3.

20 William Falconer, A practical dissertation on the medicinal effects of the Bath waters, (Bath: 1790).

21 Dancer, On the Jamaica Bath Waters, pp. 9, 12–13.

22 Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Airs (London: J. Johnson, 1774–1786).

23 Dancer, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, p. 14.

24 Ibid, p. 22.

25 Ibid, p. 24.

26 Ibid, p. 2.

27 Ibid, pp. 2–3.

28 Ibid, p. xix.

29 Ibid, p. 73.

30 Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

31 Thomas Dancer, The medical assistant, or Jamaica practice of physic: designed chiefly for the use of families and plantations (Kingston: Alexander Aikman, 1801), p. ii.

32 Ibid, p. 6.

33 Ibid, p. 7.

34 Ibid, p. 234.

35 Ibid, p. 170.

36 Ibid, p. 171.

37 Ibid, p. 177.

38 Ibid, p. 178.

39 Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 57.

40 I. P. Baker, An Essay on the Art of Making Muscovado Sugar Wherein a New Process is Proposed (Kingston: Joseph Weatherby, 1775).

41 Ibid, pp. 1–2.

42 As cited in Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, p. 232.

43 On the Georgic epistemology, see Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes From the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

44 Benjamin Rush, Directions for the Use of the Mineral Water and Cold Bath, at Harrogate, near Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Melchior Steiner, 1786). Valentine Seaman, A Dissertation on the Mineral Waters of Saratoga; Containing, a Topographical Description of the Country, and the Situation of the Several Springs; An Analysis of the Waters, As Made Upon the Spot, Together with Remarks on Their Use in Medicine, and a Conjecture Respecting Their Natural Mode of Formation: Also, a Method of Making An Artificial Mineral Water, Resembling That of Saratoga, Both in Sensible Qualities and in Medicinal Virtue (New York: Printed by Samuel Campbell, 1793).

45 Benjamin Rush, An account of the sugar maple-tree, of the United States, and of the methods of obtaining sugar from it, together with observations upon the advantages both public and private of this sugar. : In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Esq. secretary of state of the United States, and one of the vice presidents of the American Philosophical Society. : Read in the American Philosophical Society, on the 19, of August, 1791, and extracted from the third volume of their Transactions now in the press. (Philadelphia: R. Aitken & Son, 1792).

46 J. H. Soltow, ‘Scottish Traders in Viriginia, 1750–1775’, The Economic History Review 12.1 (1959), 83–98.