The first Leith Sugar House was established in 1677 by Robert Douglas and partners. [1] Between 1667 and 1701 four sugar boiling and rum-distilling enterprises were established in Scotland, three in Glasgow and one in Leith. [2] The financial success of the Leith Sugar house in the seventeenth and eighteenth century demonstrates Edinburgh's economic connection to the Atlantic economy and enslaved labour. [1]
Robert Douglas elder (died 1736) was the son of William Douglas of Blackmiln, kirk minster of Aboyne, son of an Aberdeen merchant, and Marjory, a daughter of John Ross, Minister of Birse. The family claimed descent from Archibald Douglas of Glenbervie. Robert Douglas was known as Robert Douglas of Cruixton or Cruckstown, and he became Robert Douglas of Blackmill. [3]
Robert Douglas (elder and younger) were relations of Anna Douglas, Lady Boghall, a companion of Anne Home, Countess of Lauderdale, who left a legacy to them. [4] John Hamilton of Boghall, who was a resident in Leith in 1644, [5] is known is have had an interest in the tobacco trade and chartering a ship to the West Indies. [6]
Robert Douglas was a merchant burgess of Edinburgh but lived and traded as an "indweller in Leith". [7] As a "soap boiler" Robert Douglas made and sold soap. Some soap was made from fish and whale oil. The Douglas soap business is thought to have been the direct successor of Nathaniel Udwart's concession. Udwart's family is remembered by the name of a bar and venue in Edinburgh, "Nicol Edward's". [8] Robert Douglas sold a firkin of soap to a landowner and merchant John Clerk of Penicuik for £11 Scots in February 1666, striking the bargain at the door of the shop or booth of another Leith merchant, David Boyd. A Margaret Douglas, who worked for Clerk, may have been his daughter. Clerk's accounts include a variety of sugar products bought for his own household, but do not name the retailers. In December 1667, Clerk bought a "Barbados sugar loaf". [9]
It was recognised that "sugar boiling", the refining process, was a fire hazard. In May 1677, an Edinburgh confitmaker , Thomas Douglas, was forbidden to boil his own sugar in a cellar workshop in Tailfer's Close to make confectionery, as the potential "occasion of sudden fire in the heart of the town". This measure would also help establish the Leith works as the sole regional maker of refined sugar. [10]
A sugar house requires a number of ovens and some specialised equipment to run at capacity. [11] Robert Douglas had a number of partners to help finance his sugar start-up, along with any family capital and the profits of the other family businesses. Robert Baird of Sauchtonhall (1630-1697) was one of the merchant partners. Some of Baird's papers concerning his 1677 "copartnery" in the Leith "suggarie" survive, along with records of his involvement in the Carolina Company or Society and its failed colony at Stuart Town. [12] [13] [14]
Robert Douglas elder employed a factor, David Forrester, to run the sugar business in Leith. It was known as "The Leith Succar Work Company". They sought an expert in sugar boiling and refining in the Netherlands, employed an English sugar boiler, and eventually in 1680 found a workman willing to come to Leith from Hamburg. At first, all the partly-refined sugar processed at Leith came from London, and had originated in the West Indies and Barbados. [15]
Analysis of port books, recording imports received at Leith, show that the amount of already refined sugar arriving dwindled in the first three years of the Douglas sugar house. This seems to demonstrate that the operation was then a commercial success. [16] However, surviving letters show that the Leith Sugar House was not yet fully exploiting the resource by distilling molasses to make rum in the years 1677 to 1683. The sugar houses in Glasgow were making rum by 1678. [17]
Some unprocessed sugar may have come to Leith directly from Barbados and the Leeward Islands. [18] In the 1660s, Captain Edward Burd (or Baird) transported Scottish convicts from the tolbooth of Edinburgh to work in Barbados. He brought back sugar and tobacco, but the cargo of his Hopeful Margaret of Leith was lost when the ship was impressed by Francis Willoughby to fight with the English government navy. Edward Burd was badly injured in a sea battle with the French in 1666 at "Todosantes", but recovered from a gunshot wound to the head. [19] Unlike Douglas, who had merchant burgess status, Burd was not permitted to deal in wine, and his new Leith chandlery business was strictly regulated to ensure he did not undercut existing shops and manufacturers. [20]
Sugar plantations had English owners and some Scottish staff, and in the 1670s a Glasgow merchant William Colquhoun was settled on Saint Kitts. By around 1695, a Scot with an Edinburgh heritage, William McDowall, began managing a sugar plantation on Nevis as a slave overseer. He was able to develop his own plantations after the Acts of Union 1707. [21]
Robert Douglas was described as a "soap boiler" in February 1684 when he was appointed a Master of the Hospital, Trinity House of Leith, in place of a Leith vintner, who also called Robert Douglas. The vintner was also the Shore Baillie of Leith, and he sold brandy and sack to Clerk of Penicuik. [22]
In 1695, Robert Douglas, junior and senior, described as soap boilers in Leith, were investors in the Company of Scotland, the venture known as the Darien scheme. [23] In 1695, the Parliament of Scotland recognised their flourishing trade with Greenland and Russia, and the setting up of soap and sugar works, and their plans for making porcelain. [24] They were permitted privileges to make earthenware and distill rum. [25]
In 1703 Douglas applied to Privy Council for recognition for a manufactory "to be erected and set up" as a "Suggar work at Leith and a sullarie for distilling of Rhum". [1] The Leith sugar house received partly-refined sugar produced by enslaved labourers on plantations in the Caribbean via London and produced loaf, powder sugar, candy, molasses and rum. [1]
The Douglas business portfolio was diverse. Douglas was in touch with merchants in Hamburg, via Andrew Russell in Rotterdam and his own expert sugar refiner, and shipped coal to them. [26] Douglas processed and barrelled 23 porpoises stranded on the sands at Cramond Island in February 1690. [27] Robert Douglas, the younger, a son of Robert Douglas and Helen Hunter, [28] had a brewery at Coitfield, near Leith, or at the "Coatfield Land" in Leith. [29] In December 1709 he fought a legal challenge that he should pay a duty on his ale-making as if his brewery was in Edinburgh. [30]
A Swedish traveller, Henry Kalmeter, described Robert Douglas's Leith soap works in 1720, apparently situated in Rotten Row. [31] The adjacent sugar house was now operated by Richard Morrow (or Murray) and partners. Sugar from Barbados was shipped to Glasgow and carted to Leith for refining and casting into sugarloafs and sugar syrup distilled into rum. [32] The Douglas interest in sugar in Leith seems to have ended around 1725. [33] Robert Douglas younger acquired an estate called Brockhouse. In the 1740s he converted his Coatfield premises into barracks for soldiers. [34]
There was a recapitalization of the industry in 1751 as the Edinburgh Sugar House Company, trading with the "sugar colonies of British American Plantations". [35] A new Leith Sugar House started in 1757 ceased trading in 1762. [36] Adolphus Happel, who had married Amelia Gray in 1754, was described as a Leith sugar boiler in 1763 and 1766. [37]
A "New Edinburgh Sugar Company" founded in 1771 also ran into difficulty. [38] Sugar was obtained at enormous human cost, and it can be argued that the industry in financial terms was not conspicuously profitable or a driver for Industrial Revolution and the growth of other sectors of the economy. [39]
In the nineteenth century raw sugar continued to be imported from Jamaica for processing in Leith by William MacFie and Co. of the Leith Sugar House in Elbe Street and the Leith Sugar Refining Co. in Coburg Street. [40]
The Acts of Union refer to two Acts of Parliament, one by the Parliament of England in 1706, the other by the Parliament of Scotland in 1707. They put into effect the Treaty of Union agreed on 22 July 1706, which combined the previously separate Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland into a single Kingdom of Great Britain. The Acts took effect on 1 May 1707, creating the Parliament of Great Britain, based in the Palace of Westminster.
Barbados is an island country in the southeastern Caribbean Sea, situated about 100 miles (160 km) east of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Roughly triangular in shape, the island measures some 21 miles (34 km) from northwest to southeast and about 14 miles (23 km) from east to west at its widest point. The capital and largest town is Bridgetown, which is also the main seaport.
Leith is a port area in the north of Edinburgh, Scotland, founded at the mouth of the Water of Leith.
The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, also called the Scottish Darien Company, was an overseas trading company created by an Act of the Parliament of Scotland in 1695. The Act granted the Company a monopoly of Scottish trade to India, Africa and the Americas, extraordinary sovereign rights and 21 years of exemptions from taxation.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other places were brought to the Caribbean to work in the sugar industry. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe, later supplanted by European-grown sugar beet.
Sir John Gladstone, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish merchant, planter and Tory politician best known for being the father of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Born in Leith, Midlothian, through his commercial activities he acquired ownership over several slave plantations in the British colonies of Jamaica and Demerara-Essequibo; the Demerara rebellion of 1823, one of the most significant slave rebellions in the British Empire, was started on one of Gladstone's plantations.
The Molasses Act 1733 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain that imposed a tax of six pence per gallon on imports of molasses from non-British colonies. Parliament created the act largely at the insistence of large plantation owners in the British West Indies. The Act was passed not to raise revenue but to regulate trade by making British products cheaper than those from the French West Indies. The Act greatly affected the significant colonial molasses trade.
Rum is a liquor made by fermenting and then distilling sugarcane molasses or sugarcane juice. The distillate, a clear liquid, is often aged in barrels of oak. Rum originated in the Caribbean in the 17th century, but today it is produced in nearly every major sugar-producing region of the world, such as the Philippines, where Tanduay Distillers, the largest producer of rum worldwide, has its headquarters.
John Clerk of Penicuik (1611–1674) was a Scottish merchant noted for maintaining a comprehensive archive of family papers, now held by the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.
The economic history of Scotland charts economic development in the history of Scotland from earliest times, through seven centuries as an independent state and following Union with England, three centuries as a country of the United Kingdom. Before 1700 Scotland was a poor rural area, with few natural resources or advantages, remotely located on the periphery of the European world. Outward migration to England, and to North America, was heavy from 1700 well into the 20th century. After 1800 the economy took off, and industrialized rapidly, with textile, coal, iron, railroads, and most famously shipbuilding and banking. Glasgow was the centre of the Scottish economy. After the end of the First World War in 1918, Scotland went into a steady economic decline, shedding thousands of high-paying engineering jobs, and having very high rates of unemployment especially in the 1930s. Wartime demand in the Second World War temporarily reversed the decline, but conditions were difficult in the 1950s and 1960s. The discovery of North Sea oil in the 1970s brought new wealth, and a new cycle of boom and bust, even as the old industrial base had decayed.
The economy of Scotland in the early modern era encompasses all economic activity in Scotland between the early sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth. The period roughly corresponds to the early modern era in Europe, beginning with the Renaissance and Reformation and ending with the last Jacobite risings and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
Black Barbadians or Afro-Barbadians are Barbadians of entirely or predominantly African descent.
Scottish trade in the early modern era includes all forms of economic exchange within Scotland and between the country and locations outwith its boundaries, between the early sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth. The period roughly corresponds to the early modern era, beginning with the Renaissance and Reformation and ending with the last Jacobite risings and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
In Scotland, the Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes and economic expansion between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century. By the start of the eighteenth century, a political union between Scotland and England became politically and economically attractive, promising to open up the much larger markets of England, as well as those of the growing British Empire, resulting in the Treaty of Union of 1707. There was a conscious attempt among the gentry and nobility to improve agriculture in Scotland. New crops were introduced and enclosures began to displace the run rig system and free pasture. The economic benefits of union were very slow to appear, some progress was visible, such as the sales of linen and cattle to England, the cash flows from military service, and the tobacco trade that was dominated by Glasgow after 1740. Merchants who profited from the American trade began investing in leather, textiles, iron, coal, sugar, rope, sailcloth, glass-works, breweries, and soap-works, setting the foundations for the city's emergence as a leading industrial center after 1815.
Sandbach, Tinne & Company, together with its associate firms McInroy, Parker & Company and McInroy, Sandbach & Company, was a business whose roots can be traced back to 1782. Having begun business in the cotton trade, the firms moved into sugar products and exported coffee, molasses, rum and sugar from the West Indies. They owned ships and plantations, and engaged in both slavery and transport of indentured labour.
Sir Thomas Martin Devine is a Scottish academic and author who specializes in the history of Scotland. He was knighted and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to Scottish historiography, and is known for his overviews of modern Scottish history. He is an advocate of the total history approach to the history of Scotland. He is professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and was formerly a professor at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Aberdeen.
Peter Murdoch of Rosehill (1670–1761) was an 18th-century Scottish sugar merchant and refiner who served as Lord Provost of Glasgow from 1730 to 1732.
Anne Home, Countess of Lauderdale (1612–1671) was a Scottish aristocrat.
Cecilia Douglas was a Scottish art collector and philanthropist from Glasgow. One of Scotland's wealthiest women during her lifetime, with a net worth of £40,000, her fortune was derived from the ownership of slaves in the British West Indies.
Lead ore has been mined and refined in Scotland for centuries. Lead was typically found as the ore galena. It was used as roofing material for high-status buildings, to make the pipework of the fountain at Linlithgow Palace, to glaze windows, and in the manufacture of alloys such as pewter and latten. Lead was a valuable commodity, with rights reserved to the crown, and was exported abroad. Centres included Leadhills in South Lanarkshire and nearby, Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway; Beinn Chùirn near Tyndrum; Strontian; Minnigaff near Newton Stewart; Woodhead at Carsphairn; and Islay. Abandoned workings include buddle pits which were used to separate heavy lead ores. Significant and notable industrial heritage includes the Wanlockhead beam engine.
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