TOM DEVINE

An empire of trans-oceanic Scottish trade would not have existed but for the Union of 1707 that resulted in Scottish inclusion within the English system of tariff protection, the protection and power of the Royal Navy and the wars fought successfully against France in the West Indies and the Caribbean for territorial and commercial hegemony.

British markets in the Americas and India rested on the deployment of force backed by the massive financial resources of the state. The governing assumption among all nineteenth-century European states was that global wealth was finite. Any increase in the share of one nation could only take place at the expense of another. Aggression, predatory behaviour and an obsession with protection of national interests by commercial regulation and armed force were inevitably built into these mercantilist beliefs.

The Scottish trading communities were usually enthusiastic for colonial conflicts if they resulted in real commercial gains. Equally, the only effective guarantor of Scottish colonial commerce in such a hostile environment was the Royal Navy. That protection in turn depended on the Treaty of Union of 1707.

In the years after the Union, Scottish Atlantic traders enjoyed the protection of a navy expanded on the fiscal-military resources of the English state against the foraging wolf packs of enemy predators. It was this protection which enabled the Scottish merchant marine to expand dramatically from a tonnage of 47,751 in 1759 to 91,330 on the eve of the American War in 1775.

Scottish overseas commerce became dominated by Atlantic trade for most of the century after around 1730. By 1762 just under half of Scottish imports and 52% of exports were of colonial tobacco. Even when that lucrative trade declined after the American War, imperial markets remained fundamental. The sugar and cotton trades from the West Indies became the new money-spinners. Fortunes made from tobacco, sugar and cotton had a direct impact on the agricultural revolution, especially around Glasgow.

Money poured from the Atlantic trades into land as wealthy merchants bought up properties. At least 44% of the Glaswegian merchant aristocracy owned at least one landed estate and the really rich managed to acquire a number of them, spread across several counties. Huge sums were often involved and many were gripped by the contemporary mania for "improvement".

Sustained developments took place in some areas. The Monk-lands parishes in Lanarkshire were said to be "in a huge degree of cultivation" in the 1790s because "when a merchant has been successful, he purchases a piece of land, builds an elegant villa and improves his property at the dearest rates". In Ayrshire and Kirkcudbright the very wealthy Richard Oswald, who had made an immense fortune in arms contracts as well as slave-trading in Africa and merchanting in the Caribbean and Europe, poured many thousands of pounds into his estates of Auchencruive and Cavens. But he was only the most prominent of a number of rich traders who were doing the same thing throughout the county.

The record also shows that few merchants gave up their commercial activities when estates were purchased. The profits from the colonial trades continued to be pumped into schemes of landed improvement as well as coal-mining ventures and factory villages often established on country properties. However, linen rather than cotton was far and away Scotland's greatest manufacture of the period. Most Scots producers concentrated on the cheaper and coarser lines, with Fife, Angus and Perthshire the dominant centres where the cloth was primarily destined for overseas markets. The home population in Scotland grew only slowly in the later eighteenth century. The total of 1.25 million in 1755 had only reached 1.6 million by 1801. Compare this with the massive increases across the Atlantic of 2.3 million in 1770 in the North American colonies from 265,000 in 1707 and 877,000 in 1815 in the British Caribbean in contrast to 145,000 at the start of the century. In 1815, 85% of the population in the West Indies were slaves. The colonial markets were critical to growth. Nine-tenths of all Scottish linen exports went to North America and the West Indies. Thus, after the American War, the Caribbean became even more fundamental.

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the standards of living of numerous working-class families in the eastern Lowlands of Scotland came to depend on the huge markets for cheap linen clothing among the teeming slave populations of Jamaica and the Leeward Islands.

What one writer has described as the "luscious opportunities" of Empire became even more enticing in the second half of the eighteenth century. By around 1770 the population of the North American colonies had grown to around 2.3 million. Georgia, East and West Florida, Quebec and Nova Scotia had all been won from France and Spain.

Then came the American Revolution in 1776 and the emergence of an independent United States. The momentum of territorial expansion seemed unstoppable. By 1820, British dominion encompassed one-fifth of the world's population.

All this hugely increased demand for soldiers, arms and store contractors and the colonial bureaucracies ranging from governors of huge territories at the top to humble clerks at the bottom of administrative hierarchies. The fiscal-military state had never held out more alluring prospects for ambitious officers and colonial administrators. Moreover, in India the victories at Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1763) became the military foundations for a veritable bonanza of pillage. The years c1757 to c1770 were those when the subcontinent became notorious as the place where easy riches could be made quickly. Mortality rates among servants of the East India Company were horrendous, but there were compensations. It was not company salaries which fuelled the rapacity but rather returns from private trade, prize money and tax revenues extracted from the newly conquered Indian territories. The Scots par excellence were to the fore in the exploitation of this new imperial bounty.

Repatriation of the profits of Empire from the Caribbean and India was likely since most Scots who went to make their fortunes were temporary exiles whose roots remained in the mother country. Return, of course, did not always mean to Scotland.

Moreover, both the West Indies and Bengal, for all their economic allure, had the reputation of being the graveyards of the white man. Over the period 1707 to 1775, 57% of the Company's servants succumbed to fatal diseases. Some of the tobacco and sugar princes of Glasgow's transatlantic trading empire made great fortunes, but even these could not compare with the colossal riches repatriated, some to relatives after the death, of the Indian "nabobs". Thus, for instance, John Johnstone of Westerhall returned to Scotland in 1765 with an estimated fortune of £300,000, which helped him to acquire three landed estates and a parliamentary interest. Only one year in India for General Hector Munro, the victor of Buxar, yielded around £20,000, a sum similar to 38 years of income from his Scottish estate.

Success in the Empire became the solid political foundation of the Union by the late eighteenth century, but it was also a crucial source of capital, enabling Scotland to achieve an unprecedented rate of economic growth in a remarkably short period.