William Shand, North East Scotland and the Atlantic Slave Trade

24 April 2020

By Matthew Lee

My PhD research, which is a collaboration between the University of Aberdeen and the National Library of Scotland, focusses on Scottish writers who visited the Caribbean and wrote about their experiences of slavery. As part of the project, I spent three months at the Library cataloguing items in its slavery collections. During the cataloguing, I was struck by the number of people from the North East of Scotland who were involved with slavery in the Caribbean. Much of the attention paid to Scotland’s relationship with slavery has been focussed on Glasgow. However, the North East has its own slavery story. Slave trading voyages set sail from the port of Montrose. Graduates of Aberdeen’s two universities, King’s College and Marishal College (merged into a single university in 1860), journeyed to the West Indies and worked in occupations adjacent to the slave trade. The Powis Gate, one of the university’s best-known pieces of architecture, is alleged to have been funded by compensation money paid to enslavers after emancipation in 1834.

This post delves into the life of one person from the North East who had a direct hand in slavery: William Shand of Fettercairn. Shand’s letters are located at Aberdeen University’s Special Collections and records of his bankruptcy are held by the National Records of Scotland. I spent a few weeks making my way through these letters with a view to publishing something on Shand in the future.

William Shand was born in 1776. He moved to Jamaica in April 1791 and remained there until his return to Scotland in 1823. During this time, Shand managed plantations for his brother John and other absentee owners. He told a parliamentary inquiry in June 1832 that he had connections to over a hundred estates on the island.[i] William also owned - or inherited from his deceased brother John - a number of plantations, including The Burn in Clarendon parish. The name of this estate has a particular resonance in terms of North East Scotland’s entanglement with slavery:  the Shands’ country seat in Fettercairn - halfway between Aberdeen and Dundee - was also called The Burn. The records of the estates owned by Shand demonstrate the extent of his involvement with slavery. In 1833, hundreds of enslaved people lived on Shand’s estates. Among them was a woman named Frances Brown, who had children with William’s brother John. One of these children, Robert Batty Shand, visited North East Scotland and was involved in William’s business activities.

Scots in the West Indies were known for their clannishness and ability to build networks, and Shand was no exception. His slavery operation was helped by his connections with other members of the Scottish diaspora in Jamaica. His first marriage was to Eliza Rankin, the daughter of a merchant in Greenock - another Scottish town with strong connections to slavery. Eliza’s uncle was Colin MacLarty a member of Jamaica’s medical community who owned a plantation and enslaved people. Her brother-in-law (also of Scottish descent), Hinton Spalding, became a friend and business associate of Shand’s. When he returned to Scotland, Shand kept in touch with his contacts in Jamaica. His correspondents included the overseers on his estates - mostly Scots - and political allies like the Speaker of the House of Assembly of Jamaica David Finlyason. Shand understood that his business activities relied on flows of information between Jamaica and North East Scotland - a fact he impressed on his correspondents. Shand’s business ventures were made far easier through his access to this network of Scots in Jamaica.

A potentially fascinating aspect of Shand’s correspondence are the letters he received from Iver Borland, a British merchant in Trieste. During the nineteenth century, Trieste was a free port used by the Habsburg Empire to ship goods through the Adriatic to places further east. Though I need to go through their copious correspondence in more detail, it appears that Shand was shipping slave-grown Jamaican commodities to Trieste via Borland. Amongst Shand’s papers are contracts regarding the movement of goods between Jamaica and Trieste - and from Scotland to Jamaica – demonstrating the global scale of his business.

Shand’s activities offer the prospect of expanding the geographical scope of where slave-grown Caribbean produce was traded. Borland seems to have been involved in improving Trieste’s maritime infrastructure, suggesting that the economic development of the city relied, at least in part, on slavery. From his home in North East Scotland, Shand was operating a multinational - indeed, trans-imperial - business operation that shipped coffee, sugar and spices from the West Indies to the eastern Mediterranean.

William Shand’s business ventures were undone by debt. When John died, William inherited his brother’s assets and liabilities. This meant he took over the plantations in Jamaica and the country houses in Scotland. However, he was also forced to take on John’s enormous debts as well. The records of the sequestrations show that in 1834 this debt totalled £93,784 10S 10D. [ii]. Based on the economic history tool Measuring Worth, the size of Shand’s debt in today’s prices is huge: somewhere between £8.8 million and £430 million.

Shand’s assets were sequestered to pay off these debts, meaning he lost his country seat at The Burn and another nearby house named Balmakewan. These buildings remain standing, representing a small part of the physical legacy of slavery in Scotland. Today, The Burn is a retreat for academics and Balmakewan is a wedding venue; during Shand’s tenure at the houses, however, they served as the hub of an international business operation built on the labour of enslaved people.  The connections between the North East of Scotland and slavery in the Caribbean are hiding in plain sight, waiting to be revealed.

[i] Parliamentary Papers 1832 (127), Report from Select Committee on State of West India Colonies, p.188.

[ii] National Records of Scotland, CS96/4766.

Matthew Lee is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, where he is funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and National Library of Scotland (NLS). His research examines the role of Scots in the Caribbean slave trade, and the impact of slavery on Scottish society c.1750-1834. He tweets from @matthewlee2.