The Gordons of Cairness and the Gordons of Cluny: Some Legacies of Caribbean Slavery in North East Scotland.

This paper is a preliminary, archive-based study of two unrelated Gordon families and some of the legacies of their slave derived-wealth in North East Scotland. In the case of the Gordons of Cairness, the family’s wealth from their Jamaican sugar income in the 1780’s and 1790’s, played a significant part in propelling the family into the front rank of the North East’s non- titled landed families, helping to fund architectural, educational and economic developments around their Cairness estate as well as subsidising Major General Thomas Gordon’s involvement in the Greek Wars of Independence in the 1820’s. In the case of the Gordons of Cluny, wealth from the family’s Tobago plantations supplemented the Cluny rental income contributing to the redevelopment of Cluny castle and estate and to the purchase of the islands of South Uist, Benbecula and Barra in the Outer Hebrides. As the historiography of Scotland’s links to slavery in the Caribbean increasingly places enslavement at the centre of our understanding of the nation’s economic progress in this era, research on the lives of the enslaved becomes a powerful tool for the public understanding of ‘Scotland’s Empire’. A small number of ‘slave registers’ in the Gordon of Cairness family papers, reveal themes of agency, endurance and resistance. The names of the enslaved help to remind us that the North East’s colonial connections intersect not only with the people of the Caribbean but with West Africans too.