The British Empire in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scottish Music: Early Observations

Music Publishing in Scotland

It is remarkable that during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, music publishing in Scotland skyrocketed. This was caused by the increasing popularity of Scottish music over this period in general, the greater ease and access to printing technology during the Enlightenment, and increasing public literacy. Table 1 provides data on the number of publications of Scottish music during this period.⁵ These data show a noticeable boom in music publishing in Scotland during the 1780s through to the 1810s. This raises questions over the potential that the colonial profits seeping into Scottish society more generally played a part in this publishing boom.

Table 1

Table 1

Approximate dates of publications listed on HMS.scot.

These music printing statistics match well against other data available for colonial involvement by Scots, such as data collected by Andrew Mackillop, shown in Table 2.⁶ This shows a notable increase in Scottish involvement in the East India Company, just before and during the same period that saw a boom in Scottish music publishing.

Though this table shows a clear increase in numbers of Scots in Asia from the second quarter of the eighteenth century through to the early nineteenth century, it does not indicate how the Scottish involvement compares to the wider numbers of British personnel in Asia. A few percentages will help make the increasing overabundance of Scots in Asia apparent. For civil servants, the 1730–49 figures show that Scots were 6.3 per cent of the total number of people employed in these positions. This increases to 12.2 and 13.5 in the next two columns, before rising to 21.2 per cent in 1790–1813.⁷ A similar result occurs within the data for military officers, which rises to 22.9 per cent in the final period presented.⁸ For surgeons, these numbers consistently show that between one-fifth to one-quarter of all Company surgeons were Scottish during these periods.⁹ Data for the last two employment types is a little less easily definable against the wider British population in Asia. The total of Scottish merchant marine officers between 1690–1813 is likely 20.9 per cent of the overall total.¹⁰ Meanwhile the percentage of Scots free merchants and mariners in Madras never drops below 20 per cent throughout 1778–1810 and rises to 29.4 per cent in 1810.¹¹ Taken as a whole, these percentages show an increasing involvement by Scots in the EIC and wider trading in Asia during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the start of the nineteenth. This increasing wealth of Scots will have had an impact on the Scottish economy, and therefore indirectly contributed to the music publishing boom (we will see later how specific Scots in the East Indies directly contributed to this as well). It is a striking dynamic indeed that an increase in EIC employment for Scots occurred while Scottish music publishing greatly increased as well.

Data from the West Indies is not yet so fine-grained, and so only general comparisons between Scottish music publishing trends and the involvement of Scots in the Caribbean can be made.¹² Claims that Scots represented up to 30 per cent of all landowners in Jamaica have been shown to be based on flawed data.¹³ The likely percentage lies somewhere lower than this, though we cannot know for sure. In Antigua between 1730 and 1775, thirteen of the sixty-five ‘leading families’ identified by Richard Sheridan were from Scotland.¹⁴ Whatever the exact number of Scots involved in the West Indies, it is clear that Scotland’s transformation into an industrial economy was partly based on the profits from North American and Caribbean plantations. As Stephen Mullen puts it, ‘Scotland was built on shrewd investment, venture capital – and the blood and sweat of slaves.’¹⁵

This economic view including not just the profits directly from the transatlantic slave trade but also profits derived from the products of their labour, and the economic systems built on the backs of those enslaved, is following what is now known as ‘the Williams thesis’. This is named after its proponent, Eric Williams, the first prime minister of a newly independent Trinidad and Tobago.¹⁶ The simple explanation provided here does not do true justice to Williams’ work, however the approach he took has become the de jure approach that many historians of Scotland follow to questions of slavery, and this article will follow suit.¹⁷ As T. M. Devine has argued, ‘the Scottish engagement with empire … affected almost every nook and cranny of Scottish life’.¹⁸ Economically speaking, Scottish music publishing will have also gained from this engagement; as Scotland’s economy was boosted by empire, so too was music publishing, swept along by the influx of colonially-derived money into every aspect of Scotland’s life. We will come to more specific examples of this later in the article.

The impact that empire had on all aspects of Scotland cannot be underestimated. Indeed, the great boom industries of Scotland during this period – sugar, tobacco, linen – all have colonial links. Whilst many Scottish merchants did not directly own slaves, their involvement in such trades left them only one step removed from the horrific labour processes of the plantations.¹⁹ And not only were those Scots in the West Indies implicit in this economy – those remaining at home provided the linens, foodstuffs, manufactured goods and luxury items that the colonies required and desired.²⁰ Materials sent out to those colonies in the West Indies amounted for 65 per cent of Scottish exports by 1813; already by the 1790s nine-tenths of Scottish linen production was being exported to North American and Caribbean plantations.²¹ The financial well-being of Scotland, and its implications on the musical life of the country, are entwined with that of colonial trade.

Several recent reports have highlighted the links between the transatlantic slave trade and Scotland. In all of these, what strikes the reader is the level of permeation that profits from the slave trade had into many aspects of Scottish life. The report Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow found that sixteen out of approximately 200 gifts to the university had clear connections to the profits from slavery, and that twenty-three of the approximately 2,500 donors to its Gilmorehill relocation campaign also demonstrated links to the slave trade.²² Similarly, the Plantation Slavery and Landownership in the West Highland and Islands discussion paper found:

that at least 1,834,708 acres of the west Highlands and Islands – more than half of the area’s total landmass, and approaching ten percent of the total landmass of Scotland – has been owned by families that have benefitted significantly from slavery.²³

In a similar vein, the National Trust for Scotland’s similar investigation into its properties found direct links to slavery for nineteen of the forty-eight properties surveyed.²⁴ Ten more properties benefitted from indirect links, such as trading in importing/exporting slave colony goods or benefitting from the financial systems supporting slavery economies. Finally, intergenerational links, where slavery derived wealth has percolated through familial fortunes and thereby benefited the later generations both financially and societally, account for a further thirteen properties.²⁵

All of this shows how deeply imperial wealth seeped into the social structure of Scotland. But, as David Hunter argues, ‘[t]he artifacts of slavery are not only the manacles, branding irons, and whips, or the slaves’ own possessions, but also the musical scores and instruments funded by slavery’s profits.’²⁶ We must turn to the more ephemeral world of music to ascertain how deeply Scots’ colonialism affected Scottish music. It is no coincidence that Simon Fraser in the ‘Letter and Prospectus’ to his 1816 Airs and Melodies Peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles notes that for ‘our countrymen abroad, in India, settled in the Continent of America, or resident in the West Indies’ this music in particular has a strong draw, due to their absence from home.²⁷

Subscribers’ Lists

This absence from their homeland did not only manifest in the simple purchasing of collections of music, but also in subscribing to them before they had been made. This was an increasingly used method of publication in the British Isles more generally, which allowed composers and publishers to mitigate the impact of publishing on their own finances.²⁸ Via the promise from a large list of subscribers for payment (often at a reduced rate compared to the main selling price), a publisher could have the collection printed, both for those subscribers and copies for sale more generally. Scottish tune books’ subscribers are a resource that are yet to be fully mined for information in general, though Karen McAulay does note the ‘spasmodic appearances of subscribers from Jamaica, the East Indies or elsewhere in the colonies.’²⁹ This, however, is not the focus of her chapter, instead looking at the far more copious data available in terms of other subscribers. It is true that colonial subscribers are not always clearly seen in the lists; not everyone has an obvious geographical marker advertising their position in the colonies, but a deeper prosopographical analysis of these lists may well uncover colonially-derived wealth in the banks of many well-to-do subscribers that as yet are unrecovered.

Those ‘spasmodic’ entries are evidence of individuals in the British colonies subscribing to Scottish music publications.³⁰ The following two sections of this article will explore just a few of these entries. Not only do the individuals listed show clear colonial financial support of Scottish music publishing, they are also a statement on the connectivity of the Empire and how advertisements (or other forms of knowledge such as family letters) about planned publications travelled the world.³¹

West Indies Subscribers

In the subscribers’ list for Malcolm McDonald’s A Second Collection of Strathspey Reels &c of ca. 1789 is one Mrs Macglashan of Jamaica, who ordered two copies of the publication.³² Who precisely Mrs Macglashan was is unclear; lacking a first name it is hard to be certain of who in the records she might be.³³ One possibility is that she is the same person as the ‘Mrs J. McGlashan’ that left Jamaica in 1793.³⁴ This J. McGlashan is potentially identifiable as one Jean McGlashan, who is given the similar ‘Rights and Privileges’ as an English subject in 1766 by an act of the Jamaican Assembly.³⁵ Her maternal grandmother was Frances Willey, ‘a free mulatto woman’ from the parish of St Andrews. Her daughter Mary then had both Jean and her brother Charles, with their father being one ‘Duncan McGlashan, practitioner in physic’.³⁶

This familial link to Frances Willey would quite possibly make Jean McGlashan the first known mixed-race subscriber to a publication of Scottish traditional music. However, if this genealogical theory is correct, then her family was also deeply involved in slavery, which raises questions over where her money to support McDonald’s publication came from. Her father Duncan Charles MacGlashan/McGlashan, aside from being one of the doctors on the island, was owner or co-owner of two plantations on the island during 1774–5: the Blackheath plantation in Westmoreland and the Rhine plantation in the parish of St Thomas in the East, totalling 283 enslaved people.³⁷ Jean’s brother Charles seems to have followed in his father’s footsteps, being listed as both a doctor and plantation-owner in several of Jamaica’s almanacs during the 1790s onwards. Despite their mixed heritage, this family clearly had no problem with plantation slavery. Frustratingly, we have not found any record of who Jean McGlashan married, nor of where her ship landed, and so our trail goes cold as to this potential identity of our subscriber Mrs Macglashan.

Even if this is not the same Macglashan family, whatever her position in Jamaica was, it nonetheless placed her in a slavery-based economy.³⁸ Estimates of the profits of British slave-trading around 1770 are £115,000 at the time; aggregate West Indies planting profits were £2.5 million.³⁹ Whilst the trade in slaves was a comparatively small part of the West Indies’ total profit-making, it is impossible to remove these people from the understanding of the wider transatlantic economy.⁴⁰ In 1770, just under 90 per cent of the exports of Jamaica to Great Britain and Ireland were sugar and rum, both products that required extensive use of slave labour.⁴¹ It is undeniable then that Jamaica, and by extension the other West Indies colonies who present similar statistics, had economies entirely reliant upon the production of goods by enslaved peoples.⁴² It is this economic backdrop that enabled Mrs Macglashan’s support for McDonald’s Strathspey Reels, no matter her familial background.

A further example from Jamaica comes from Archibald’s Duff’s 1794 A Collection of Strathspey Reels &c.⁴³ Here we find ‘Mr John Alexander, Surgeon, Jamaica’ as the first subscriber listed. Medical practitioners were particularly necessary for the West Indies, due to the effects of the climate on the white colonists and the need to treat the worst excesses of punishments meted out to the enslaved.⁴⁴ Scots or Scots-trained doctors were a common sight in the West Indies, and often acquired a great deal of wealth.⁴⁵ As we have seen with the McGlashan doctors, they could also be owners of plantations. With this in mind, it can be suggested that this John Alexander is the same John Alexander who in 1792 owned twelve enslaved people in St Ann, Jamaica.⁴⁶ If this is the case, then there is a clear link between the ownership of enslaved people, and thereby the profits of their labour, and the financial support of a publication of Scottish music.⁴⁷

East Indies Subscribers

Angus Cumming’s 1780 A Collection of Strathspey or old Highland Reels provides ample evidence for the presence of East India money in Scottish music publishing. Among the extensive list of Grants subscribing to the publication, are entries such as ‘Grant, Capt. Charles, East-India Company’s Service’; ‘Grant, Capt. Ludovick, East Indies’; and ‘Grant, Charles, Esq; Calcutta’, amongst others similarly located in the East Indies.⁴⁸ Similarly, one ‘Lieutenant Macdonald, Bengal’ is found in John Bowie’s 1789 A Collection of Strathspey Reels & Country Dances.⁴⁹ Finally, another Grant can be found in Duncan Macintyre’s 1795 A Collection of Slow Airs, Reels & Strathspeys, as ‘Lieutenant A. Grant, East India Company’s Service, Madras’. Macintyre himself went on to emigrate to India, possibly becoming the master of ceremonies for the Governor-General of Bengal.⁵⁰

The presence of so many military men in EIC employment is no surprise – the territorial conquest of India required soldiers, and was so quick that in half a century it controlled the entire subcontinent with its private army of 200,000 men.⁵¹ This was supported by the British military as well. Bengal is an early example of the level of looting and extortion that occurred under the auspices of the EIC. This was one of the first areas hit hard by the EIC’s extortionate taxations, and its treasury was simply emptied and transferred to Fort William, the Company’s headquarters in Calcutta.⁵² Between 1765 and 1815, approximately £18,000,000 was taken a year from India, bankrolling Britain at the expense of India.⁵³ Into this land of financial opportunity came the Scots, whose ability to mobilise human capital allowed them to benefit greatly from empire.⁵⁴ In these three subscribers’ lists there is perhaps some of the most obvious evidence that East Indies wealth was being used to generate cultural capital for the wealth owner by laundering their colonial profits into a more acceptable form. MacKinnon and Mackillop, in the context of slavery-derived wealth being used to fund land purchases, note that this was a method to turn this wealth into something more ‘culturally respectable, non-threatening, and even “traditional”’.⁵⁵ These lists of subscribers suggest a similar impulse, turning East and West Indies money into a form of cultural wealth, creating respectability by association with the traditional music of Scotland.

Newspapers

Newspaper advertisements provide occasional snapshots of the impact of Scotland’s colonial activities into the country’s musical framework. Found through the Runaway Slaves in Britain project database, we find in the Edinburgh Evening Courant on the 2^nd of May 1772 this advertisement:

RUN AWAY from his MASTER, upon MONDAY laft,

A BLACK SERVANT:

He is about five feet ten or eleven inches high, strong made, short hair, about 23 years of age: – His name is ANTHONY, had a dark coloured coat on when he went away, and can play a little upon the fiddle. — Whoever will secure him in any jail in Britain, shall be properly rewarded upon giving proper intimation to the Publisher of this Paper.⁵⁶

Of particular interest to this article is the statement that he ‘can play a little upon the fiddle’ – Anthony’s musical abilities raise numerous questions here. Was Anthony’s fiddle playing a colonial imposition upon him, as part of his role in the household? Or was it something he himself had freely taken up? Had he been able to play similar instruments before his life as a ‘servant’, back in his own homeland? And who had paid for this fiddle that he had played upon? Was this something that he himself had managed to acquire, or was it provided by his enslaver? Frustratingly, all these questions, including what happened to Anthony, remain unanswered. What this advertisement does show, though, is that in Edinburgh in the later eighteenth century, there was at least one black violinist.

Despite the term ‘servant’ being used, it is clear that Anthony was enslaved. We know that enslaved black people were kept in Scotland, at least until the result of the Knight vs Wedderburn case in 1777.⁵⁷ We even find members of the Buchanan family involved in the sale of a ‘stout young NEGROE MAN, bred a failor and cook’ in Greenock in 1766.⁵⁸ Another example comes from 1772, the same year as Anthony fled his enslaver. Robert Cunninghame Graham and his wife Ann returned from their Jamaican plantation with two enslaved domestic servants, one named Martin, the other’s name unrecorded. A year later Martin was then returned to Jamaica to be sold, a clear indicator of his status as a slave rather than a true ‘servant’.⁵⁹ Despite Anthony’s musical abilities, a similar fate may have befallen him as punishment for his supposed transgressions.

A further piece of evidence for the entanglement of empire and the colonies in Scotland’s musical landscape is a 1758 advertisement for musicians needed for a ship bound for Jamaica:

       For Kingston in Jamaica,

       The St ANDREW

       Captain Hugh Wyllie,

IS now to take on board goods at Greenock, and be clear to fail against the first of March. For freight or passage apply to James Douglass or George Anderson merchants in Glasgow, or the master at Greenock. The vessel is a prime sailer, burthern 270 tons, mounts 16 carriage-guns, 4 and 6 pounders, 14 swivels, and will have 50 hands and a latter of marque.

N.B. A surgeon, a French-horn-man, a drummer, and an armourer are wanted for said ship, and will meet with good encouragement by applying as above. Any joiners, bricklayers, or blacksmiths, that are willing to indent for four years will also meet with due encouragement.⁶⁰

This notice also ran the following week, but the sentence about the surgeon, French horn man, drummer, and armourer was removed – evidently these positions had already been filled.⁶¹ If indeed there were enough French horn players and drummers in Glasgow willing to relocate to Jamaica, it can be concluded that the colonies were providing income for Scottish musicians.

The Glassford Family Painting

Perhaps the most famous painting linking Glasgow’s wealthy merchant class to their colonial endeavours, the Glassford family painting (originally painted by Archibald McLauchlan between 1764–6), has been the recipient of a certain amount of unwarranted controversy.⁶² The uncovering of a black enslaved servant in the left hand of the image, obscured by years of grime, caused some to claim that it had intentionally been covered, although it is far more likely this was a result of normal deterioration.⁶³ The painting also includes coded messages flaunting the family’s overseas holdings (including tobacco plantations in Virginia and Maryland) and purchasing power, such as a bowl of exotic fruit and a parrot. However, the eldest daughter, Jean, is the focus of this discussion because of her playing of a musical instrument in the scene.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Jean Glassford, with her father to the left, and a black servant just visible at the left edge of the image (Image: Glasgow Museums).

Jean stands to the right of her father, playing an instrument that is identifiable as an English guittar.⁶⁴ This instrument was just coming into fashion at the time of painting, and was already known in Scotland, with advertisements for the instruments themselves, tutors, and music books all appearing in newspapers.⁶⁵ The instrument also enjoyed great popularity further afield, in both America and India, partly due to its utility for solo performance, a boon for women whose husbands were away working.⁶⁶

Jean’s guittar subtly points out the window, past the parrot to the large garden of their estate, viewable perhaps as a stand-in for the family’s plantations in America, all of which function as an advertisement for her eligibility for a suitor. This guittar is another example of the family’s wealth – not just in monetary terms that allowed them to import exotic fruits and animals – but in terms of cultural capital. Jean has been clearly raised and tutored to be the daughter of a wealthy man, and musical skill was part of the expected skillset of a wealthy young lady.⁶⁷ Her training on this instrument would have been funded by her father’s colonial wealth, as was much else of her life. Whilst her position here is a relatively passive one, receiving the benefits of her father’s colonial investments rather than actively participating in the family business, her training still stands as a testament to the importance of such money in the musical cultures of Scottish families.

The marriage of Jean, as the eldest of the Glassford children, would have been of great importance to the continuation of the family business.⁶⁸ Her position here, as a young musical woman with the wealth of her father’s colonial investments behind her, is a powerful one. Her marriage to the Glasgow merchant James Gordon on 18 August 1768, would have been aided, even if only slightly, by her proficiency on a musical instrument.⁶⁹ James Gordon was another West India merchant, an investor in John Glassford and Co. and Glassford, Gordon and Co., along with other companies, tobacco and otherwise.⁷⁰ By this marriage, the family continued its entanglements in colonial trades. The Glassford painting stands as another testament to the cleansing of colonial wealth by its re-investment into cultural activities such as music.

Elizabeth Ross

Elizabeth Jane Ross’s biographical details are well-documented in an edition of the important music manuscript she left in the library of Raasay House, where she was raised by her uncle James MacLeod, the laird of Raasay.⁷¹ Her father had served in the EIC, and it was to India that Ross returned, having spent the early years of her childhood there. Here, she and her sister had one primary objective – the finding of suitable husbands. With her match to the baronet Charles D’Oyly, they settled in Patna, around whom a circle of artistic creativity flourished.

Of particular interest, however, is that during her time in India, Ross had a set of bagpipes made by a local craftsman, as a gift to the piper John MacKay, who had served her uncle.⁷² MacKay was likely the source of some of the material in her music manuscript, and Ross reportedly worked hard to be able to play these pipe pieces on the piano.⁷³ Her gift has two interesting implications: first, that Highland bagpipe making was a skill that could be found in India, with craftsmen working to a standard that would be acceptable to a highly capable player such as MacKay.⁷⁴ Second, that colonial wealth (her husband worked for the EIC) could still impact the musical culture of her home, with patronage and friendship being expressed in Scottish terms, despite the two people being halfway around the world from each other.⁷⁵

Conclusion

These Scottish music publications and other interactions shows music not necessarily as a directly related field to slavery, such as the production of tobacco, sugar, cotton, and rum, but rather as a cultural by-product of a nation flush with imperial money. The increase in Scottish musical publications is by no means just down to the prevalence of slavery and violently extractive economic policies throughout the British Empire. The increasing availability of musical printing throughout Europe, the cheapening of paper, the rise of the middle class and other factors will have played their part too. However, these other factors likely have their own roots in colonialism, too. It will never be possible to determine the full influence of slavery and colonially-derived wealth on Scottish music, but the evidence presented here shows that we should consider Scottish music as a cultural artefact that is tinted, at the very least, by colonialism.

The financing of musical activities allowed colonial wealth to be transformed into more societally acceptable forms, thereby increasing the cultural capital of those laundering their fortunes.⁷⁶ In 1975, George Shepperson wrote

I hope that we shall not forget that there are elements associated with the Atlantic slave trade – and, indeed, with its ramifications into other trades and industry in eastward and other directions – which cannot at the moment – and probably never will – be measured. I refer to its effects on white culture.⁷⁷

Whilst we may never be able to truly ‘measure’ the impact colonial wealth had on music, Scottish or otherwise, we can now begin to acknowledge the moments more deeply where it becomes clear that Scottish music is a cultural artefact of colonialism.