Abstract
In 2003, John M. MacKenzie pointed to a curious lacuna in the historiography of Scotland’s largest city. While Glasgow owed its vertiginous nineteenth-century growth to the imperial economies of tobacco, cotton and shipbuilding, and though the city habitually marketed itself as the ‘Second City of the Empire’ from as early as 1825, modern historians have been ‘surprisingly’ reticent on the ‘imperial dimensions of the social and cultural history of the city’. MacKenzie imputes this reticence to the primacy of class as a category of analysis, particularly in histories of Glasgow’s social radicalism, and to a corresponding ‘desire to distance socialism from imperialism’. Observing that the first two volumes of a recent history of Glasgow contain no thoroughgoing analysis of the imperial dimension, MacKenzie finds the most ‘striking silence’ to be that which has enveloped the institution of chattel slavery that was pivotal to the transatlantic tobacco trade. As MacKenzie notes, T. M. Devine produced a well-received monograph on Glasgow’s tobacco lords that ‘contains only two oblique references to slaves or slavery’.