BUCHANAN, Cochrane, Dennistoun, Dunlop, Glassford, Ingram, Oswald, Speirs. The list of Glasgow slavers, revered as “Tobacco Lords”, who are celebrated in the naming of the streets and districts of the city is as long as it is shameful. Even in recent decades Glasgow City Council has thought it proper to renovate and promote “The Merchant City” without facing up to the central role of African slavery in its creation. Was a second thought given when this hub of music venues, theatres, clubs, bars and restaurants was relaunched under its existing name? The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow’s Royal Exchange Square stands, we are often told, in premises formerly inhabited by the Royal Bank of Scotland. Less often are we reminded that, prior to its purchase by the bank, the grand building was the ostentatious mansion of the tobacco tycoon William Cunninghame, who reputedly owned more than 300 enslaved human beings on his plantations in Jamaica.
Last modified on Fri 23 Apr 2021 15.02 EDT
Glasgowâs Merchant City is a construct. Before the wave of post-1980s regeneration, nobody knew the city centre district by that name. With its new identity, it was branded as a destination for a fashionable crowd in search of boutiques, restaurants and wine bars.
The merchants themselves were already commemorated in the road signs: Ingram Street after tobacco lord Archibald Ingram; Buchanan Street after plantation owner Andrew Buchanan; Glassford Street after John Glassford, the most successful of the tobacco traders.
Merchant City advertising campaigns did not dwell on how these men built their wealth. That job has been taken on by writer and director Adura Onashile who, working with the National Theatre of Scotland, has built an app-based walking tour that compels us to remember.
THE foundation of the United States of America was disastrous for the Tobacco Lords of Glasgow, some of whom lost their plantations in the new country, but it forced the city fathers to address the issue of the lack of manufacturing capacity in and around Glasgow. There was a wide variety of products made in Glasgow just before the American Revolution which showed the change that was occurring in the city over the space of 30 years. Alexander ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle wrote in his famous memoirs that in the year 1744: “There were not manufacturers sufficient,” either there or at Paisley, to supply an outward-bound cargo for Virginia.