The recording of this week’s joint Orkney Heritage Society and UHI Archaeology Institute seminar.
It features Kate Phillips, who discusses the unacknowledged black Scottish diaspora in Jamaica, our role in building racism and the unsung Scottish people who gave their lives to ending slavery. She illustrates the lives of sugar-growing, slave-owning Scots in Jamaica and explains how Scottish merchants controlled the trade. She also explores the sexual behaviour of Scotsmen in the Caribbean, the lives of their children and the terror tactics used by Scottish planters to put down persistent revolts.
Using Scottish voices and examples, Kate traces the origins of the racially based Jamaican legislation, later used more widely to control black communities in the colonies, the well-funded campaigns to spread ideas of white supremacy and resist slave emancipation in the face of a national organisation here in Scotland which argued that slavery was simply wrong.
Kate Phillips graduated from the University of Glasgow to become a social development specialist working in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. She established the Active Learning Centre, an international charity based at the University of Glasgow, where she directed a postgraduate fellowship which brought rights activists to study civil organisations in Scotland.
Bought & Sold, Scotland: Jamaica & Slavery is her first book.
