Glasgow and the tobacco trade

What was Glasgow like around 1715?

Glasgow was an old cathedral and university town on the River Clyde, with a few busy streets of merchants’ houses, workshops and markets. A 19th-century history puts its population at about 12,000 at the time of the Union in 1707. By 1700 its people were already making linen, soap, pottery, glass and refined sugar; sugar refineries, called sugar houses, had worked there since the 1660s.

The town had suffered a hard blow just before the game’s era. In the late 1690s Scotland tried to found its own colony at Darien in Panama. The scheme collapsed, and many investors, Glasgow merchants among them, lost their money. Many Scots blamed English opposition for the failure, and Glasgow saw riots against the Union, yet the loss also showed how hard it was for Scotland to trade overseas on its own.

The writer Daniel Defoe, who knew Scotland well, praised Glasgow in a book of 1727 as “the cleanest and beautifullest” city in Britain apart from London. Defoe strongly supported the Union, so his praise was not neutral.

Why couldn’t big ships sail up to Glasgow?

In the early 1700s the Clyde was too shallow for big ships for most of the way up to the town. Sea-going ships could not reach Glasgow’s own riverbank, so cargoes were carried up and down the river in small boats.

To solve this, the town council bought land at Newark, on the south side of the estuary, in 1668 and built a harbour there. It was first called Newport Glasgow and later Port Glasgow. In Defoe’s time the customs house stood there, and ships were repaired at Port Glasgow or at Greenock nearby. The river was deepened only much later.

How did the 1707 Union change Glasgow’s trade?

England’s Navigation Acts allowed only English ships and ports to trade with England’s colonies. Before 1707 Scots counted as foreigners, so Glasgow merchants traded with the colonies only on a small scale, partly openly and partly by smuggling.

The Union of 1707 made Scotland part of the new Kingdom of Great Britain, and Scottish ships could now trade legally with Virginia, Maryland and the West Indies. Customs duties in Scotland rose sharply to English levels, and Glasgow merchants turned to tobacco as their main colonial cargo.

The merchants’ agents worked through what historians call the store system. They kept stores in the colonies where planters could buy goods on credit, then paid their debts in tobacco. Ships carried out Scottish linen, plaid cloth and other goods, the kind of cloth and tools planters needed, and brought tobacco and sugar home. Much of the tobacco was then sold on to Europe.

Why did Glasgow ships reach Virginia faster?

Geography helped Glasgow. Ships leaving London or Bristol had to sail down the English Channel, where wartime privateers, private warships licensed to attack enemy ships, lay in wait.

Glasgow ships left the Clyde and headed north-west into the open Atlantic, far from the Channel. Defoe reckoned this saved them about two to three weeks each way, so that a Glasgow ship could be off Virginia while a London ship was still in the Channel. He also counted nearly fifty Glasgow ships sailing to the American colonies each year in the 1720s.

Did Glasgow merchants cheat on tobacco duties?

Their English rivals certainly thought so. In early 1722 merchants from Bristol, Liverpool and Whitehaven complained to the Treasury, the government office in charge of taxes. They said tobacco from Scotland was being sold in England more cheaply than they could manage, because Scottish customs officers had weighed it short, so that less duty was paid. Glasgow merchants sent answers defending themselves. In April 1722 Bristol merchants wrote that more Glasgow tobacco had come in that season than ever before.

A Treasury inquiry found some truth in the charges, and a law of 1722 put Scotland’s customs under tighter control from London. The effect was sharp. A Scottish minister, Robert Wodrow, noted in 1723 that where nearly sixty ships had once sailed for tobacco in some years, that year there were scarcely seven. Disputes and smuggling went on through the 1720s and 1730s, especially tricks with tobacco that was shipped out to claim back its duty and then secretly landed again.

What was the Glasgow malt tax riot of 1725?

In 1725 Parliament brought a tax on malt, the grain used to brew beer, to Scotland. When it came into force in Glasgow in late June, crowds turned on Daniel Campbell of Shawfield, a rich tobacco merchant and the town’s Member of Parliament, who had voted for it. They wrecked his fine town house.

Soldiers sent to keep order fired on the crowd, and several people were killed; a 19th-century account gives the number as nine. The government had Glasgow’s magistrates taken to Edinburgh under guard for failing to stop the riot, and the town later paid Campbell large damages. The riot shows how angry many Scots still were about British taxes in the game’s years.

How was Glasgow connected to slavery?

Very few slave ships sailed from Scottish ports, but Glasgow’s trade still rested on slavery. The tobacco of Virginia and Maryland, and the sugar and molasses of the West Indies, were grown and processed mainly by enslaved Africans. Defoe noted that Glasgow even distilled a spirit from molasses that it called “Glasgow brandy”.

Some Glasgow families also owned plantations. Glasgow City Archives records that the Stirling family of Keir held two sugar estates in Jamaica, worked by enslaved people, from the 1720s. Scottish merchants and doctors also worked at slave-trading forts in West Africa and on the ships that carried enslaved Africans to the Americas. Today the University of Glasgow and the city’s museums research and display these links openly.

Who were the Tobacco Lords?

The Tobacco Lords were the very rich Glasgow merchants who ran the tobacco trade in its great age, from about the 1740s to the 1770s. They built grand mansions in the city, and one merchant’s house is now Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art.

In the game’s years they had not yet won the trade. Before the 1740s Glasgow’s share of America’s tobacco was still small, and London was far bigger. Glasgow became the leading tobacco port in the 1740s and 1750s, and by about 1770 it imported more than 40 million pounds a year, more than London. The American War of Independence, which began in 1775, put that trade in danger.