The Tobacco Lords of Glasgow.
They sound like a **** indie band,
but they actually controlled most of the world’s tobacco trade
for a third of a century.
Slaves picked it, Europe smoked it,
and the tobacco lords grew rich off the profits.
We’re talking enormous mansions rich,
streets named after you rich,
dress your slaves up in tartan and make them carry your golf clubs rich.
What we don’t know are the names of
the enslaved people who picked the tobacco leaves.
No one bothered to name a street after them.
Empires of Dirt
at the expense of everyone else.
Previously, we found out how Britain exported homophobia
to the rest of the world
and how Bristol was built on sugar and slavery.
[How Glasgow Was Built on Tobacco Money]
October 15th, 1492, Christopher Columbus is exploring the Americas,
having got extremely lost en route to India.
He sees an indigenous man paddling a canoe with food, water,
and tobacco leaves.
The Spanish colonists quickly embraced the tobacco leaf.
By 1527, there are already settlers addicted to tobacco.
When Sir Francis Drake returns to England from the Americas
in the late 16th century,
he introduces the English to the tobacco plant.
Tobacco use grew exponentially throughout the 17th century.
In 1614, the newly established colony of Jamestown, Virginia,
sent its first shipment to England.
By the 1680s, Jamestown was producing
over 25 million pounds of tobacco a year
for sale all over Europe.
That’s the equivalent weight of 630 double-decker buses.
All this tobacco was grown by slaves.
Scottish slave traders kidnapped people from West Africa,
sometimes imprisoning them on Bunce Island off the coast of Sierra Leone
before trafficking them across to the West Indies and America.
Bunce Island was turned into a mini Scottish territory.
Slave traders built a golf course on the island
and even forced enslaved people to dress up in tartan
and act as their caddies.
If they survived the journey,
these enslaved men and women were put to work on plantations.
The life of a slave there was one that was unrelenting in its cruelty.
Scottish slave masters were considered to be amongst
the most brutal of the slave owners.
Life expectancy on a Scottish-owned plantation
averaged around seven years,
but some enslaved people only survived for two.
Slaves were even made to speak Gaelic
as a way of estranging African people from their cultures
and stopping them from forming bonds with each other.
So we all loved tobacco.
But where did Glasgow come into it?
Glasgow is geographically closer than any other British port
to the East Coast of the US,
cutting two to three weeks off the journey
from the tobacco plantations of Virginia.
It was a no-brainer.
At first, merchants simply purchased tobacco from American farmers.
But before long, Glaswegians started lending money to them
to fund future production,
which basically meant fronting them money
to buy even more enslaved people.
Between 1740 and 1770,
Glasgow was at the center of the tobacco trade with the Americas.
By 1770, Scotland was importing almost 40 million pounds of tobacco.
As slaves toiled in the sweltering heat of Virginia’s plantations,
back in Glasgow, the tobacco lords grew rich.
They built lavish townhouses and churches in the city center
and donated to Glasgow University.
Tobacco was a huge earner for Glasgow’s merchants
until it wasn’t anymore.
By the time the American War of Independence broke out in 1775,
£1.3 million was owed to Scottish traders
by American tobacco plantation owners.
That’s £211 million in today’s money.
Those who owed money to Britain really hated having to pay this back,
and that includes George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,
meaning that our love of smokes
inadvertently contributed to American independence.
After the war ended,
the debts that were owed to Scottish traders were never repaid
because the Americans took the view of,
“You’re on the other side of a massive ocean,
what the **** are you going to do about it?”
American independence destroyed Glasgow’s tobacco lords.
The smart ones moved on to new enterprises,
like importing cotton from the West Indies,
which was also picked by slaves.
But some were ruined financially,
like former tobacco lord John Glassford,
who died in 1783 with debts close to £100,000,
the equivalent of £14 million in today’s money.
Glasgow’s shameful slave-owning past has been largely erased from history,
but the names of its tobacco lords live on in plain sight.
Walk around the streets of Glasgow
and you’ll find these slave traders celebrated,
from Virginia Street, to streets named after former tobacco lords
like John Glassford, Archibald Ingram and Andrew Buchanan.
Their names continue to live on,
but the names of the enslaved people who made them rich
have been forgotten.