The year 1765 marked a turning point for The East India Company (EIC). Following the Battle of Buxar, the Treaty of Allahabad secured to the company the Diwani rights, the right to collect taxes on the Mughal emperor's behalf directly from the people in the eastern province of Bengal-Bihar-Orissa. The British began consolidating their hold on India in the wake of the company's military and diplomatic victories, building on more than a century and a half's worth of experience operating on the subcontinent.

Scots and Scotland invested heavily in the West Indies and the enslaved labors who worked plantations on Jamaica, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands. Lowland merchants and Highland landowners alike derived wealth and power from the West India trade, tying distant places like Glasgow, the northwestern Highlands, the Gold Coast of Africa, and Kingston together. As in the Chesapeake, temporary Scots migrants to the Caribbean found work as plantation overseers, in company stores, or managed their own estates.

The forced enslavement of millions of African men, women, and children powered the transatlantic economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From New York to Barbados, enslaved people worked on docks, cultivated Virginia tobacco, or labored on hellish Caribbean sugar plantations. Individual Scots, such as the tobacco merchant William Cunninghame, and institutions, like the University of Glasgow, directly benefited from slavery and the slave trade.