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.

The silhouette of the poet Agnes McLehose serves a metaphor for a woman's legal rights in the British Atlantic world.  Women like her navigated and contested numerous laws and legal traditions that shaped their lives in significant ways. In the male-dominated eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women faced considerable legal constraints over their property as well as their bodies. Much depended on a woman's marital status and the legal regime under which she lived.

Scots engaged in commerce on local, transatlantic, and global scales by forging numerous commercial relationships at home and aboard. Personal and financial connections helped artisans and farmers to sell their wares in Edinburgh's Grassmarket, allowed fishermen from the Isle of Lewis to send their catch to London, and enriched the Glasgow merchants who controlled large swaths of the American commodities trade.

The man shown here, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, served as the last royal governor of Virginia. Dunmore’s tenure as colonial Virginia’s final chief executive highlights both the major role Scots played in administering Britain’s American empire and the close links between Virginia and Scotland. By the mid-eighteenth century, commerce bound Glaswegian merchants to Virginia planters as Scots took control of the Chesapeake tobacco trade. Scots settled in Virginia to work this trade, where they often acquired land and slaves of their own.

Christianity was a powerful force in Scottish society. Beginning in the sixteenth century the Scottish Reformation, part of the wider Protestant revolution in Europe, began to transform Scotland into a Presbyterian nation. The Church of Scotland, or the Kirk, and its adherents broke with Roman Catholicism and reformed its doctrines to reflect Calvinist theology.