Caribbean
There were disproportionately large numbers of Scots in powerful positions in the British Caribbean colonies in the eighteenth century.
Scots held enslaved people in captivity, were overseers in Caribbean forced labour estates, and worked in professions that maintained the infrastructure of slavery.
Aberdeen and North-East Scotland were also the residence of many absentee landowners, who lived in Scotland while drawing wealth from Caribbean slavery.
Learn about enslavers from the North-East, how enslaved people resisted, what emancipation was like, and enslaved Africans and their descendents in Scotland.
![Pages of a manuscript journal with a coloured illustration of a light brown woman wearing a white and yellow patterned dress. She has gold earrings and black, bushy hair partly tied up. She is feeding a chicken. The illustration is captioned: "Mullatoe woman in her morning dress".](https://exhibitions.abdn.ac.uk/university-collections/files/fullsize/6de07bbab4f88e000c6438502bc37823.jpg "Pages of a manuscript journal with a coloured illustration of a light brown woman wearing a white and yellow patterned dress. She has gold earrings and black, bushy hair partly tied up. She is feeding a chicken. The illustration is captioned: "Mullatoe woman in her morning dress".")
Journal describing life in Dominica
Johnathon Troup graduated from Marischal College, becoming a physician in the clinic of another Aberdonian in Dominica, a Dr Fillan. He wrote an illustrated journal to record his journey to Dominica and his life there in 1789-1790.
As well as recording medical cases, he wrote about the island’s natural history and described the music, dance, clothing, customs, and language of the enslaved people - and the relentless cruelty. Although he sometimes criticised enslavers who physically abused those who were enslaved, he never questioned the institution of slavery itself.
