Scotland and Guyana, connected by cotton, were important to each other. Scottish firms and finance operated across four European empires in the southeast Caribbean, where the slave-based plantation economy was booming. Gaelic-speaking Scottish adventurers James McInroy and George Robertson found their footholds in Dutch-ruled Guyana and British-ruled Grenada, respectively. They smuggled captive Africans into, and cotton out of, Guyana and supplied British manufactures across the region as the cotton frontier expanded. While war and rebellions ruined large merchant firms, they broke free from the sticky web of credit and debt. After British forces occupied Guyana in 1796, the partners launched a transatlantic shipping line that eventually became Sandbach Tinné & Co. They secured cargoes and sales of plantation supplies by ruthlessly enforcing conditions attached to mortgages that were secured on enslaved people.
This micro-historical study is the first to make full use of the Parker Papers, held in Liverpool, and the Sandbach Tinné collections, held in Lon-don. It demonstrates that metropolitan networks stifled trade as much as they facilitated it. The self-organized networks that emerged from inter-imperial regional trade were more agile and robust. Sandbach Tinné’s organization and risk-management strategies provide a crucial perspective on the expansion of global capitalism in the southeast Caribbean. Developing the scholarship of Eric Williams, this account of the Sandbach Tinné story demonstrates how Caribbean slavery underpinned Scotland’s cotton industry and overseas commerce. Through cotton, Guyana was first incorporated into the rapidly expanding world-economic system while Scotland was propelled into this system’s industrialized core.