Caribbean & Diaspora Storytelling
Heritage · Reading list
The Scottish–Jamaican connection: six books that explain it
Why so many Jamaicans carry Scottish surnames, who the Scots in Jamaica actually were, and what the families that came out of it have inherited. History, a novel, and the research guide that lets you follow your own line back.
Open a Jamaican phone book, a church register or a school roll and you are reading a map of the Highlands and the Lowlands: Campbell, Grant, Gordon, McKenzie, McPherson, Douglas, Stewart, Ross.
Most Jamaicans know this and most have been told some version of why. The full version is only now being written, largely by Scottish historians who have spent the last twenty years going through estate papers, compensation claims and Highland parish records to find out how deeply their country was involved in the Caribbean, and by Jamaican families doing the same work from the other end.
The short answer is that Scots went to Jamaica in numbers out of all proportion to Scotland’s size. They came as planters and attorneys, as overseers and bookkeepers on other men’s estates, as merchants in Kingston, as doctors, and as younger sons with nothing at home. Enslaved people were recorded under the names of the estates and the men who held them. The children of Scottish men and enslaved or free Black women carried those names forward, and so, after emancipation, did the families who took a name because a name was needed. A Scottish surname in Jamaica can mean descent, or ownership, or both, and often the only way to know is to go to the records.
These six books are the ones we would put in your hands, in the order we would hand them over. They begin with our own, because the connection is not an abstraction for this press, and they end with the guide that turns reading into research.
The list
Six books, in order
Lorna Phillips’s first novel, set in the Swift River valley of Portland Parish and drawn from the author’s own family, whose Gray and McPherson lines run through that district. We put it first because it is what the rest of this list looks like once it has been lived rather than documented: the names, the land and the water that holds the memory of both. If you came to this page because of a surname, start here. For the parish behind the novel, see our guide to Portland Parish family histories. About Lorna Phillips
The standard account, and the book that ended the comfortable Scottish belief that slavery was an English business. Devine, Scotland’s leading historian, gathers the evidence on Scottish ownership, management and profit across the Caribbean, with Jamaica at the center. Clear, sourced and unsparing; the single volume to own if you own only one.
Where Devine gives the structure, Alston gives the people. He follows Highland families into the Caribbean and back, and, crucially, follows the children of Scottish men and enslaved women, some of whom were sent “home” to Inverness and Cromarty and raised there. If you have ever wondered what happened to the mixed-race children of the estates, this is the book that goes looking for them.
The money. Mullen traces the fortunes that Glasgow’s merchant families made from Caribbean sugar and the enslaved labor behind it, and shows where that money went: into the city’s streets, banks and institutions. For Jamaican readers it answers a question the island rarely gets to ask, which is what became of the wealth that left.
Knight was an enslaved African, bought in Jamaica by the planter John Wedderburn and brought to Scotland, who sued for his freedom and won it in the Court of Session in 1778, a ruling that ended slavery on Scottish soil. Robertson’s novel follows Wedderburn’s family and the search for the man who defeated them. It won the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year, and it is the best fictional account of what Jamaica did to the Scots who went there.
The book that turns the history above into your history. Grannum explains the records that connect a Jamaican family to a Scottish one: the slave registers of 1817 to 1834, the compensation claims, the parish registers and the wills of planters who provided for their Jamaican children. It sits beside our own Read the Names and the Jamaican genealogy starter kit.
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Following your own name
A surname is a clue, not a conclusion. Before 1834, an enslaved person appears in the registers by first name under the name of the estate or owner; a Scottish surname attached to a family after that date may come from a parent, a former owner or a baptism. The records that distinguish these are the slave registers, the compensation claims, which name every owner paid at emancipation, and the parish baptism registers, which sometimes name the father and sometimes pointedly do not.
The Legacies of British Slavery database at University College London lets you search those compensation claims by estate and by owner, and is where a Jamaican district name and a Scottish family name are most likely to meet. Our free guide, Read the Names, walks through how to use it alongside the Jamaican records, and the starter kit covers what to have on hand before you begin.
Frequently asked questions
Why do so many Jamaicans have Scottish surnames?
Scots went to Jamaica in large numbers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as planters, overseers, bookkeepers, merchants and doctors. Enslaved people were often recorded under the surname of the estate or its owner, and the children of Scottish men and enslaved or free Black women carried those names. Campbell, Grant, McKenzie, McPherson, Gordon and Douglas are among the most common results.
Does a Scottish surname mean I have Scottish ancestry?
Not necessarily. A surname may come from an estate, an owner or a baptism rather than a parent. The records that settle it are the slave registers of 1817 to 1834, the parish baptism registers, and, for the nineteenth century, civil registration. Our free guide Read the Names explains how to work through them.
What is the best book on Scotland and Jamaica?
For a single volume, Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past, edited by T. M. Devine, is the standard account. For the human scale, David Alston’s Slaves and Highlanders; for a novel, James Robertson’s Joseph Knight.
Free guide
Read the Names: a Jamaican genealogy guide from Maroon House Press
The search steps in order, parish by parish, with the records explained in plain language. Free, and the companion to everything on this page.
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