Alexander McCall Smith, novelist, librettist, playwright, poet and polymath, was awarded the 2022 Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Scottish literature.ĭavid Alston’s Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean, which won the Saltire Society History Book of the Year before going on to claim the overall Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year prize, was described by the judges as “ The best book to date on Scottish involvement in chattel slavery and the impact of the gains from this on Highland Scotland. This legacy, entwined with so many of our contemporary institutions, must be reckoned with.The Saltire Society announced the winners of 2022 Scotland’s National Book Awards at a ceremony at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh tonight (Thursday 8 December).ĭavid Alston received the prestigious Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award for his Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (published by Edinburgh University Press). Highlands by slavery and emancipation compensation schemes. As Scots recover and grapple with their past, this vital history lays bare the enormous wealth generated in the David Alston gives voice not only to these Scots but to enslaved Africans and their descendants - to those who reclaimed their freedom, to free women of colour, to the Black Caribs of St Vincent, to house servants, and to children of mixed race who found themselves in the increasingly racist society of Britain in the mid-1800s. Their voices are clearly heard in the archives, while in the same sources their victims' stories are silenced - reduced to numbers and listed as property. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from these crimes against humanity in the Caribbean Islands and Guyana, some reluctantly but many with enthusiasm and without remorse. Scots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage.

Slaves and Highlanders by David Alston