Only a few minutes’ walk from the seaside community of Cromarty in the Scottish Highlands, a 17-year-old mixed-race student was stabbed during a brawl outside the local school. A recent immigrant from the Caribbean, he had been shunned by others and often carried a knife to protect himself.
His white opponent, who was a year younger, and claimed to have been attacked first, retaliated, drew his own blade and cut the foreigner in the thigh. Both from troubled backgrounds, the black student was probably an illegitimate son sent to Scotland for a paid education, with no close family around him in a strange country, the Scottish historian, Dr David Alston writes.
Dr Alston uses this true story, not from 2018, but from 1818, at the start of his new book, “Slaves and Highlanders” seeking to help correct “a catalogue of silence” in detailing the links between his homeland and slavery in the Caribbean, with emphasis on British Guiana and Jamaica.