THOSE WHO HAVE WRITTEN this book are aware that they have not engaged in any ordinary academic exercise. Its findings may provoke not only interest but also argument and controversy well beyond the world of scholarship. This would not be surprising. The study deals with big issues: a suggested reinterpretation of part of a nation's past, its beliefs and sense of itself. Readers of the book therefore should be assured that all contributors are bound by the classic credo of historical scholarship – to aspire towards convincing conclusions based on professional scrutiny of relevant and representative evidence without either fear or favour.

The immense scale and duration over two centuries of the Atlantic slave trade in the British Empire was bound to leave its mark on the history of the four nations of the United Kingdom. Equally, the depth and range of the impact was likely to vary significantly between them. This study suggests that the effect was relatively minor in the case of Ireland and Wales but much more significant for England and Scotland.

The relationship between England and slavery has long been recognised and understood, the linkages with Scotland much less so. Indeed, for more than a century and a half, any such connections were mainly lost to history as a comforting myth took root and then flourished that the Scots had little to do with the history of the enslaved. It was believed that the ‘nefarious trade’ in human beings within the Empire was always an English monopoly and never a Scottish preserve. After all, Scots had long taken pride in the Calvinist tradition of the equality of souls before God and the sentiments of shared humanity articulated most eloquently in the immortal words of the national bard, Robert Burns, ‘a Man's a Man for a’ that … That Man to Man, the world o'er Shall brothers be for a’ that’.

Moreover, the Christian values of the nation coupled with the progressive thought and humane sympathies of the Scottish Enlightenment eventually inspired many Scots to play a leading and well-documented role in the successful campaigns for abolition of the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself within the British Empire in 1833 and then to become passionately involved in the global crusade to confront that moral evil throughout Africa and the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century.