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This article focuses on the manuscript diary of a Scottish doctor, Jonathan Troup, who during a truncated fifteen-month period, from 1789 to 1790, practised medicine on the island of Dominica, part of the climatic 'torrid zone' in the British West Indies. While the relevant textual contents of his diary are already familiar to scholars of medical humanities, the analysis seeks to complement and extend these existing discussions by addressing an aspect of the illustrated and inscribed pages of Troup's diary that has not been previously discussed, namely his diurnal account of race-making. The article argues that Troup was a product of Scottish enlightenment medical training, with its blended curricula of medicine, natural history and moral philosophy. The diary in turn, is shown to be a product of the diagnostic tools of that education, which equipped practitioners with the skills to classify human diversity through careful observation in the 'colonial field'. In his diurnal sketches, Troup employs a tiered racial system or calculus of colour to differentiate between peoples of different races, based on the visual proximity of their skin to either European whiteness or shades of blackness associated with African descent. In the textual descriptions that variously accompany, envelope, elucidate and ignore the drawings, Troup's race-making schema is shown to be informed by factors other than the gradations of skin complexion, including social temper and moral temperament. Such factors are given particular prominence in his discussion of multi-racial women, making gender an innate constituent of his race-making schema. The article is framed by the concept of business, which for most professionals in the Caribbean involved more than one economic occupation. It offers a prognosis as to the significance of Troup's diary for a range of academic disciplines, historical, literary and visual, and their discreet historiographies which pertain to his imperial careering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the rise of John Lamont, a Highland planter in nineteenth-century Trinidad. The island was subsumed into the British Empire in 1802, the third wave of colonization in the British West Indies and just thirty-two years before slavery was abolished. Many Scots travelled in search of wealth and this article reveals how one West India fortune was accumulated and repatriated to Scotland. John Lamont travelled from Argyll in the early 1800s, eventually becoming part of the Trinidad's plantocracy class and recipient of a major sum of compensation on the emancipation of slavery in 1834. Unlike many other Scots in the British West Indies, however, Lamont remained in situ in the post-emancipation period and was thus an exception to the sojourning mindset identified in previous studies. Lamont's status as an ‘every-day planter’ undoubtedly contributed to his major fortune which, despite his residency in the colonies, was dispersed in the lower Highlands of Scotland amongst his paternal family, the Lamonts of Knockdow. The article also surveys modern representations of John Lamont: a Highland planter who, in his own words, achieved his wish to die ‘in harness’ in Trinidad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that discusses the profitability of the West India trade in Glasgow, Scotland from 1779 to 1867, noting the role of slavery and imperialism in funding Scotland's industrial revolution. Topics include the plantation businesses owned by Archibald Smith, James Smith, and the firm Leitch & Smith, the connection of Glasgow to Caribbean area plantations, and economist Adam Smith's view that the British West Indies took wealth from Great Britain.