By Dr Georgina Arnott, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Melbourne
Since 2020, the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, has been examining the role of British slavery in the 1829 colonisation of Australia’s western third.
The project was stimulated by the LBS database and the work of historians showing the importance of slavery networks, capital, commerce, and ideas to imperial endeavour across the Indian and Pacific oceans in the early nineteenth century.
One of the expectations of the project was that researchers would identify further individuals linking British slavery to Western Australia. How many slave-owners relocated from the Caribbean to Australia’s first privately funded colony in the emancipation period? To date, a search for ‘Western Australia’ under ‘Notes’ in the LBS database produces fifteen individuals.
https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/9yM6GLV9/Gp3L86dlxV27y
Research into Western Australia’s founding governor, James Stirling (1791-1865), has laid bare the long tentacles linking British enslavement to Western Australia. Yet this is a complicated, temporally and geographically expansive story, not captured by migrations from the West Indies to Australia. How might such data be fed back into the database?
Brothers James and Walter Stirling
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Vice-Admiral and founding Governor James Stirling came from a wealthy Glasgow family of textile manufacturers and traders. Stirling’s early years were spent at Drumpellier Estate, purchased by his great-grandfather Andrew Buchanan in 1739. Such was the family’s standing within Glasgow’s elite society that James’ mother Anna Stirling (née Stirling, 1762-1830) started a fashion for multiple dishes at dinner, registered by some observers as an ‘extravagant style of living’.[i]
http://www-leeper.ch.cam.ac.uk/FamilyTree/422-423.htm
Right: Anna Stirling, Geni;
http://photos.geni.com/p5/9749/4397/5344483692656f69/AnnaDorotheaStirling1762-1830_large.jpg
James Stirling is not listed, or even mentioned, in the LBS database and has never been linked to slavery. It was the inclusion of James’s older brother Walter Stirling (1780-1864) that prompted our research into the Western Australian governor. Together with Thomas Wace, Walter was an awardee in five Barbados claims for compensation covering nine enslaved people. With brothers William, Charles and John, Walter had taken over the family’s London textile house in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but otherwise held no obvious connection to the West Indies. Additionally, Walter Stirling and Thomas Wace were among three assignees for a compensation payment covering 221 enslaved people at the Pin Green Field in British Guiana.
Walter’s LBS entry caused us to ask: did these investments in slavery reflect the family’s involvement in West Indian merchant trade? Going further back, had slavery business played a part in the family’s rise within Glasgow’s merchant elite? It has since emerged that James’ father, two grandfathers and four great-grandfathers all received some kind of material benefit from slavery, as did James himself.
Slavery income James Stirling received
Between 1812 and 1818, James was a naval captain in Jamaica, where his uncle Vice-Admiral Charles Stirling (1760–1833) was commander-in-chief. During these six years, James received extra pay on at least six occasions for chaperoning merchant ships and bullion to and from the slave colony, at the expense and request of slave-owners.[ii]
Moreover, James received a significant income from capturing enemy ships laden with goods produced by enslaved people. Early in the 1812 War, fought between the United States and Britain, James captured at least three vessels in the Gulf of Mexico carrying coffee and sugar, which were sold as part of prize proceedings.[iii]
In just nine months, James received commissions and prizes deriving from slavery that amounted to almost £3000, around twelve times his annual naval salary. He entrusted this money to the family business, managed at this time by Walter.[iv]
Slavery in earlier Stirling generations
These slavery profits were dwarfed by those received by James Stirling’s family in earlier generations. For at least two decades, James’ father Andrew traded large volumes of textiles with Jamaica slave-owners and those servicing them. Family letters reveal a sense of scale: when James was eight years old, a sudden fall in produce prices in the West Indian market led to losses of £95,000 for Stirling, Hunter & Company (more than £7.2 million in 2017 money).[v]
That the operation remained viable was testament to the importance of intergenerational wealth to the family. During this period, James’ father’s income was buffered by coal royalties on Drumpellier Estate and an inherited share in William Stirling and Sons, one of Glasgow’s most successful textile manufacturers. James’ grandfather William had established the concern around 1730, in the wake of The Calico Acts 1700/01, which radically tipped the balance in favour of British textile printers at the expense of Indian producers.
The commodity from which William Stirling (1717-1777) first accrued capital was the one that consolidated his family within Glasgow’s merchant elite: tobacco. After the Act of Union 1707, slave-produced Virginian tobacco began being imported into Glasgow for export across Europe. When demand for tobacco exploded over the middle decades of the eighteenth century, those Glaswegian firms that had entered the trade before 1730 did extremely well, consolidating wealth and commercial advantage through intermarriage. William, son of ‘tobacco lord’ John Stirling (1677–1736), married Mary Buchanan (1730–1806), daughter of Andrew Buchanan (1690-1759).
Buchanan, James’s great-grandfather and Lord Provost of Glasgow, was amongst the most successful importers of Virginian tobacco, amassing a ‘large fortune in a few years’.[vi] In Virginia itself, Buchanan owned extensive plantations and enslaved large numbers of people.[vii] In 1742, the captain of Buchanan’s vessel Vernon purchased eighteen women in Barbados, transporting the surviving seventeen to the Upper James River, Virginia. Andrew Buchanan owned at least five vessels which moved goods between North America, London, the West Indies, and Glasgow.[viii] Sugar, amongst these goods, was processed in Glasgow’s sugar houses, two from five of which Buchanan part owned.
At the other end of this trade, across the Atlantic Ocean, were those enslaved for the purpose of cultivating crops at minimal cost. European demand for tobacco during the first fifty years of Glasgow–Virginian trade was a major factor in the tenfold growth in the purchase of Africans in British North America. By 1750, more people were enslaved on the Chesapeake than anywhere else in continental North America.[ix]
Material legacies of Stirling’s ancestors
Andrew Buchanan’s legacy lives on in Glasgow’s public spaces, including its main shopping street, Buchanan Street, as well as Virginia Street, which Buchanan named in honour of his Virginian slavery wealth. In 2020, anti-racism campaigners renamed Buchanan Street George Floyd Street in light of these slavery connections.[x]
While Buchanan’s Virginia Mansion, reputedly the grandest of all tobacco-lord houses, no longer stands, today’s Gallery of Modern Art has a connection to the family. From 1789 to 1817 it was the headquarters of William Stirling and Sons, run during this period by James’ father and two uncles. The Stirlings purchased the house from its first owner, William Cunninghame, a Jamaican slave-owner and partner in Buchanan’s King Street Sugar House.
The LBS database and Australian history
Members of the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery team are finding similarly complex histories behind the roughly 200 people who are listed in the LBS database with a connection to Australia. Such stories dramatically recast Australian colonial expansion as a by-product of Britain’s gradual withdrawal from the Caribbean. They shed new light on familiar biographies – in this case, for example, James Stirling’s attempts to introduce indentured Asian labour to raise tropical crops. Responses to these histories amongst Australians vary from disbelief and hostility to intrigue and recognition.
The importance of the LBS database to this research cannot be overstated. Without Walter’s LBS entry, it might have been decades before researchers examined the family wealth behind Western Australia’s first governor. Yet the challenge remains: how can such stories most usefully exist within the LBS database, as a tool for tracing connections across empire?
[i] John Gordon, ed., The New Statistical Account of Scotland, Glasgow, Lanark, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Blackwood’s and Sons, 1845), 230.
[ii] Royal Gazette of Jamaica (Jamaica), 17 October 1812, 18; Royal Gazette of Jamaica, 21 November 1812, 17; Royal Gazette of Jamaica, 12 December 1812, 18; Royal Gazette of Jamaica, 20 March 1813, 19; Royal Gazette of Jamaica, 8 May 1813, 20; Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser (London), 11 February 1813, 1–2.
[iii] ‘Captains’ Logs, including Brazen’, 6 August 1812, ADM 51/2013, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), United Kingdom; Royal Gazette of Jamaica, 21 November 1812, 19; The Enquirer (Richmond, Virginia), 2 October 1812, 3; National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C), 10 October 1812, 3; untitled, within High Court of Admiralty: Prize Court: Assignation Books, General Series, HCA 8/157, TNA; untitled, HCA 8/156, TNA; untitled, within records of the Instance and Prize Courts, HCA 2/268, TNA.
[iv] James Stirling to Anna Stirling, 7 April 1813, Statham-Drew papers, ACC 9631A, SLWA.
[v] Pamela Statham-Drew, James Stirling: Admiral and Founding Governor of Western Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 9; John Oswald Mitchell, Old Glasgow Essays (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1905), 384; ‘Currency Converter: 1270–2017’, The National Archives, United Kingdom, accessed 20 October 2021, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/.
[vi] Robert Renwick, History of Glasgow, vol. 3 (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson, 1921), 240.
[vii] ‘Drumpellier’, Thomas Annan, John Oswald Mitchell and John Guthrie Smith, eds., Old Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry, 2nd edn. (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1878), xxxvi; ‘Andrew Buchanan’, Scotland and Atlantic Slavery, https://scotlandandslavery.wordpress.com/andrew-buchanan/ accessed 26 September 2021,
[viii] ‘Intra-American’, Voyage ID 101203, SlaveVoyages, accessed 17 June 2021, www.slavevoyages.org/american/database; John Gibson, The History of Glasgow from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time (Glasgow: Rob Chapman and Alex Duncan, 1777), 210.
[ix] Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd edn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 44.
[x] ‘Glasgow ‘slaver’ streets renamed by anti-racist campaigners’, The Guardian, 7 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/06/glasgow-slaver-streets-renamed-by-anti-racist-campaigners
Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery 
