Hey Iain, agree that understanding Scottish involvement in slavery isn’t helped by a tendency towards a ‘contrasting of horrors’ approach. But the differences in chattel & in servitude v. real: in law, being inherited & above all in enduring racial legacies in the here & now. https://twitter.com/iainmackinnon75/status/1276505568245620736
I can’t speak for @IainMacInnesUHI reply ‘no Scots were enslaved’. But I certainly agree with him inasmuch as he was replying in the context of an equivalence debate over the coercive transatlantic movement of Scots POWs, indentured servants & cases like the Skye/Harris tenants.
The Q of Scots captured & traded by Corsairs does indeed raise questions of whether some Scots experienced enslavement. But the issue under debate was not that many forms of oppression didn’t exist (they did!) but the structural & ongoing social and cultural legacies of slavery
What follows is not saying those traded by Corsairs were not treated appallingly. But Corsairing does not develop ‘industrial’ & ‘capital’ supply chain approach & is never defined by the racial element of Atlantic slavery: no hereditary principle & manumission a key feature.
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