The wealth generated both directly and indirectly by Caribbean slavery had a major impact on Glasgow and Scotland. Glasgow's Sugar Aristocracy is the first book to directly assess the size, nature and effects of this. West India merchants and plantation owners based in Glasgow made nationally significant fortunes, some of which boosted Scottish capitalism, as well as the temporary Scottish economic migrants who travelled to some of the wealthiest of the Caribbean islands. This book adds much needed nuance to the argument in a Scottish context; revealing methods of repatriating wealth from the Caribbean as well as mercantile investments in industry, banking and land and philanthropic initiatives.

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON THE HISTORY, MEANING AND MATERIALITY OF THE MARINE ENVIRONMENT There is a blue hole in environmental history. The thirteen essays in this very accessible collection fill it by closing the gap between land and sea, by exploring the ways the earthly and maritime realms influence one another. What has too often been described as the 'eternal sea' is shown to be remarkably dynamic. Ranging widely from Australia to the Arctic, from ocean depths to high islands, a new generation of humanists and scientists trespass the boundaries of their own fields of inquiry to tie together human and natural histories. They reflect contemporary concerns with declining fisheries, damaged estuaries, and vanishing coastal communities. Here the history of oceanic sciences meets that of literary and artistic imagination, offering vivid insights into the meanings as well as the materiality of waves and swamps, coasts and coral reefs. In their introduction, John Gillis and Franziska Torma suggest the directions in which the fluid frontiers of marine environmental history are moving.

Prior histories of the first Spanish mariners to circumnavigate the globe in the sixteenth century have focused on Ferdinand Magellan and the other illustrious leaders of these daring expeditions. Harry Kelsey's masterfully researched study is the first to concentrate on the hitherto anonymous sailors, slaves, adventurers, and soldiers who manned the ships. The author contends that these initial transglobal voyages occurred by chance, beginning with the launch of Magellan's armada in 1519, when the crews dispatched by the king of Spain to claim the Spice Islands in the western Pacific were forced to seek a longer way home, resulting in bitter confrontations with rival Portuguese. Kelsey's enthralling history, based on more than thirty years of research in European and American archives, offers fascinating stories of treachery, greed, murder, desertion, sickness, and starvation but also of courage, dogged persistence, leadership, and loyalty.

Youth, Heroism and War Propaganda explores how the young maritime hero became a major new figure of war propaganda in the second half of the long 18th century. At that time, Britain was searching for a new national identity, and the young maritime hero and his exploits conjured images of vigour, energy, enthusiasm and courage. Adopted as centrepiece in a campaign of concerted war propaganda leading up to the Battle of Trafalgar, the young hero came to represent much that was quintessentially British at this major turning point in the nation's history. By drawing on a wide range of sources, this study shows how the young hero gave maritime youth a symbolic power which it had never before had in Britain. It offers a valuable contribution to the field of British military and naval history, as well as the study of British identity, youth, heroism and propaganda.