Tobacco Lords

Concentrated in the port city of Glasgow, these merchants utilised their fortunes, which were also partly made via the direct ownership of slaves, to construct numerous townhouses, churches and other buildings in Scotland.

The triangle involved merchants carrying manufactured goods from Europe to West Africa to sell or exchange for slaves which they transported to America and the Caribbean.

Celebrated in his lifetime, Glassford was the most extensive ship owner of his generation in Scotland and one of the four merchants who laid the foundation of the commercial greatness of Glasgow through the tobacco trade.

In the last war, he is said to have had at one time five and twenty ships with their cargos – his own property – and to have traded for above half a million sterling a year.Glasgow merchants made such fortunes that they adopted the style of aristocrats in their superior manner and in their lavish homes and churches.

The Gallery of Modern Art, which today occupies the (greatly expanded and embellished by later reconstruction as the Exchange) mansion built for William Cunninghame in 1780, at a cost of £10,000 (equivalent to £1.68 million in 2023).

[11] Heavily capitalised, and taking great personal risks, these men made immense fortunes from the "Clockwork Operation" of fast ships coupled with ruthless dealmaking and the manipulation of credit.

[12] Planters in Maryland and Virginia were offered easy credit by the Tobacco Lords, enabling them to buy European consumer goods and other luxuries before harvest time gave them the ready cash to do so.

But when the time came to sell the crop, the indebted growers found themselves forced by the traders to accept low prices for their harvest in order to stave off bankruptcy.

[14] Thomas Jefferson, on the verge of losing his own slave plantation Monticello, accused British-based merchants of unfairly depressing tobacco prices and forcing Virginia planters to take on unsustainable debt loads.

In 1786, he remarked:A powerful engine for this [mercantile profiteering] was the giving of good prices and credit to the planter till they got him more immersed in debt than he could pay without selling lands or slaves.