David Alston

Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year 2022Shortlisted for the 2021 Highland Book PrizeScots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from these crimes against humanity in the Caribbean Islands and Guyana, some reluctantly but many with enthusiasm and without remorse. Their voices are clearly heard in the archives, while in the same sources their victims' stories are silenced - reduced to numbers and listed as property.David Alston gives voice not only to these Scots but to enslaved Africans and their descendants - to those who reclaimed their freedom, to free women of colour, to the Black Caribs of St Vincent, to house servants, and to children of mixed race who found themselves in the increasingly racist society of Britain in the mid-1800s.As Scots recover and grapple with their past, this vital history lays bare the enormous wealth generated in the Highlands by slavery and emancipation compensation schemes. This legacy, entwined with so many of our contemporary institutions, must be reckoned with.

Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year 2022Shortlisted for the 2021 Highland Book PrizeScots were involved in every stage of the slave trade: from captaining slaving ships to auctioning captured Africans in the colonies and hunting down those who escaped from bondage. This book focuses on the Scottish Highlanders who engaged in or benefitted from these crimes against humanity in the Caribbean Islands and Guyana, some reluctantly but many with enthusiasm and without remorse. Their voices are clearly heard in the archives, while in the same sources their victims' stories are silenced - reduced to numbers and listed as property.David Alston gives voice not only to these Scots but to enslaved Africans and their descendants - to those who reclaimed their freedom, to free women of colour, to the Black Caribs of St Vincent, to house servants, and to children of mixed race who found themselves in the increasingly racist society of Britain in the mid-1800s.As Scots recover and grapple with their past, this vital history lays bare the enormous wealth generated in the Highlands by slavery and emancipation compensation schemes. This legacy, entwined with so many of our contemporary institutions, must be reckoned with.

Tim Davies is one of the most exciting artists working in Britain today. Internationally exhibited and acclaimed he specialises in art which explores identity through artefacts - he has approached Wales through wool, fire, oil-drenched seabird feathers, lead from the roof of a disused chapel. More exotically he has returned a tropical hardwood parquet floor to the Belizean jungle from whence it came, laying the blocks among the trees where new plants now grow through them and termites erode them. Change, organic and by intervention, and method are at the centre of Davies' art; process is its determining feature. In a retrospective approach three leading critics provide an illuminating and informative commentary to his work. David Alston is the Keeper of Art at the Lowry Centre; Iwan Bala is one of Wales' leading artists and critics; Anne Price-Owen is Senior Lecturer in Art at the Swansea Institute. Together they explore the practise, the international context, the Welsh context and the recurring motifs of Tim Davies' work. Davies himself also provides a commentary on five of his significant pieces, and the Foreword is provided by Susan Daniel-McElroy, Director of Tate St Ives. Tim Davies was born in Haverforwest in 1960, and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including shows in Australia, Mexico, Hong Kong, Belize, Ireland, Estonia, Poland and Croatia.