Fuerzas competitivas de Michael Porter

Alston discussed the power of the digitally connected world in bringing together ‘obsessive people.’ Through his website, also called Slaves and Highlanders, Alston came into contact with someone, for example, who had meticulously transcribed every copy of the Essequibo and Demerara Gazette from 1804 to 1817. Whether he was implying it or not, Alston’s work itself could be described as obsessive. His website is an encyclopaedic account of the slaves, ‘runaways’, ‘free coloureds,’ plantation owners, overseers, tradesmen, doctors, wives, mistresses, legitimate children, illegitimate children, and the children of slaves and ‘masters,’ all with mutual Highlander and Guyanese ‘connections.’ Of course in his research, Alston has found information relating to non-Scots, and their details are also carefully stored within his website.

Asked if he would do another exhibition, Alston is hesitant. He said that he is beginning to realise the real power and potential of his website. The site currently receives around 1,000 visits a month, and 65% of visits are new sessions; visitors spend an average of

4 minutes on the site.’157 _{Alston said people have used it to help write PhDs, and that he meets}

up with a new person almost every month to discuss some element of the website’s content. For example, at the time of our second interview in early 2017, Alston was in touch with a student from Glasgow who had organised a historic walking tour of Inverness, and wanted to include information about slavery. It has also put him in contact with researchers in the Caribbean, and North and South America. For example, Gaiutra Bahadur, an American writer born in Guyana to Indian parents, adopted some of Alston’s research on writing her book

Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. The book is a meticulously researched account of the unmarried Indian women who helped fill the labour gap on Guyana’s sugar plantations following the abolition of slavery in 1833/4; one of these women was Bahadur’s great- grandmother.158 Thus, not only has Alston’s research disrupted the status quo regarding Scotland and African slavery, but it is also beginning to have implications in the

understanding of the post-abolition Caribbean, a world that the Scots continued to dominate. Scots helped organise the mass-migration of indentured Indians to Guyana – something that ‘looked uncomfortably like slavery itself’ - until the system ended in 1919.159

During our first interview, I had asked Alston is he felt that the research being carried out by Scottish historians and universities on the topic of slavery had been recognised and valued by international historians of slavery and the Atlantic. He said:

I think a lot of historians in the Caribbean have done a lot of work over many years in difficult circumstances and I think, at least amongst some of them, there’s an

understandable…people coming along from rich countries, like the UK, and getting published.

Alston said that he had found it difficult to get in touch with some historians in the Caribbean, and to establish cooperative relationships. He imagines their complaint – ‘Why didn’t people listen when I was saying this?’ Alston then suggested that something should be

157 _{Email from David Alston, 15.12.16.}

158 _{Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2013), 3-15.} 159 _{Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic, 165.}

done to support countries such as Guyana with their archives and to help them preserve their history. This would indeed fit an agenda for greater social justice beyond Scotland’s borders, however it was not something that Alston realised during 2007 or afterwards.

Alston argues that slavery is ‘marbled’ throughout Scottish society. He argues that it is a ‘touchstone’ for so many things – Scottish identity, Scottish history, and the state of its museums. During our conversations, Alston mentions other areas of Scottish history that have similarly been swept under the rug: Scottish involvement in the indentured labour systems in the Caribbean after abolition in 1833, mentioned above; and, Scottish involvement in the Chinese opium trade. Alston spoke of William Jardine and James Matheson, two Scots, one a Highlander, whose colonial trading business in Asia was the forerunner of the multi-billion dollar conglomerate Jardine Matheson, and who Alston describes as the ‘biggest drug dealers of the nineteenth-century.’ Matheson’s portrait currently hangs in the Cromarty Courthouse Museum, as Alston said no one else was interested in having it when it was dislodged from its previous home several years ago. Alston argues that recognising the complexities and darker sides of a nation’s history is ‘about corporate responsibility in the widest sense. If the corporate body is the state, or nation state, that’s where the responsibilities are.’ This approach reflects Aleida Assmann’s idea of ‘dialogic memory,’ whereby nations accept the ‘dark legacies of an entangled history of violence’, while incorporating the memories of their victims within their own national memory.160 _{While nations may still veer towards the ‘grand}

solidarity’ approach – proud nations built on complicated, but mostly proud, histories – then encompassed within that still lies the ‘corporate responsibility.’ Life may be experienced beyond borders, but it is still governed within them.