THE full extent of Scotland's involvement in the 17th and 18th-century slave trade is today laid bare at a seminar in Glasgow - a city that benefited considerably from the trade.

"No more can there be any talk after this event of 'It wisnae us'," said Scotland's pre-eminent historian, Professor Sir Tom Devine.

The event, entitled Recovering Scotland's Slavery Past, is the first in this country to specifically focus on the role of those north of the Border in the enslavement and maltreatment of Africans.

In an address to the seminar, Sir Tom makes clear the sheer scale of Scottish involvement in Caribbean and north American slavery.

Speakers, including experts from across the UK, say it is clear Scotland outperformed other parts of the UK in the enslavement of Africans.

Ahead of the event, Sir Tom said: "This conference, with papers delivered by the world's foremost experts in the field, will confirm once and for all the Scottish people were engaged fully in every nook and cranny of the British slavery system for nearly two centuries until its final abolition in the British Empire in 1833.

"No more can there be any talk after this event of 'It wisnae us'."

In his introduction to Lost To History, a forthcoming book on the subject, Sir Tom asserts that Scots - as merchants, mariners, soldiers, plantation owners and overseers - were at the "very heart" of the slave trade.

Scottish merchants who ­operated in such key ports as Liverpool, Bristol and London profited greatly from what was referred to by some contemporaries as the "nefarious commerce".

Sir Tom added, however, the trade also allowed substantial parts of Scotland to flourish.

He wrote"The gains from slave-based cultivation in sugar, cotton and tobacco had a significant impact, not simply on Glasgow and other western port cities and their hinterlands, but also throughout the length and breadth of Scotland, from the northern Highlands to the Borders."

While the landed, mercantile and professional elites did best from slavery, the jobs created by the markets in the West Indies and north America for the mass of Scots, particularly those who were employed in textile-making, had to be acknowledged.

Many Scots had played ­"honourable" roles in helping to bring about abolition but Sir Tom believes the full extent of Scottish engagement had been "virtually erased from history" until early in the last decade - a phenomenon he refers to a "condition of amnesia".

He discusses an advertisement taken out in the Glasgow Herald on the 50th anniversary of the 1833 abolition, by the Glasgow West India Association.

It said Glasgow had "kept out" of the slave trade, unlike Bristol and Liverpool - and that a charge levelled at Liverpool, that there was "not a stone in her streets that was not cemented with the blood of a slave", could not be applied to Glasgow.

Sir Tom dismisses this assertion as "brazenly hypocritical," not least because the association had been unequivocal in its opposition to slave emancipation.

The Economic And Social Research Council seminar has been organised by Dr Nicholas J Evans, a lecturer in Diaspora History and a member of Hull University's Wilberforce Institute For The Study Of Slavery And Emancipation.

The seminar marks the 50th anniversary of Glasgow City Archives. Dr Irene O'Brien, Glasgow's city archivist, referred to Sir Tom's assertion of "amnesia" and said: "This memory of slavery exists in the archive. We have a wonderful collection of documents relating to slavery, and Scotland's involvement in the trade.

"Archives, after all, are all about preserving memory."

Sir Tom added: "Of course the manuscript evidence to demonstrate Scotland's role in the slave economies has long been available in numerous archives both at home and abroad. The point is that only in recent years have Scottish historians become interested in examining them."