27. The True Significance of Scottish Names in Jamaica
To buttress the untrue narrative of Scottish slaves in the New World, advocates often point out the descendants of Scotts in Caribbean islands like Jamaica. However, such individuals are overwhelmingly descended from indentured servants who entered into indenture voluntarily, not from Scottish prisoners forcibly sent to the island by the English. Caribbean planters preferred Scottish laborers, who were viewed as hard workers and more honest than indentured servants from other parts of the British Isles. But they were indentured servants, not slaves.
Advocates of the myth also point out the proliferation of Scottish surnames in Jamaica – Campbell, for example, is the most common Jamaican last name – to support their position. In reality, Scottish names are common in Jamaica not because the island held many Scottish slaves. They are common because many mixed-race children were born from sexual violence visited upon black slave women by white slave owners and their overseers. Many of those predators were Scotts, and many enslaved people took their surname.