Trade & Industry

Glasgow grew rich on trade long before it became an industrial city. The Union of 1707 opened England’s colonies to Scottish merchants, and Glasgow, a shorter voyage from the Americas than its English rivals, seized the chance. By the 1750s the tobacco lords were bringing in more tobacco than all the other ports of Britain combined, and re-exporting most of it to France and the rest of Europe. Their wealth built the Merchant City and funded the city’s first banks, but it rested on the labour of enslaved people on the plantations of Virginia and Maryland, a connection the city has begun to confront openly.

When the American Revolution ended the tobacco trade, Glasgow’s merchants turned to sugar and rum from the Caribbean, and then to cotton. Linen had been the town’s first great manufacture, and the wider textile industry, from the handloom weavers of the Calton to the bleachfields and dyeworks of the Clyde valley, employed tens of thousands. The merchant class describes the families who moved between these trades and into banking and land.

The Industrial Revolution transformed Glasgow from a merchant town into one of the great workshops of the world. James Watt's improvements to the steam engine began in a university workshop, and James Beaumont Neilson's hot blast, patented in 1828, made Scotland’s blackband ironstone economic and turned Lanarkshire into a great iron and coal district. Victorian engineering followed: locomotives from Springburn, sugar machinery, bridges and boilers shipped across the world.

The twentieth century brought slow and then sudden decline. The decline of heavy industry explains how competition, under-investment and the loss of imperial markets closed the works and yards that had defined the city, and how Glasgow began to rebuild around services, education and culture.