Enslavement and Machinery: Reinterpreting the Mirrlees Watson Order Books at the Scottish Business Archives
Enslavement and Machinery: Reinterpreting the Mirrlees Watson Order Books at the Scottish Business Archives
When I first consulted the Mirrlees Watson order books at the Scottish Business Archives as a Glasgow Library Research Fellow in 2024, I was not looking for the history of engineering. I was searching for evidence that might help answer a very different historical question: how can we trace the ownership and management of sugar plantations in nineteenth-century British Guiana during the transition from slavery to indentured labour?
My doctoral research at the University of Cambridge examines the mercantile networks of Sandbach Tinné & Co., one of the largest commercial conglomerates operating in the British Caribbean during the late slavery and emancipation periods. Rather than studying these networks through the conventional lenses of political events or institutional history, I have adopted a prosopographical approach, reconstructing the relationships between families, merchants, attorneys, plantation managers, financiers and manufacturers. This methodology often requires looking beyond the obvious archival sources.
That is precisely why the Mirrlees Watson order books proved so significant.
What makes these volumes exceptional is not simply that they record the manufacture of sugar machinery, but that, taken together, they inadvertently map the ownership and management of plantations over time. Read as a continuous dataset rather than as individual engineering orders, they reveal patterns that are difficult to reconstruct from any other surviving source.
At first glance they appear to be records of a Scottish engineering firm supplying machinery to sugar estates across the Caribbean, the Americas and the wider British empire. They document boilers, engines, mill components and replacement parts with remarkable technical precision. Yet viewed through the lens of plantation and mercantile history, they reveal something much more.
Each order links a machine to a particular estate, a particular moment in time and, crucially, to the people responsible for that estate. Proprietors, attorneys, executors, managers and commercial agents emerge repeatedly throughout the volumes. Read sequentially over decades, these entries become an unintended but extraordinarily rich record of plantation ownership, management and investment. In effect, they document the industrial infrastructure through which plantation capitalism adapted to emancipation, revealing how investment, technology and commercial networks continued to sustain Caribbean sugar production under new labour regimes.
For my own research, these records helped illuminate the commercial relationships surrounding Sandbach Tinné & Co. and the wider Scottish and Liverpool merchant communities with which they were connected. More broadly, they suggest new ways of understanding how industrial Scotland, Caribbean plantation economies and global trading networks remained closely intertwined throughout the nineteenth century. What appear to be engineering records can equally be read as evidence for business history, kinship, genealogy, colonial administration, economic geography industrialisation and the transition from enslaved to indentured labour.
Accompanying me during the fellowship was research associate Lucy Moynihan, whose expertise proved invaluable in developing the research methodology into a structured dataset. Working collaboratively, we identified and extracted the Mirrlees Watson orders relating to Sandbach Tinné and associated estates, transforming individual engineering records into a longitudinal dataset of plantation ownership, management and industrial investment from 1840 onwards. Drawing upon my wider prosopographical research into Sandbach Tinné’s mercantile networks and Lucy’s meticulous archival analysis, the project demonstrated how these volumes could be reinterpreted as a source for Caribbean social and economic history rather than engineering history alone.
This period marked the transition from enslavement and apprenticeship to indentured labour throughout much of the British Caribbean, although Mirrlees Watson also supplied territories, including the United States, where slavery continued. The resulting dataset therefore provides a valuable means of comparing changing systems of labour, ownership and industrial investment across different plantation economies.
The work also highlighted the importance of preserving archival authenticity. Company names, estates and individuals frequently appear under multiple spellings or abbreviations in the original order books. Rather than silently standardising these variations, Lucy’s dataset preserves the original spellings while identifying the underlying people, companies and estates through annotation. This approach not only safeguards the integrity of the archival record but also demonstrates why AI-assisted transcription, valuable though it is, cannot replace informed historical interpretation.
One of the most rewarding outcomes of the fellowship has been seeing these volumes become more widely accessible. As a result of my fellowship, the Scottish Business Archives recognised the wider significance of the collection and secured funding to digitise the key order books identified during the fellowship.
Seeing the collection transformed into a searchable digital resource, has also reinforced its value as a research dataset rather than simply a series of digitised documents. The ability to search names, estates and engineering orders across volumes opens entirely new possibilities for network analysis, prosopographical research and the reconstruction of plantation economies over time.
The accompanying work exploring AI-assisted transcription has demonstrated both the opportunities and the limitations of new technologies in archive practice. While artificial intelligence can accelerate the production of searchable text, the project also confirms that careful human interpretation and editorial expertise remain essential, particularly when working with complex historical records.
The digitisation of these order books marks an important step in opening this collection to researchers around the world. Their value extends far beyond the history of engineering. They provide a remarkable longitudinal dataset for historians of slavery and emancipation, scholars of Scottish industry, family historians, digital humanists and anyone interested in the interconnected histories of Britain and the Caribbean. Their cumulative value lies in enabling researchers to reconstruct changing patterns of plantation ownership, agency, industrial investment and commercial relationships across successive decades.
Archives continually reveal new meanings when researchers ask new questions. My hope is that these digitised volumes will encourage others to explore the Mirrlees Watson records from fresh perspectives and, in doing so, uncover histories that have remained hidden in plain sight for generations.
When I first consulted the Mirrlees Watson order books at the Scottish Business Archives as a Glasgow Library Research Fellow in 2024, I was not looking for the history of engineering. I was searching for evidence that might help answer a very different historical question: how can we trace the ownership and management of sugar plantations in nineteenth-century British Guiana during the transition from slavery to indentured labour?
My doctoral research at the University of Cambridge examines the mercantile networks of Sandbach Tinné & Co., one of the largest commercial conglomerates operating in the British Caribbean during the late slavery and emancipation periods. Rather than studying these networks through the conventional lenses of political events or institutional history, I have adopted a prosopographical approach, reconstructing the relationships between families, merchants, attorneys, plantation managers, financiers and manufacturers. This methodology often requires looking beyond the obvious archival sources.
That is precisely why the Mirrlees Watson order books proved so significant.
What makes these volumes exceptional is not simply that they record the manufacture of sugar machinery, but that, taken together, they inadvertently map the ownership and management of plantations over time. Read as a continuous dataset rather than as individual engineering orders, they reveal patterns that are difficult to reconstruct from any other surviving source.
At first glance they appear to be records of a Scottish engineering firm supplying machinery to sugar estates across the Caribbean, the Americas and the wider British empire. They document boilers, engines, mill components and replacement parts with remarkable technical precision. Yet viewed through the lens of plantation and mercantile history, they reveal something much more.
Each order links a machine to a particular estate, a particular moment in time and, crucially, to the people responsible for that estate. Proprietors, attorneys, executors, managers and commercial agents emerge repeatedly throughout the volumes. Read sequentially over decades, these entries become an unintended but extraordinarily rich record of plantation ownership, management and investment. In effect, they document the industrial infrastructure through which plantation capitalism adapted to emancipation, revealing how investment, technology and commercial networks continued to sustain Caribbean sugar production under new labour regimes.
For my own research, these records helped illuminate the commercial relationships surrounding Sandbach Tinné & Co. and the wider Scottish and Liverpool merchant communities with which they were connected. More broadly, they suggest new ways of understanding how industrial Scotland, Caribbean plantation economies and global trading networks remained closely intertwined throughout the nineteenth century. What appear to be engineering records can equally be read as evidence for business history, kinship, genealogy, colonial administration, economic geography industrialisation and the transition from enslaved to indentured labour.
Accompanying me during the fellowship was research associate Lucy Moynihan, whose expertise proved invaluable in developing the research methodology into a structured dataset. Working collaboratively, we identified and extracted the Mirrlees Watson orders relating to Sandbach Tinné and associated estates, transforming individual engineering records into a longitudinal dataset of plantation ownership, management and industrial investment from 1840 onwards. Drawing upon my wider prosopographical research into Sandbach Tinné’s mercantile networks and Lucy’s meticulous archival analysis, the project demonstrated how these volumes could be reinterpreted as a source for Caribbean social and economic history rather than engineering history alone.
This period marked the transition from enslavement and apprenticeship to indentured labour throughout much of the British Caribbean, although Mirrlees Watson also supplied territories, including the United States, where slavery continued. The resulting dataset therefore provides a valuable means of comparing changing systems of labour, ownership and industrial investment across different plantation economies.
The work also highlighted the importance of preserving archival authenticity. Company names, estates and individuals frequently appear under multiple spellings or abbreviations in the original order books. Rather than silently standardising these variations, Lucy’s dataset preserves the original spellings while identifying the underlying people, companies and estates through annotation. This approach not only safeguards the integrity of the archival record but also demonstrates why AI-assisted transcription, valuable though it is, cannot replace informed historical interpretation.
One of the most rewarding outcomes of the fellowship has been seeing these volumes become more widely accessible. As a result of my fellowship, the Scottish Business Archives recognised the wider significance of the collection and secured funding to digitise the key order books identified during the fellowship.
Seeing the collection transformed into a searchable digital resource, has also reinforced its value as a research dataset rather than simply a series of digitised documents. The ability to search names, estates and engineering orders across volumes opens entirely new possibilities for network analysis, prosopographical research and the reconstruction of plantation economies over time.
The accompanying work exploring AI-assisted transcription has demonstrated both the opportunities and the limitations of new technologies in archive practice. While artificial intelligence can accelerate the production of searchable text, the project also confirms that careful human interpretation and editorial expertise remain essential, particularly when working with complex historical records.
The digitisation of these order books marks an important step in opening this collection to researchers around the world. Their value extends far beyond the history of engineering. They provide a remarkable longitudinal dataset for historians of slavery and emancipation, scholars of Scottish industry, family historians, digital humanists and anyone interested in the interconnected histories of Britain and the Caribbean. Their cumulative value lies in enabling researchers to reconstruct changing patterns of plantation ownership, agency, industrial investment and commercial relationships across successive decades.
Archives continually reveal new meanings when researchers ask new questions. My hope is that these digitised volumes will encourage others to explore the Mirrlees Watson records from fresh perspectives and, in doing so, uncover histories that have remained hidden in plain sight for generations.
Malik Al Nasir is an award-winning PhD Candidate at The Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, St Catharine’s College. He is an Affiliate of Cambridge Digital Humanities and Project Manager of the Connector Project at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. He is the author of Searching for my Slave Roots (William Collins, 2026)
Lucy Moynihan is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of History, University of Liverpool researching ‘Race, Slavery and Abolition at the Liverpool Athenaeum, 1797-1833’. She is a Research Associate for the Connector Projects ‘Overwriting – Underwriting’ research pilot at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.
Malik Al Nasir is an award-winning PhD Candidate at The Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, St Catharine’s College. He is an Affiliate of Cambridge Digital Humanities and Project Manager of the Connector Project at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. He is the author of Searching for my Slave Roots (William Collins, 2026)
Lucy Moynihan is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of History, University of Liverpool researching ‘Race, Slavery and Abolition at the Liverpool Athenaeum, 1797-1833’. She is a Research Associate for the Connector Projects ‘Overwriting – Underwriting’ research pilot at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool.