David Evans & Co. The Last of the Old London Textile Printers

Abstract

The Glasgow 'Tobacco Lords' were the subject of a classic study, but there has been no overall survey of their successors, the Scottish cotton masters. This article draws on a rich and surprisingly underused source, the wills and probate inventories of Scottish cotton merchants and manufacturers, to give a fuller picture of a group, which played a key role in Scotland's early industrialisation. It also casts light on the early decline of the cotton industry in Scotland by demonstrating how, as profits declined, the cotton masters, who had always had diverse business interests, began to move into more lucrative areas of investment, such as coal mining, iron manufacturing, railways, shipping and overseas trade.