The most famous enslaver in Jamaica, the island that was one of the most profitable of Britain’s Caribbean colonies, is a ghost. One of the tellings of the legend has it that young Annie Palmer, the “White Witch of Rose Hall”, was a sadistic 19th-century killer and torturer who terrorised enslaved people, murdering the grand-niece of her African lover, Takoo, with a curse, before he killed her. Annie’s spirit now apparently haunts a golf course in Montego Bay.

Even as a kid, touring the beautiful island with Jamaican loved ones on holidays, I noticed the British men who had controlled the island’s sugar plantations were largely forgotten.

It was the heroes of the 18th- and 19th-century resistance against slavery’s violence who were everywhere, such as the guerrilla commander Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who was said to have been able to catch bullets. Or Sam Sharpe, a pioneer of liberation theology whose uprising led to abolition, or the political activist Paul Bogle. Their faces were on the banknotes we used to buy pineapple soda.

This is one way descendants process the legacies of enslavement: through the memory of ancestors who resisted their oppressors, the worst of whose crimes were so obscene that they became spectral, like Annie Palmer, or the pirates of Port Royal, swallowed by an earthquake.

But the legacy of slavery in Jamaica, and across the Americas, is pervasive in persistent inequality, in generational trauma, and in the elite schools and words plantation owners left behind. Some of those words are Scottish. Scottish surnames, such as Campbell and Gordon, and placenames, including Aberdeen and Dundee, are everywhere in Jamaica. But until fairly recently, in the UK, there was relatively little interrogation of this deep Scottish imprint.

Edinburgh University’s report into its history,

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