In the eighteenth century, Glasgow and its outports became the dominant force in the highly lucrative tobacco commerce from the Americas to Europe.

This prize-winning book explains why such remarkable success came about against fierce international competition, provides a detailed assessment of the merchant community which made it possible and analyses the close relationship between the tobacco business and the Scottish pathway to a new industrial society. The Tobacco Lords also fully demonstrates the decisive impact of these Scottish traders on the plantation economy and society of colonial North America in general and Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina in particular.

First published in 1975 this pioneering book was acclaimed by reviewers and is still considered the seminal work on the subject.

Sir Tom Devine is the Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author or editor of more that forty books on Scottish historical studies and related fields. The only historian to be knighted by HM The Queen ‘for services to the study of Scottish history’, he has been described by The Times newspaper as ‘as close to a national bard as the nation has’.