James Watt, 1736 - 1819. Engineer and inventor

James Watt, a Glasgow scientific instrument maker, is famed as the inventor of a new, more efficient steam engine. He went into partnership with Matthew Boulton in Birmingham to mass manufacture the new engines. This transformed industrial development by making mechanical power cheaply and universally available.

Watt’s success, however, was not simply a reflection of his ingenuity, but was rooted in the social and economic conditions of eighteenth-century Scotland. His father was a prosperous Greenock merchant who traded with the slave economies of the West Indies and Americas. His business occasionally traded in enslaved people, and Watt himself was involved, as a young man, in the transfer of an enslaved boy to a Scottish gentry family. Although Watt personally condemned chattel slavery, commenting that ‘we heartily pray that the system of slavery so disgraceful to humanity abolished by prudent though progressive measures’, his company nevertheless sold steam engines to Caribbean after his retirement in 1800. This maintained their profitability just as slavery was becoming subject to increasing criticism.

Credit: Purchased 1984