This article uncovers the Scottish Highlands' earliest-known overseas slave-owning circle and the imperial entanglement with the Dutch Empire and its sugar on which this depended. It thus provides a case study of the transnational, Dutch-influenced nature of commerce in a non-metropolitan part of northern Europe in the later seventeenth century. The article highlights two interconnected contemporary developments: the engagement of Highland migrants or exiles in the sugar-based enslavement of African and indigenous populations in Suriname; the region's heavy reliance on the importation of sugar with origins in the Dutch Atlantic plantations. In this way, the article illuminates both north Highland agency in the oppressions of the 'triangular trade', and its merchant community's opting for Dutch over Lowland Scottishrefined sugar when supplying and encouraging local demand at that time. Taken together, this demonstrates the early enmeshment of the region in transnational 'circuits' of slave-owning and the interconnected seepage of sugar across broader sections of the northern European economy than previously considered. A Scottish Highland-led circle is shown to have grown prior to the formal creation of the British Empire, simultaneous with the commercial activity of Dutch Suriname-based sugar planter, Henry MacKintosh, who developed strong ties linking the colony with New England, Rotterdam, and his home burgh of Inverness.

Narrow strips of sea do not always function as ‘chokepoints’ for the communities that live around them. This article interrogates the historiography of the ‘corridors’ of the Moray Firth region, taken here to be inclusive of the Dornoch Firth, the Cromarty Firth and the inner Moray Firth, and incorporating the Inverness, Kessock and Beauly Firths. Although public and private bodies use the term ‘Moray Firth’ frequently, with few exceptions historians have refrained from doing so. The settlements of the northerly part of the coast, in particular, have been poorly represented in the region's historiography, a theme interrogated in the first section of the article. Social and cultural interactions across the firth are explored, drawing specifically on the history of seven settlements around the Beauly-Wick edge: Pictish Portmahomack, Norse Dingwall, the medieval burgh and pilgrimage site of Tain, early modern Dornoch, nineteenth-century Wick and the modern industrial centres of Invergordon and Nigg. These communities interacted with others situated on the coast to the south. The article concludes by proposing several new questions and approaches for future historical writing on the Moray Firth.

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