Glasgow History 3

History of Glasgow Part 3

  After the Act of Union was signed between Scotland and England in 17 07, the

English colonies and trade routes via the Atlantic Ocean where open to Glasgow’s
entrepreneurs for trade.

The first major import business was Tobacco giving these entrepreneurs the nick
name of “The Tobacco Lords”. A vast amount of wealth was created for and by the
Tobacco Lords whose great trade was interrupted by the small matter of the
American Revolution. Fortunately the canny Scots had diversified into sugar
imported from the West Indies a major by product of this trade was Rum.

Auspicious Mansions and office blocks sprouted up in the City, but unfortunately
there where a great many poor workers who had gravitated to the City in order to
find work.

The vast majority of the workers and their extended families where provided with
Tenement housing
and often families would stay in a “singil
en” (single end house with only one room), where they endured squalid and
harsh conditions with the entire “close” (tenement building) having to share the
one toilet or “cludgie” to give it, its Glasgow name.

The City further developed when layers of Silt where removed from the shallow
Clyde to allow large vessels to sail into the heart of the city and with the

establishment of Port Glasgow further down the river the city was about to take
it’s place as the second city of the British Empire.