Talk:James Baillie (merchant)

Hermitage, bought in 1765 (soon?) jointly with his brother, Alexander Baillie, was certainly the core of James Baillie's holdings in Grenada,(later other kin, for example a cousin, Dr Colin Chisholm, an early expositor of the case for yellow fever as a contagious disease, had shares in Hermitage) but this is someone who, after a little less than twenty years as a London West India merchant and banker can, in his own words "to oblige the Bank of England" commit himself to buying, for £100,000, the two Granada estates of Bacolet and Chemin, on a deposit of £45,000 and seven annual instalments at 4%. (He later sold Chemin, but Bacolet is still known as "Baillie's Bacolet" This stretched his resources a bit. The initial capital for Hermitage seems to have come from a partnership of the three Baillie brothers of Dochfour, Alexander, James and Evan,though there was a fourth, Duncan, also in Grenada, and Alexander's father in law in Grenada Smith, which among other things acted as a distribution agent for African slave cargoes. They were highly estaeemd from Charleston, where henry Laurens writed well of them, to Guyana, wnere James owned the Northbrook plantation in Demerara.

He was agent FOR Grenada, not "to'. His election for Horsham may well have been made the easier because he was a banker for Lord William Gordon, his co-MP whose family owned Inverness Castle and other land in Inverness-shire, the Baillies' home county.. His wife, usually known as "Colin" Campbell, was the daughter of the "Red Fox" Campbell of Glenure, and engaged, after his death, in a running battle for her share of his business, with his cousin, George Baillie, who had taken over his business in the early 1790s. The Baillie banking business in the mid 1790s was, in the financial crisis of the period, deemed "too big to be allowed to fail" and received the bulk of a very large Government loan to help bail out the business and maintain West Indian credit, of which it was, with Houston's of Glasgow, the main supporter.Delahays (talk) 22:59, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't want to make heavy weather of this, and I don't want to seem ungrateful (even if late with it) for the author's thanks. But there is a difference between an Agent FOR Grenada and an Agent TO Grenada. An agent represents the folk who appoint him. The UK Government had no need of any representative agent in Grenada, not least because, during Baillie's association with the island, he was, while there, subject to SIX successive Governors appointed by the London Government, and their various administrative arrangements. As Agent FOR Grenada he looked after the interests of the British colonists there IN LONDON, and as such had the ear of the London West india merchant community, and, in Parliament, the Commons. He could not have done the job without the trust of the Governor. This is what Colonial Agents DID. If they could at the same time become MPs, they could in fact perform some of the functions of the "represeatives" colonists could not elect: though the very elastic and self-generating British Constitution was far from perfect in that regard, it didn't, at least, prevent them from doing so.

 I owe the author an apology for not making this clear years ago, but at the time I didn't think there would be a problem about this issue.  Since Grenada did not become British until 1762, and Baillie himself is the authority for his return to the UK in the 1770s, the longest period he could have spent in the island was considerably less than twenty years and it's doubtful that he could have spent a total of even 15 there, mainly because the base for the Baillie brothers' initial business development was St Kitts,(in fact, Nevis - apologies: Smith was a Nevis planter) where the eldest, Alexander, had begun as a supercargo for his future father in law, a merchant and planter from Lancashire who can't be more accurately traced than that so far, named, unfortunately, Smith.  The original partnership was Smith and Baillies, under which name they traded with Laurens in Charleston S.C., among others. The last of the Baillies formally to join it was the main survivor, Evan,eventually laird of Dochfour himself, MP for Bristol, a pillar of the Bristol Old Bank, and a substantial figure in general, who had served as a staff officer at the siege of Havana, mainly in charge of water supplies for the invading army. Even Evan's own History of Parliament article used to be unaware that he had ever personally been ANYWHERE in the West Indies at all - so little interest had been taken in these people.  James  Baillie himself in the main source I used, David Fisher's article on him in the History of Parliament, available online, owned considerable interests in Demerara, and in fact bought Baillie's Bacolet fairly late in his life.  Since he did so, in his own words (used in his will) "to oblige the Bank of England" it would seem reasonable to suppose that when he did so he was closer to London than the Caribbean - not impossible for an Agent for Grenada.

If you think it useful, I'll try early next year to put together a rewrite which might repair this damage, for which I am prepared to accept any blame going.Delahays (talk) 20:43, 23 December 2022 (UTC)