Description

Thomas Bolt, best known in Shetland for his patronage of P&O co-founder Arthur Anderson, took under his wing a number of young people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He arranged their education and medical care, and in some cases managed their estates until they came of age. As adults, some of them would become instrumental in the social and economic changes of the nineteenth century, yet Thomas Bolt, the force behind them has until now remained largely unexplored. Through these tales of how he managed his young charges and who they became, the book traces Bolt’s role in shaping eighteenth and nineteenth-century Shetland society. It addresses themes such as the education of middle-class girls, the medical treatment of children, trade during Napoleonic wars, and Shetland connections with slavery-based colonial economies.