The elite built their wealth on slavery – what can we do about it?

The Herald Scotland

15 hours ago

Obviously this did not come cheap, but its second owner, Ninian Home, had no trouble finding the means to turn this into a show-stopping stately home. As a sugar plantation owner in the West Indies he was filthy rich and wanted everybody to know it.
Paxton House Trust, which holds the property for the nation, does not shy away from this shameful legacy. Instead, it has an exhibition highlighting the family's lucrative links to slavery and their plantations in Grenada.
Part of the house's collection of sumptuous Georgian costumes includes a model of a black servant dressed in elegant shirt, silk waistcoat and breeches. What he and other black servants made of the Scottish Borders is not recorded; perhaps the best that can be said is that they were likely to have lived longer and more healthily here than if they had been working on a plantation.
For what it's worth (very little you might say), it seems that Ninian Home was not a brutal owner. But an owner he was, one of countless great planters who made their fortunes, and passed them on, from the labour of the enslaved. Such were conditions in the West Indies – and in other colonies on the eastern seaboard of America – that so many died of disease, overwork or harsh treatment, constant transports of new slaves from Africa were required to replace them. It was an unspeakable way to make money, and yet many who did so believed themselves to be morally upstanding figures.
Nor was Home a rarity among the middle and upper ranks of 18th-century Scottish society, whose houses, parks and prestige are with us still. Almost wherever you look, plantation owners and slave traders' fingerprints are all over our major institutions. Wherever there is generational privilege and power stretching back centuries, be it a bank or a justice system or an entrenched social hierarchy, you can be sure there is a direct association with enrichment from the colonies, either through slavery or oppression of other sorts.
Just how complicit or rapacious Scotland has been is yet to be fully examined. This week, however, in a ground-breaking move, the University of Edinburgh published a Race Review, exploring the university's historic relationship to slavery and colonialism, and the ways in which it has benefited from these connections.
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Overseen by Professor Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland's first black professor, who died in June, the report runs to over 100 pages. Its conclusions make sobering reading. Not only did Edinburgh University receive £30m in 'philanthropic gifts' from those whose income came from tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations, but it reveals the extent to which 18th-century academics promulgated ideas of the racial superiority of whites and the inferiority, in particular, of blacks.
Those of us taught to take pride in the Scottish Enlightenment, which laid the foundation for liberal democracy and rejected the stranglehold of religion, might need to adjust our lens. Edinburgh's leading thinkers, among them the philosophers Adam Ferguson and David Hume and the historian William Robertson, assumed that whites were superior. Despite heated debate, this belief was reflected in the curriculum, moulding the minds of students before they headed out into the world.
Highlighting the perniciousness of these ideas, the report also investigates the university's ties to apartheid and genocide of colonised people across the globe, including the Middle East. In this respect, they single out Arthur James Balfour, the university's long-standing chancellor (1891-1930) and the architect of the Balfour Declaration. He played a pivotal role, they write, 'in establishing and maintaining a century-long process of imperial and settler-colonial rule in Palestine, resulting today in one of the longest standing colonial occupations and apartheid regimes in modern history.'
The Race Report makes several recommendations for apology and reparation, and the Principal, Sir Peter Matthiessen, has pledged 'meaningful change', promising to 'learn from and repair its past'. Delivering the report, Matthiessen announced that 'we cannot have a selective memory about our past, focussing only on the historical achievements which make us feel proud.'
The legacy of David Hume is proving controversial (Image: Newsquest)
He's right. When you learn that even the Picts traded in slaves, you begin to realise that violent subjugation and money made from the misfortune of others underlie much of the heritage on which our nation has been built. Indeed, as the global history of colonialism shows, ruthless mistreatment of those deemed inferior is one of the most deplorable human instincts.
However, Edinburgh University's critics point out that it is rather convenient to draw attention to reprehensible historic liaisons, whilst ignoring its contentious present-day alliances. The protest group Edinburgh University Staff 4 Free Speech claims that the university has 'murky relationships with organisations and governments which support modern day human exploitation'. They cite the university's 'silence' over the treatment of pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, and its profitable ties to the Chinese government, whose persecution of Uighurs has drawn international condemnation.
How many major institutions and companies have connections they would rather were not investigated too closely? Better perhaps to ask, how few don't? Where there's great wealth, there's all too often criminal ill-treatment. Today's abuses might not be as egregious in scale as in previous centuries, but there are countless ways in which to exploit workers, even in this country, let alone those with a poor human rights record.
Despite our faith in public and political transparency, it's safe to assume that ill-gotten gains continue to taint public life and private philanthropy, seeping into the bedrock of our society under the guise of donations, influence, endowments and bequests. As Edinburgh University's report makes clear, it is essential to look unflinchingly at the past and face up to its ongoing legacy. We should be equally forensic and unforgiving when scrutinising the present, but that's a great deal harder.