Long read: How should Edinburgh represent the story of slavery?

A Tale of Five Monuments

Provost Robert Aldridge, Sir Geoff Palmer and former Edinburgh University Rector Dr Debora Kayembe at the event on Monday

It was the UN International Day of Remembrance for victims of the slave trade earlier this week and in St Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh, a small group gathered by the side of a 150-foot grey obelisk stretching up into the equally grey sky.  Provost Robert Aldridge, wearing his chain of office and holding a large umbrella, made a short speech. He said he was pleased “that despite some difficulties” a plaque referencing slavery is in place on the monument, and he is “proud that, in Edinburgh, we are having these difficult conversations’. 

Monument One: Melville Banned It

On a fluted stone pillar stands the elongated figure of Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville, and in front of it is the controversial plaque. The council managed to replace it on March 18, just in time for the ceremony - an earlier version was seized in a nocturnal raid by the Melville Monument Committee, led by the tenth Viscount Melville, who is angered that his ancestor’s honour is being impugned. 

The plaque says that Dundas, who amended William WIlberforce’s House of Commons motion on the abolition of slavery in 1792 by adding the word ‘gradually’, was

"Instrumental in deferring the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and… as a result of this delay, more than half a million enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic.”

The slave trade was abolished in Britain in 1807.

“Are you related to this marvellous man?”

The plaque seizure was the latest twist in the war of - mainly - words that has been going on about Henry Dundas for the last few years.  It is mirrored in Canada, where the city of Toronto has several streets named after him. This year, Yonge-Dundas Square is scheduled to become Sankofa Square. A wider renaming has been put on hold for reasons of cost and political backlash.

There the pushback is led by Jennifer Dundas, a former reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and a leading light of the Henry Dundas Committee, which sees Dundas as an abolitionist. She shared a recent post about his role in speaking up for human rights, which elicited the reply:

“Are you related to this marvellous man? I was unfamiliar with him before seeing your post. He was a badass, in the best possible way.” 

But it is not just the family of Dundas who have pushed back. Scottish historian Professor Tom Devine and Professor of Scottish History in New Zealand Angela McCarthy agree that it is ‘bad history’ to single Dundas out and blame him for prolonging slavery. They and other academics have argued that Professor Geoff Palmer, who fought for years to get this plaque put in place, is a retired professor of brewing not a historian, and therefore has no right to reassess the role of Dundas. 

A gradual approach

Palmer has always been a moderate voice in the debate about remembering slavery in Edinburgh. Some argue that if the Dundas family doesn’t want to see Henry ‘singled out’ , then taking the 14 foot statue down from the pillar would solve that issue. The plinth could be repurposed. But Palmer has maintained that Dundas should stay atop the pole  - he is part of our history. That is true in a personal as well as a general sense for him - Palmer’s great-grandfather Henry Larmond appears on the slave roll of Dundas’ ally Alexander Lindsay, the Earl of Balcarres who was governor of Jamaica. 

Palmer - who has made an extensive study of Dundas’ career - was chair of a committee on commemorating the legacy of slavery which initially included the tenth Viscount, Bobby Dundas. For years, they tried to agree on wording for a new plaque but every suggestion was rejected. Eventually, the committee was cancelled -  until the explosion of protest after the death of George Floyd. At a Black Lives Matter demonstration, Palmer gave a speech where he talked about the blocking of the plaque. The then council leader Adam McVey called him and they pushed on with the process, but without involving the Viscount. 

The resulting wording has been decried by the Dundas family and by historians, who continue to disparage Palmer’s scholarship and his right to make judgments about what Dundas did or didn’t do. In turn, Palmer called them ‘an academic racist gang’. Last week in a widely-read Substack putting the pro-Dundas case, writer Alex Massie countered that:

“I think it is more offensive to be called a racist than it is to be a black person in modern Britain.”

Geoff Palmer addresses the crowd at the ceremony (photo Ed City Council)

In Palmer’s corner

On Palmer’s side is Edinburgh City Council, under both its SNP and Labour leaders (it is now led by Cammy Day), the current chair of the Slavery Legacy Committee Irene Mosota and others including Professor Tommy Curry of Edinburgh University. (I heard a bit about Tommy “said differently” Curry, this being a catchphrase that stuck, when my son was a student at Edinburgh University. He said Curry was the best lecturer he encountered in four years.) A winner of the American Book Award, and various Philosophy awards, it is less easy for other academics to cast aspersions on Curry’s scholarship or his right to assess the role of Dundas in the slave trade. He is an expert in this field. 

Curry backs the wording on the plaque. But he also wants to broaden the debate so that it is about more than just Dundas. He argues that the idea of Black people being part of humanity and yet of an inferior strand, or race, emerges in part from the Scottish Enlightenment. In the US, for many years, researchers thought the buck stopped with Darwin and his misinterpreters, but the notion that Black people were close to the foot of a pyramid of humanity; that they were more stupid, their protesting voices could be ignored, and that their lives mattered less, were fostered here. 

Monument Two: How much did these ideas urn?

Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1785 to 1810, Dugald Stewart has an equally grandiose monument - a large urn surrounded by nine fluted pillars -  a few minutes walk from the Melville monument, on Calton Hill.

At the end of the 18th century, Stewart was teaching that chattel slavery was wrong. He was part of a group of thinkers - including James Beattie at Aberdeen - which demolished the notion that Black people were of a different species. Science showed that this was nonsense. 

Instead, Enlightenment thinkers saw the seeds of the subjugation of the Blacks in their own abilities. They argued, essentially, that millennia of living in hot countries had weakened their intellect and culture so that while they were humans, and individuals among them might be capable of improvement, they were generally inferior. 

Scottish Enlightenment figures were, therefore, in a very real sense, racist. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean that there was nothing good about the Scottish Enlightenment. We can admit for example that the early Labour movement was misogynistic without discrediting its role in improving the lot of working people  - there has to be room for nuance. 

“How could we do without sugar and rum?” 

The first slave in Scotland to gain his liberty was David Spense in 1770 after he escaped when his owner was trying to force him back to the West Indies. He was baptised and took refuge with a Kirk elder described as a ‘zealous seceder’ (an independence supporter). 

Spense wrote: "I am now by the Christian Religion Liberated and set at freedom from my old yoke bondage & slavery and by the Laws of this Christian land there is no Slavery nor vestige of Slavery allowed nevertheless you take it upon you to exercise your old Tyrannical Power over me and would dispose of me arbitrarily at your despotic will & Pleasure and for that end you threaten to send me abroad out of this Country to the West Indies and there dispose of me for money."

In the UK, Daniel Defoe in 1722, Jonathan Swift in 1726, and Samuel Johnson in 1752 all strongly expressed their views against slavery.  Later in the century, Ottobah Cugoano, also known as John Stuart after being bought by a Scottish plantation owner who took him into his household, wrote about the brutal cruelty he witnessed.

Kidnapped and taken to Grenada as a child, Ottobah recalled: “For eating a piece of sugar cane, some were cruelly lashed or struck over the face to knock their teeth out. Some of the stouter ones, I suppose often reproved and grown hardened and stupid with many cruel beatings and lashings, or perhaps faint with hunger and hard labour were often committing trespasses of this kind.. and some told me they had their teeth pulled out to deter others and to prevent them eating any more sugar cane.”

Olaudah Equiano lectured about slavery across Britain. Josiah Wedgewood produced anti-slavery medals showing a man in chains and the legend ‘Am I Not A Man and a Brother?” in 1787. The poet William Cowper wrote of slaves:

“I pity them but must keep mum for how could we do without sugar and rum?” 

There were no pro-slavery societies

The point is - there were no pro-slavery societies. People who wanted to carry on benefitting from slavery for as long as possible counseled delay and inaction - that was the only realistic course. It would not have been tenable for Dundas or any other public figure to argue in favour of slavery. In that sense, there are analogies with climate change. Like slavery, burning millions of years’ worth of fossil fuels in a century has created enormous profits. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher publicly accepted that climate change was real and that protecting the balance of nature was the great challenge of the times. Since that dropping of the penny, it has become increasingly impossible for any public figure who wants to be taken seriously to dispute the reality of climate change.  But how often have you heard a government minister say that while they are - absolutely - committed to net zero they realise it can’t be done overnight? It has to be done gradually.

Dundas himself had a small role in the freeing of Joseph Knight, a slave held in Scotland who took his case to the Supreme Court and won in 1778. Dundas advised Knight’s counsel in his private capacity as an advocate. This ruling meant slavery was not legally recognised in Scotland. It went further than an English judgement of 1772.

There is no dispute, however, that it was Dundas who moved the amendment to Wilberforce’s anti-slavery motion. His defenders argue that he knew the House of Lords would have killed it as it stood so he did his best to modify it sensibly. He was an abolitionist - but a pragmatic one. But, as in the case of climate change, fostering delay is the only option for people who want to keep on making money. Is it not more consistent with the record to read Dundas as a pragmatist in the other cause?  

A master of manipulation

Dundas stalks the index pages of any history of the period - Pitt’s right-hand man, a finger in every pie. He was involved in the opium wars with China, with the East India Company. He argued for the strongest possible military response to the American insurrection. He ordered that slaves should be procured for the British army, played a role in Britain's attack on Haiti, in an attempt to put down the slave rebellion there. He was deeply concerned with Britain’s prosecution of the French Revolutionary Wars  - the war being a major reason he gave for the necessity of a gradual approach to abolishing the slave trade. 

Dundas was also a supreme media manipulator in both Scotland and the UK.  “The Thunderer in the Making’ a history of the Times newspaper, quotes a secret report to Dundas in 1793 from his undercover operator Charles Stuart. He wrote of the importance of propaganda over news:

“They do not realise that while they circulate news, the others circulate sentiments…a shower that falls and nourishes and brings forth fruits…

“The truth is everything is to be managed by managing the press. The artillery of the French could not be managed a month unless they managed the artillery of the press. I look upon the press as fire to the gun or potfire to the cannon. Whenever I hear of a French victory, I in general ascribe it to their artful circulation of journals and bulletins through every municipality and in every department.. When I hear of the French casting cannons, I think nothing of that at all, providing you can only prevent them from casting types..” 

At home in Scotland, Dundas charged his heiress wife Elizabeth Rennie with adultery. She forfeited her right to see her children and her whole fortune (East India Company), including Melville Castle, to him. At work, he was busy bedding in Unionist sentiment and furthering Unionist interests in a Scotland still riven after the Treaty of Union and the aftermath of Culloden. His career ended in impeachment - he was accused of misappropriating Naval funds. Maybe that was political faction fighting - but there was certainly an inexhaustible demand for money to maintain his position at the top of the greasy pole. 

Westminster in the days of Dundas was far from democratic. MPs were generally elected by buying support from the small number of people who were eligible to vote. That was particularly the case in Scotland - in his day Dundas commanded the votes of every one of Scotland’s MPs. Voting against the man known as ‘the uncrowned King of Scotland” was not an option. One of the other lines on the plaque in front of the Melville Monument says “Dundas suppressed dissent in Scotland.” 

Monument Three: The verdict of the future

Down the hill from Dugald Stewart, in the Old Calton Burial Ground is another obelisk, the Martyrs’ Monument. This is to five members of Edinburgh’s society of the Friends of Liberty, which campaigned for universal suffrage. The men, two born in Scotland and three in England, were influenced by the ideas of the American and French revolutions but they were arguing for reform, not armed insurrection. Nevertheless, they were arrested, tried and transported in 1793, They mostly died within a few years - only one survived to return home. 

Inscribed on the monument are the words of William Skirving at his trial, welcoming the verdict of the future on the injustice of his present:  “I Know That This …Will Be Re-judged”.  

Monument Four: All Men Are Created Equal

There is another monument in the Old Calton Burial Ground  - as far as I know it is the only statue of a Black person in Edinburgh. It shows a barefoot, nameless slave clinging to the base of the American Civil War Memorial. The man has one arm raised, pointing at Abraham Lincoln and the sky. 

The American colonists issued their Declaration of Independence in 1776, saying:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Enslaved black people believed that this would extend to them. They thought liberation was around the corner. The Founding Fathers considered this proposition - but rejected it for one reason. Money. George Washington, for example, didn’t want to free the slaves because it would have bankrupted his plantation. The value of slaves in the US exceeded all other forms of wealth. 

Between the Declaration of Independence and the passing of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, in 1865, passed almost a century. During that era, the excuses and justifications for slavery that had been used in earlier times fell away. That was when the pernicious ideas of racial difference and what that stood for really started to bed in.

Five:  Feet of Clay

There is a statue of David Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Many people assume it is Victorian but it dates from 1996 and is by neo-Classical sculptor, an admirer of the style of art usually associated with totalitarian regimes, Sandy Stoddart. A godlike Hume is shown wearing a toga  - his toe is bright from rubbing by Philosophy students who apparently believe this will bring them luck in their exams.

To Tommy Curry’s point that the kernel of the idea that there is a hierarchy of races lies partly in the Enlightenment. Have we in Scotland - and the UK really looked at the mistakes made by our cherished intellectual heroes and how these were made use of to justify the unjustifiable?

On a recent tour of Oxford, I was surprised to find virtually no mention of its involvement with slavery. It reminded me of the possibly apocryphal story that if anyone dies at Disneyland, their body has to be smuggled off-site because nobody can die in the Magic Kingdom. Once I had noticed Oxford’s deafening silence on slavery, it started to make the place feel a bit like a theme park of white privilege. 

A wider engagement with the reality of the past is going on in Edinburgh - as it is in Glasgow, where the University runs a reparative justice programme with the University of the West Indies.

But how should Edinburgh represent this growing awareness in its cityscape? Recently, Hume’s name was removed from an Edinburgh University tower because of the racist views he expressed - which were part of an international conversation that became the theory of race. The building is now known as ‘40 George Square’. This seems an unimaginative change - I agree with Palmer that increasing our understanding of the past is preferable to airbrushing it. A couple of years ago, a short film by musician and artist Kayus Bankole called ‘Sugar For Your Tea’ was projected onto the City Chambers - providing a powerful and memorable reframing. 

Surely inviting new perspectives like this, and exposing flaws in the arguments of key thinkers like Hume, is more in keeping with the best traditions of Scottish Enlightenment than worshipping at their feet?

(This post was amended on March 29 to add a mention of Dundas’ role in the Joseph Knight case.)