Content warning: mention of sexual assault
Behind the grand Georgian facades of Dundas Street, lies a secret from the darkest annals of British history. Unbeknownst to the thousands of locals, students, and tourists who stroll across the cobblestones, the New Town street takes its name from the eponymous 1st Viscount Melville Henry Dundas, infamous for delaying the end of slavery by calling for a more gradual abolition. The legacies of the British Empire permeate through spaces around us as part of everyday life, unchallenged or ignored by previous generations.
In Today’s Britain, though, this narrative is being confronted head-on, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Scotland’s role in the Empire has attracted especially heavy scrutiny as a new generation of scholars are suggesting it played a disproportionately large role in the British Empire. These uncomfortable silences are challenged in a new book, Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Slavery and Empire, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.
The editors cast a wide net: from Scottish ventures in slavery on Caribbean plantations right up to the presentation of artefacts that we see today in museums. The range of essays from an impressively diverse range of contributors makes it accessible to readers – academics and non-academics alike – who are keen to learn more about Scotland and Empire.
The book is filled with Scotch planters, slavers, and businessmen such as Aberdonian William Forbes, who made his fortune providing copper sheathing to the Royal Navy. This was vital for the Crown’s ships to safely patrol the shallow waters of Caribbean colonies. In 1783, Forbes paid for his vast Falkirk estate by producing a single, specially printed £10,000 banknote (over £1.24m today), prompting gasps from onlookers. Or Robert Wedderburn, the illegitimate child of Perthshire nobleman James Wedderburn’s rape of an enslaved woman. Robert vividly described the experiences of enslaved people in The Horrors of Slavery, which became a major abolitionist text. Rediscovering figures such as Forbes and Wedderburn as part of a new Scottish colonial history is a harrowing experience – the characters jump straight off the page and into the cities and countryside around us.
So what can shifting ideas of Scotland’s global history teach us? One clue is in the ‘transnational’ element of the book’s title. Transnational history is used as a tool for a fuller study and understanding of the myriad of economic, cultural, and social connections formed between metropole and colony. By linking disparate events from around the globe it becomes possible to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of under-emphasised parts of Scotland’s own national history. The aim is to attack our collective amnesia around episodes of empire and therefore change our perceptions and the spaces around us.
Several chapters focus on decolonisation projects that seek to re-centre the lives of enslaved people at museums, archives, and even the University of Edinburgh itself.
Attentive visitors to the National Museum of Scotland (once known as the ‘Royal Collection’) may have noticed an absence from its main hall. Last year, the Ni’isjoohl totem pole was returned to its original home with the Nisga’a nation of indigenous people in British Columbia, Canada. The 11-metre-tall pole had been centrally displayed in the Museum and leaves a sizable gap in its absence – its removal has fundamentally altered the physical and intellectual landscape of the museum – but ultimately the curators recognised it was time to return the stolen artefact to its original home.
This is testament to the changing nature of Scotland’s history where previously marginalised groups are now claiming their place. The process of sharing the stories of those who suffered under British, and especially Scottish, colonialism is only just beginning. Important works like Scotland’s Transnational Heritage mean it is as last possible to reclaim them from the deafening silence of history and reconcile Scotland with its imperial past.
Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery edited by Emma Bond and Michael Morris is available to purchase on the University of Edinburgh Press website.
“Edinburgh Castle” by Craigyc is licensed under CC BY 2.0