SCOTLAND’S top historian, Professor Sir Tom Devine, has launched a furious broadside at those whom he accuses of conducting the debate around slavery of being “almost completely ignorant” about its history.

Devine says that attacking statues of public figures connected to the 18th and 19th-century slave trade “achieves little and fails to acknowledge the real truth of historic Scottish involvement in the slave systems”.

“Targeting statues is a largely meaningless gesture which might make some people feel good about themselves for a little while,” he says. “This though, does little to address the very real and ongoing issue of racial prejudice in Scotland and throughout the UK.”

Devine spoke out at the end of a week in which attention in Scotland has been focused on the imposing statue of Henry Dundas in Edinburgh’s St Andrew Square which dominates the city centre.

Dundas, one of the most powerful figures in Scotland in the early-19th century, used his influence to delay the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by 15 years. Edinburgh City Council is to consider a plan to rededicate the statue to those who continued to suffer enslavement during this period.

Across the world other statues have been targeted in the wake of international protests about the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis two weeks ago. In Bristol last Sunday, a statue of the 19th-century slave trader, Edward Colston, was felled by protesters and flung into the harbour.

Devine insisted that focusing merely on statues and other artefacts from the past was misplaced. “If people want to talk about Scottish involvement in slavery they need to be aware of the full picture. In the 18th and early-19th centuries the Scottish nation as a whole was ‘complicit’ in slavery. The markets and financial returns from ‘the nefarious business’ helped to lay the foundation for modern Scotland and shaped the economy from which we now benefit.”

In 2015, Devine edited a collection of essays about Scotland’s historic involvement in the slave plantations. Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past demonstrated how all levels of Scottish society, from the early-18th century to the end of slavery in the British Empire, were directly or indirectly affected.

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“The new research showed that merely concentrating on prominent mercantile figures fails to take account of the fact that Scottish society as a whole benefited from chattel slavery: weavers of ‘slave cloth’ for the West Indies; fishermen who exported dried fish to feed the slaves; workers in the mills who processed the raw cotton harvested by slave labour; the crews of the vessels who sailed across the Atlantic; and the officials, lawyers and clergymen who administered the slave colonies and the spiritual needs of their owners.

“Only by acknowledging the full extent of this nation’s role in slavery can we begin to construct a meaningful programme of response today to that dark period of history.

‘’I am convinced that the evidence we now have suggests Scottish modernisation was even more dependent on the slavery factor than England. This was not because of involvement in the slave trade itself. Ships from Scottish ports rarely took part in that horrible commerce in human beings after 1730. Rather it was based on the overwhelming place of tobacco, sugar and then cotton in Scottish external trade. The remarkable boom in these commodities depended entirely on armies of black slave labourers.”

In 2018, Glasgow University published a report, based on more than two years of research, that revealed it benefited directly from the slave trade in Africa and the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Its audit put the figure at £200 million in today’s money.  Following this the university launched a wide-ranging “reparative justice programme” to include the creation of a centre for the study of slavery and to establish ties with the University of the West Indies.

The study also raised questions about how the wealth of Glasgow and other parts of Scotland was accumulated. Devine praised the university’s research and openness.  “The research confirms that man more Scots gained from the colonial trades based on slave labour than the tobacco lords and sugar princes who are now attracting such virulent media and political condemnation,” he said.

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“Therefore, it follows that today there must be institutions and families with links to those times and who prospered from the profits of chattel slavery. But so far, in Scotland, only the University of Glasgow has admitted how it benefited and how it intends to proceed by way of some form of recompense to the people of the West Indies. Why are others silent?

“One positive consequence of the current furore has been the triggering of a deeper awareness of the inequalities that black people in Britain and the US continue to encounter to this day and which have undeniable connections to slavery.  “Yet in order to begin to heal that wound in Scotland, a soundly-based and open knowledge of the nation’s central part in slave history is an essential precondition.”