9. British universities and Caribbean slavery

Nicholas Draper

Implicit in the title of the colloquium on which this volume is based – ‘History, Heritage and Ideology’ – is a declension: I/we do history; you do heritage; they do ideology. This was not intentional, I am sure. But it is the more revealing for that. ‘They’ – the unpaid historians and community activists who are held to do ideology – were not there with us in the room, which comprised academic historians, heritage professionals and university administrators. I do not represent the ‘they’, but I do speak to some of them. And I can report that there is mounting anger over the ways in which universities – and not only universities – are failing to deal with their histories of entanglement with British colonial slavery as one component of Britain’s wider colonial past. David Cannadine has suggested that this anger flowed from an infantile fury at the discovery that the past was often cruel and violent.¹ I do not think this is correct. The anger flows from the continued complacent and uncritical representation and celebration of that often cruel and violent past as progressive, liberal, enlightened. Unless there are changes in approach, unless universities lead in the research and exploration of their own histories, there is likely to be increased polarization between inside and outside groups, growing frustration on both sides and ultimately the eruption of destructive conflicts in which universities, driven onto the back foot, impugn the legitimacy of their critics and further entrench versions of themselves that reject the values of evidence-based analysis and of engagement with society which supposedly they embody.

It does not have to be this way. The experience of the U.S. shows not only what happens when universities remain passive until the storm breaks over their heads (for example, the recent conflicts at Georgetown and Yale²), but also what can be achieved by universities taking on the responsibility for their own history. The process undertaken by Brown under Ruth Simmons more than a decade ago, and which among other thing led to the establishment of the ‘Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice’ under Tony Bogue, appears exemplary in this context.³

Universities and other institutions in Britain⁴ might well respond that yes, they can see a problem in the U.S., where slavery was embedded, but Britain was (and remains) in a different position, with slavery having been purely a colonial phenomenon, with no history of chattel slavery in the metropole. Distance certainly insulated metropolitan Britain from the realities of slavery in the past, but that distantiation is unlikely to save universities today, because of course slavery came home to Britain, and to British higher education, in many different ways. And universities are especially powerful sites for the analysis of ‘the debt to slavery’: if institutions which in their values and aspirations appear to represent the antithesis of the slave-system owe their existence, maintenance or growth to that system, what does that mean for our collective assumptions about Britain’s liberal past? And what does it mean for our present if universities continue to ignore the parts of their history that are less convenient, or to deny the relevance of these pasts?

If work is to be undertaken by British universities on their linkages with slavery, it will need to be both precise and comprehensive about the nature of such linkages: those were the objectives and the methods of the Brown report. A comprehensive account of connections to slavery for any British institution would encompass not only its linkages to slave-ownership but also its relationship with the financial, cultural and physical legacies of the concentric circles of involvement centred on the slave-economy: the slave-trade and slave-traders; the supply and fitting out of slave-trade vessels; the supply of trade goods for West Africa; the export of manufactures to the slave-colonies themselves; the commodity flows in sugar, tobacco and other goods produced by enslaved Africans; the financial structures and institutions, the development of which was in whole or in part a function of the slave-economy; and, perhaps most potently of all, the intellectual formations surrounding ‘race’ which were formed and re-formed in the era of British colonial slavery and its aftermath.

The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (L.B.S.), and the evidence it provides, is focused on the owners of enslaved Africans and on the immediate financial claims of mortgagees and legatees secured on the bodies and lives of the enslaved and their unborn children. It thus represents only one piece of a much bigger picture. But the evidence we are building, of who actually owned or mortgaged enslaved people in the period from c. 1763 to 1834, can be used as a start-point for tabling the kinds of issues raised more broadly by slavery for the histories of our British universities. Conventionally, the focus in such explorations is on benefactors – Eric Williams famously foregrounded the case of the Codrington Library at All Souls as an example.⁵ Founders and benefactors are indeed central. But in this paper I intend to raise also three other possible types of linkage between universities and slave-ownership: universities themselves as slave-owners; what would now be called ‘faculty members’ as slave-owners; and students as slave-owners. In no way is this intended as a comprehensive survey. Instead, it focuses on a number of cases that have been discovered or highlighted in L.B.S.’s work to date, effectively as a by-product of our research. We have not set out to investigate British universities specifically: instead, we have logged the instances in which universities appear in the findings of our broader cataloguing of British slave-ownership.

Founders and benefactors as slave-owners

Founders, either as prime movers in the organization of a wider effort to establish new educational institutions or as funders of such establishments, appear to create an especially intimate linkage between a university and a given form of wealth, the very existence of that institution being embedded in the material interests of its founders. By definition, the oldest Scottish universities (St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow), and Oxford and Cambridge, founded before the inception of British colonial slavery, lie outside this category, but the universities founded in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century potentially fall into this analysis. With the broadening of tertiary education in the Victorian period, the question arises as to what extent and in what ways slave-ownership can be relevant to these institutions, established after the end of British colonial slavery in 1838.

King’s College London, founded in 1828 as an Anglican response to the godless ‘London University’ (now University College London) and granted a Royal Charter in 1829, raised funds through soliciting donations and by selling shares of £100 each, and its linkages to slavery can be explored through an analysis of the lists of donors and subscribers. The initial core funding came from the Anglican hierarchy led by the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, who gave £1,000 each: these senior clerics were not slave-owners, although as is widely known the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts founded by their predecessors owned the Codrington estates on Barbados and the enslaved people upon them. But the wider subscription lists included (alongside William Wilberforce, who gave £50) more than fifty slave-owners and as many again who were linked to slave-ownership as trustees, agents or family members. Among the former were John Gladstone (a major slave-owner in British Guiana, and purchaser of one share of £100); John Bolton (the Liverpool slave-owner and slave-trader, responsible for shipping more than 20,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, who gave £100); and the alderman and M.P. John Atkins (who owned more than 500 men, women and children in Jamaica and who gave £100 and subscribed for two shares of £100). In a signal of financial pressures on Jamaica slave-owners in the last years of slavery, Charles Nicholas Pallmer M.P. for Surrey, previously chairman of the ‘Standing Committee of the West India Planters and Merchants’ lobbying group between 1818 and 1820 and owner of hundreds of enslaved people in Jamaica, made a donation of £100 and paid the first part of his subscription to five shares of £100 but then appears to have reneged on the £475 balance of his subscription. Of the 907 individuals who gave over £50 or bought at least one share of £100, some 7 per cent were close enough to the slave-economy to appear in the slave compensation records.⁶ These also included as an annual subscriber of £5, Henry Phillpotts, then dean of Chester and later the bishop of Exeter (whose subscription fell into arrears), often characterized misleadingly as a slave-owner: in fact he was trustee for the earl of Dudley, who was himself a subscriber to University College London and who owned at his death in 1833 some 665 enslaved people on three estates in Jamaica. Although the earl of Dudley was not representative of the founders of U.C.L., either in his aristocratic status or in his slave-ownership, their number also included John Smith, of the banking firm of Smith, Payne & Smith, which lent heavily to the West India merchant firm of Manning & Anderdon (whose senior partner William Manning, subscribed to one £100 share in King’s College London). Manning & Anderdon had itself become intensely engaged in the slave-economy: to date, we have found sixteen separate estates with over 1,500 enslaved people of which the firm was owner, lessee or mortgagee-in-possession between the abolition of the slave-trade and the abolition of slavery. When Manning & Anderdon failed in 1831, Smith Payne & Smith moved to secure its exposure by seizing estates and enslaved people and mortgages over estates and enslaved people, becoming prominent claimants in the slave compensation process of the 1830s.

Universities founded in the later Victorian era, after the end of slavery, pose different questions in their relationship to slave-ownership (and to slavery more widely). At Liverpool, key early physical developments included:

A large engineering laboratory (the gift of Sir A. B. Walker, 1889); the main Victoria building, including a fine library presented by Sir Henry Tate, and the clock tower erected from the civic subscription to commemorate the jubilee of 1887 (opened 1892); magnificent laboratories of physiology and pathology, given by Rev. S. A. Thompson Yates (opened 1895); and a handsome botanical laboratory given by Mr. W. P. Hartley (1902).⁷

The name of Sir Henry Tate draws reflexive responses connecting him with slavery. He was an adolescent when British colonial slavery ended, so the connection must lie in (1) his sourcing (if such there was) of slave-grown sugar in other European colonies after British emancipation; and/or (2) his more general exploitation of patterns of production and demand in the sugar market, undoubtedly established through slavery in the two centuries prior to his birth. Either or both of these might be valid: but Tate was certainly was not a slave-owner or descended from them. The connection to slave-ownership for the University of Liverpool in this context runs in fact through S. A. Thompson Yates, who was born S. A. Thompson, the son of Samuel Henry Thompson (1807–92) and Elizabeth Yates (1815–92). Elizabeth Yates in turn was the eldest daughter of Joseph Brooks Yates.

The O.D.N.B. says of Joseph Brooks Yates:

After leaving Eton about 1796, he joined the firm of a West Indies merchant, in which he became a partner, remaining with it until shortly before he died. He was one of the leading reformers of Liverpool, and in the years after 1815 was a prominent figure in local campaigns and petitions in favour of civil liberties, adherence to constitutional rights, and democratic reform. He was also a liberal supporter of the city’s literary and scientific institutions. In February 1812 he joined with Thomas Stewart Traill in founding the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society, of which he was president for a total of twelve years. He was president of the Liverpool Royal Institution in 1842–3, and was also one of the founders of the Southern and Toxteth Hospital at Liverpool.⁸

All this is true but Yates also owned or held mortgages over 1,000 enslaved people at the time of Emancipation. It is his name that is carried and perpetuated by the building, and possibly his money that in part funded it. S. A. Thompson Yates’s mother was co-heiress of her father, inheriting one-fifth of Joseph Brook Yates’s estate, while her husband Samuel Henry Thompson was executor of Yates’s will. Samuel Henry Thompson himself died a millionaire in 1892: he (as was his father before him) was a long-term partner in the banking firm of Heywood & Co. (a predecessor of Barclays), a bank founded by the Heywood brothers, ‘experienced in the African trade’, as the history of the bank puts it – they were slave-traders. Without access to the family financial records – and Checkland’s biography of the Gladstones appears unique among histories of slave-owning families in the clarity with which it could set out the building of the family fortune – it is not possible to specify the extent of the flow of wealth to S. A. Thompson Yates from Joseph Brooks Yates’s slave-ownership, as opposed to the flow from a banking business founded on the slave-trade. But in either case there appears to be a possible issue posed by the name of the Thompson Yates Building, which remains part of the University of Liverpool.

The history of the University of Liverpool goes on to say:

During the same period [1889–1902] eight additional chairs were endowed, and many lectureships and scholarships were founded. Throughout the early history of the college it had rested mainly on the support of a comparatively small group of friends; among those whose munificence rendered possible the rapid development of the college, special mention should be made, in addition to those already named, of the fifteenth and sixteenth Earls of Derby, successive presidents of the college, both of whom founded chairs; of Mr. George Holt, most princely of the early benefactors; of Sir John Brunner, Mr. Holbrook Gaskell, and Mr. Thomas Harrison, all of whom founded chairs; and of Mr. E. K. Muspratt, Mr. John Rankin, Mr. J. W. Alsop, Mr. A. F. Warr, Mr. C. W. Jones, Sir Edward Lawrence.⁹

Names on this last list highlight some of the commercial connections of Liverpool to the slave-economy beyond slave-ownership. George Holt was a shipping magnate, as were his brothers Alfred and Philip. The three men were sons of a major cotton broker, also named George Holt who died in 1861 and whose trade in that period was by definition in slave-grown cotton from the southern U.S. Sir Edward Lawrence, who died in 1909, was a director of the Anglo-Confederate Trading Co. in the era of the American Civil War. In 1862 he registered the blockade-runner Banshee in the name of Edward Lawrence & Co. and in 1863 the blockade runner Wild Dayrell for the Anglo-Confederate Trading Co.¹⁰

For British universities, the circle of benefactors will be much larger than that of founders. Every university extant in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is likely to have received gifts derived from slavery. Eric Williams’s example of the Codrington Library is re-used repeatedly – and it is indeed a powerful expression of the connection of civilization and barbarism – but it is not an isolated example, instead representing a wider phenomenon whose scale at present remains unknown, because gifts that are less spectacular than the Codrington Library are not always – or indeed not often – visible from the outside, although cumulatively they might dwarf it in importance. It is only because in the course of L.B.S.’s work we have reviewed his will that we know, for example, that John Dawkins, a fellow of All Souls for almost fifty years, a forebear of Professor Richard Dawkins and the owner of 475 enslaved men, women and children in Trelawney, Jamaica, left 200 guineas to All Souls at his death in 1844. In the absence of work by the beneficiary institutions themselves, it is not possible to get a handle on the true extent and significance of such gifts: and the risk arises that assumptions are made that in fact overstate the importance of this giving.

Some similar gifts are known. Eric Williams highlighted the Hibbert Trust, as it became known, that among other things offered divinity scholarships. Candidates would only be considered if their degree came from an institution such as London University ‘where degrees were granted without subscription to the articles of religion’. The trust was funded by Robert Hibbert in 1847 with U.S. $50,000 in Ohio stock and £8,000 in railway shares. Hibbert had petitioned parliament in 1833 opposing Emancipation, even with compensation for his 560 enslaved people, whom he valued at £70,000: the emancipation plan he said would be ‘utterly ruinous to himself, and to others who are similarly situated’.¹¹

At St. David’s Lampeter (now University of Wales Trinity St. David), the Phillips Collection comprises over 22,500 books donated from 1834 onwards by Thomas Phillips; he also endowed six scholarships, left St. David’s shares in the London & Westminster banks worth £7,000, and established in his will a chair of natural science there. Phillips has an entry in the O.D.N.B. as ‘philanthropist and surgeon’ that describes his career in India and – interestingly – at Botany Bay. What it does not say is that this Nabob had invested part of his imperial wealth in buying the Camden Park estate and enslaved people attached to it on St. Vincent, reportedly for over £40,000, c. 1820, or that he then purchased and moved a further eighty-five enslaved people from Cariacou to the estate, or that the number of enslaved people on the estate declined from 231 in 1822 to 164 at the time of compensation, with fifty-five deaths (one quarter of the enslaved population) recorded between 1822 and 1825 and another thirty-nine deaths (a further one quarter) between 1825 and 1828.

Where connections are recognized, the reading of some of the philanthropic legacies can reproduce a culture of abolitionism in which slavery is elided. At Aberdeen, Hugh Fraser Leslie reportedly commissioned the building of the Powis Gates in 1834. According to an Aberdeen University walking tour:

Turn left along the High Street and, about 50 yards down, pause to look across the street at this imposing gateway. This has no original link with King’s but was erected in 1834 by Hugh Fraser Leslie of Powis – the lively owner of a straggling estate lying to the West of Old Aberdeen. The minaret towers of the structure may suggest a Turkish influence. Above the arch is the coat of arms of the Fraser Leslie family. Another shield at the back carries busts of three black slaves, commemorating the family’s link with the grant of freedom to the slaves on their Jamaica plantations. Mr. Leslie’s fantasy gates may have been designed to underline his view that he was as important as the College.¹²

Hugh Fraser Leslie had managed his own estates in Jamaica in the 1830s and campaigned for further compensation for the early end of Apprenticeship of formerly enslaved field workers in 1838, having described anti-slavery campaigners as ‘the washings and scrapings of the manufacturing districts’.¹³

Universities as slave-owners

Perhaps the most vividly damaging connection in the U.S. has been with the ownership and sale of enslaved people by the universities themselves, a history recently surfacing at Georgetown. To date we have no evidence of direct ownership of enslaved people by universities or colleges in Britain, in contrast to other institutions such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts or Greenwich Hospital. But a word of caution is in order here. The slave compensation records, one of our major archival sources, show individuals rather than institutions. Hence, as noted above, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was compensated through its treasurer, James Heywood Markland (who also was active in anti-abolition campaigning as a member of the Literary Committee of the Society of West India Merchants and Planters in the 1820s). So institutions may lie behind individual names of slave-owners. One award that has aroused our interest in this context, although there is no direct evidence to date that it is indeed such a case, is the Revd. John Wilson, who had been senior bursar of Queen’s College Oxford in 1830–1 and 1831–2 and was junior bursar in 1832–3, when he bought Olivees and the more than 100 enslaved people on the estate in St. Kitts, for whom he was compensated as ‘Rev. John Wilson of Queen’s College Oxford’ in 1835.¹⁴

In another case, a contingent legacy appears not to have been triggered. John Lawrence Aikenhead matriculated Trinity College, Oxford, on 14 May 1752 aged 17, took a B.C.L. in 1759, and a D.C.L. 8th July 1773. Aikenhead had inherited the Stirling Castle estate and the enslaved people attached to it in Jamaica from his father William in 1760. When he himself died in 1780 he left Stirling Castle and the enslaved people attached to it to his second son, also named William, with annuities to his wife and daughters chargeable upon it; in default of issue it would pass to Robert Graham and his heirs, then to Robert Hamilton and his heirs, and in default of any of the above to be sold by Trinity College Oxford to (re)build the College according to the plans by Sir Christopher Wren ‘as also’ to buy up houses to enlarge college garden, and if Trinity declined to take on the trust the estate was to be sold by the City of Bath to construct ‘a more elegant and extensive pump room, public room ... in the Lower Town of Bath’ under the design or direction of ‘Mr. Wyatt’. With such a chain of contingencies, it was unlikely that Trinity would have inherited the enslaved people.

‘Faculty members’ as slave-owners

Universities and their constituent bodies construct their histories in part through their commemoration and celebration of select individuals among the faculty. In 2007, the University of Cambridge, in common with many other educational and cultural institutions, marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave-trade:

Some of the Cambridge colleges that helped give birth to Britain’s anti-slavery movement will host an array of distinguished speakers this weekend as part of ongoing celebrations to mark the anniversary of slavery’s abolition.

Among those giving presentations will be Professor Ruth Simmons, the first African-American woman to head an Ivy League University in the United States, and Mark Malloch-Brown, the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. Their visits form part of a series of events to mark both the 200th anniversary of abolition in 1807, and the university’s special connections with the anti-slavery movement. In the late eighteenth century, Cambridge was home to an influential group of academics, businesspeople, traders and policy-makers, who worked to end the slave trade. As early as 1784, the university’s vice chancellor, Peter Peckard, also master of Magdalene College, was speaking out against the lucrative Atlantic slave trade and set an essay competition with the question ‘Who has the right to enslave someone against their will?’ The winner of that competition, an undergraduate at St. John’s College called Thomas Clarkson, then spent seven years lecturing all over the country to fuel public indignation against the slave trade.¹⁵

Cambridge is understandably proud of Peter Peckard, who appears on Clarkson’s hydrographic map as the source of one of the key streams that led to the abolition of the slave-trade. But to what extent is Peckard more representative of late eighteenth-century Cambridge – or Magdalene – than his near predecessor, the pluralist Dr. George Sandby, the master between 1760 and 1774, and chancellor of the diocese of Norwich in 1768, of whom the Ipswich Journal reported on 13 May 1758: ‘On Tuesday was married the Rev. George Sandby, Rector of Denton in Norfolk, to Miss Acres, an accomplished young lady with a genteel fortune’? Her genteel fortune was derived from slave-ownership in Jamaica. Sandby himself appeared as the signatory of a deed for the lease of Tryall estate and the enslaved people attached to it in Jamaica in 1762. In the 1830s, the couple’s son the Revd. George Sandby shared in the compensation paid for the enslaved people on the Tryall estate.

The financial benefits of slave-ownership could, of course, pass separately from ownership itself. Under the will of Walter Kennedy of Suffolk Street, Charing Cross, Middlesex, which was proved on 20 February 1776, Kennedy left his Tobago property – land and enslaved people – in trust (his trustees included his brother William Kennedy, professor of Greek at the University of Aberdeen), with instructions to sell the estates and pay £10,000 to his wife Ann Catharina Wried with the remainder to support his son Hugh John in his minority and then to be his, with contingent remainder to William Kennedy and their two sisters.

The legacies of slave-ownership span generations. The recent biography of the historian and London School of Economics lecturer and professor R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) characterizes his background as ‘a family history based on the careful accretion of wealth and local status from relatively humble origins. Like many entrepreneurial families who came to prominence during the Industrial Revolution, later generations purchased landed estates and were enabled by inheritance to divert from business and commerce to scholarship and the church’. In the course of this discussion, the study identifies Tawney’s paternal grandmother, Susannah James Bernard, by name.¹⁶ It does not mention that she was co-heiress of her father Dr. Charles Edward Bernard, who was a slave-owner from a dynasty of Jamaica slave-owners and was himself born in Jamaica and died after the end of slavery, having received compensation for 350 enslaved people. Tawney’s connection with slave-ownership might not tell us much about Tawney: but it tells us something important about the way in which British history is constructed if such connections are omitted in a case-study of class-formation in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Edward Turner was the first professor of chemistry at University College, appointed in 1827, and author of ‘one of the best of all nineteenth-century textbooks of chemistry’, Elements of Chemistry (1827).¹⁷ ‘He was born in Jamaica, of pure English blood, eldest son of a prosperous island proprietor there, in the thriving slavery days of our West Indian colonies’, according to a late nineteenth-century memoir that epitomizes the rewriting of the history of British colonial slavery to portray Emancipation as a mistake that ruined the colonies or more specifically ruined the former slave-owners and their families.¹⁸ Five of his siblings – although not Edward Turner himself – shared in the compensation awards for the family’s Dunbarton estate, and Turner held a power of attorney in the compensation process for his brother.

Universities also made, and continue to make, discretionary choices about whom to celebrate with honorary degrees. James Ewing of Strathleven, a major mercantile figure in the formation of modern Glasgow and a slave-owner in Jamaica, was awarded an LL.D by the University of Glasgow in 1835. The slave-owner John Gray (who died c. 1769) was rector (largely a ceremonial position) of Marischal College, Aberdeen between 1762 and his death, although he lived near London on Richmond Hill. Edward, later Sir Edward, Cust, the M.P. and courtier, was awarded an Hon. D.C.L. from the University of Oxford in 1853. He had married Mary Anne Boode, from a slave-owning family in British Guiana, through whom he became an owner of Greenwich Park estate and the enslaved people on it, leading him to write in 1835 to one of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation from his home at Leasowe Castle: ‘Dear Stevenson [sic]: how much might I hope to receive? I trust I am not intruding an impertinent request ... I see your Brother in Law at Holkham received one royal duchess with very great splendour’.¹⁹

Undergraduates as slave-owners

A conventional although not exclusive orientation in contemporary contention over the legacies of the past is conflict between students and authorities. But undergraduates were historically (and in some cases remain) members of the elite society around them, and many slave-owning families sent sons to university in Britain. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England this meant Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes accompanied by attendance at the Inns of Court. In some cases, there was dynastic continuity as multiple generations attended the same university and often the same college: eleven members of the Beckford family matriculated in Oxford in the century between 1726 and 1828, of whom four were at Balliol and three at Christ Church. In other cases, it appears clear that the family was seeking to cement its next generation in the networks of power and privilege in Britain. Benjamin Amory of St. Kitts, for example, in his will proved in 1819, stated that he wished his son John James Amory to be educated at either Oxford or Cambridge and to have an allowance of £400 p.a. while he was there.²⁰

It is not possible at present to quantify the importance of slave-owning families to Oxbridge colleges, because we have not undertaken the systematic analysis possible using the alumni rolls of the two universities. Instead we have recorded where known the slave-owners who had attended either of the institutions. This provides rich anecdotal material and a sketch, possibly misleading, of the minimum scale of slave-ownership among undergraduates. To date we have identified almost 400 slave-owners matriculating at Oxford or Cambridge in the period 1763–1834, with a slight preponderance towards Oxford. One quarter of the identified Oxford slave-owners were at Christ Church and nearly half of the Cambridge slave-owners were at Trinity. These concentrations might suggest priorities for systematic work that would look at the status of the undergraduates (that is, pensioner or commoner versus fellow-commoner) and their contribution of fees to their college (and university), relative to the endowments of the colleges.

In the case of Oxford and Cambridge, it appears that slave-ownership made the undergraduates; in the case of Scotland, it appears that the universities made slave-owners, in the sense that the greater vocational emphasis equipped young male Scots for roles in the slave-economy, especially as doctors but also initially as book-keepers and clerks. Thomas Jarvis, for example, had an M.A. from Glasgow and an M.D. from Edinburgh, moving in 1744 to Leyden before going to Antigua, where he practised and through marriage took ownership of Thibou’s estate and the enslaved people on it, later becoming president of His Majesty’s Council. Again, there is a need for systematic work on the rolls of the Scottish universities to determine the extent of these connections to slavery.

Conclusion

The concerns raised in this paper are not confined to higher education: they apply mutatis mutandis to the public schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where anecdotal material suggests that ‘West Indian’ pupils formed a meaningful component of the school rolls and slave-owners contributed financial and cultural resources. Llandovery College was founded as the Welsh Educational Institution in 1847 by the former slave-owner Thomas Phillips after his offer to endow a chair in Welsh at St. David’s Lampeter was turned down. He endowed closed scholarships at Jesus College, Oxford, for Llandovery pupils and he gave 7,000 books to the school. Dollar Academy was founded by the slave-trader John McNabb, who left money for that purpose on 1802. The Revd. David Laing, who co-founded Queen’s College, Harley Street and assisted Miss Buss in the foundation of North London Collegiate (where six Laing Scholarships were funded in his memory in the gift of his widow) was the son of a slave-owner in Jamaica and a trustee of the Mount Lebanus estate. At St. John’s Leatherhead, Henry Dawes gave £2,500 for the purchase of the land at Leatherhead in 1867: the Henry Dawes Centre, the school’s new classroom block named after the nineteenth-century donor, was opened on 13 October 2010 by H.R.H. the duchess of Gloucester, the school’s patron. The slave-owner Anthony Morris Storer left his library as well as his prints collection to Eton College. According to the O.D.N.B. entry for Storer, ‘the collection [of 2,800 volumes] contains thirty-four incunabula, including three Caxtons and five of the Aldine incunabula. There are numerous first editions of Greek and Latin classics, Italian literature and early English plays. There are 388 quartos of the last, as well as the first three folios of Shakespeare. A recent keeper at Eton called the collection “the crowning glory” of the library’.²¹

Widening the field of analysis for slave-connections for the universities themselves would identify for example those descendants of ancestors engaged in the slave-economy who physically shaped new and old universities, such as Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of Old Quadrangle at Manchester in 1903 (which is contended to have given rise to the concept of the ‘red brick’ university), the son of another Alfred (1798–1873), a cotton broker and partner in Nicholas Waterhouse & Sons who claimed slave compensation as a creditor of a large estate in British Guiana; or Sir George Gilbert Scott, whose middle name honoured his mother’s descent from a slave-owning family on Antigua and their eponymous estate, and who oversaw the later phase of the restoration of the chapel at All Souls. It would take in slave-grown crops other than sugar and coffee, notably tobacco: the Wills building at Bristol is beginning to become the centre of attention on this score. And it would take in the most problematic intellectual legacies of slavery, including the invention of ‘race’, so central a legacy at University College London through the work of Galton.

More broadly still looms the issue of colonialism as such. Addressing these histories is a daunting prospect, and it is not for me to prescribe what forms the exploration should take or what subsequent steps will be appropriate. But it is not a safe assumption, looking at the U.S., that it can’t happen here. If nothing is done in Britain, we will all be overtaken, as we will deserve to be.

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¹ See D. Cannadine, ‘Introduction’ above, pp. 8–9.

² ‘Yale grapples with ties to slavery in debate over a college’s name’, The New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/nyregion/yale-in-debate-over-calhoun-college-grapples-with-ties-to-slavery.html?_r=0> [accessed 3 Aug. 2017]; Georgetown University, ‘Georgetown apologizes for 1838 sale of 272 slaves, dedicates buildings’ <https://www.georgetown.edu/news/liturgy-remembrance-contrition-hope-slavery> [accessed 7 Aug. 2017]; C. S. Wilder, Ebony and Ivy (2013).

³ Brown University, Slavery and Justice, Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice <http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice> [accessed 3 Aug. 2017].

⁴ This paper is confined to England, Scotland and Wales, and does not consider universities in Ireland, although the Legacies of British Slaveholding project itself does embrace slave-owners in Ireland.

⁵ E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994 [1944]), p. 90.

⁶ N. Draper, The Price of Emancipation (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 331–4 shows 76 individual subscribers and donors who appeared in the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, of whom five were only tentatively identified as the same person in the two sets of data. A more definitive subsequent review based on ‘List of donation and subscriptions of £100 each’ in The Statement of Proceedings Towards the Establishment of King’s College 1830 (1830), pp. 57–95 appears in M. Watson, ‘The imprint of slavery on London: King’s College London’ (unpublished University College London M.A. thesis, 2014). The underlying work for this thesis showed an adjusted total of 105 donors and subscribers (out of 1489) sufficiently connected with the slave-economy to appear in the compensation records.

⁷ ‘Liverpool: the University’, in Victoria County History of Lancaster: iv. 53–4, available on British History Online <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/lancs/vol4/pp53-54> [accessed 21 Apr. 2018].

⁸ C. W. Sutton (rev. A G Crosby), ‘Yates, Joseph Brooks (1780–1858)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30195> [accessed 29 May 2018].

⁹ ‘Liverpool: the university’, pp. 53–4.

¹⁰ J. McKenna, British Ships in the Confederate Navy (Jefferson, N.C., 2010), p. 213; Liverpool Post, 14 Dec. 1863.

¹¹ J. Murch, Memoir of Robert Hibbert, Founder of the Hibbert Trust: with a Sketch of its History (Bath, 1874); A. R. Ruston, The Hibbert Trust: a History (1984).

¹² <https://www.abdn.ac.uk/events/documents/history.pdf> [accessed 2 Aug. 2017].

¹³ ‘West India Emancipation in 1838’, Anti-slavery Examiner, Omnibus, x. 62.

¹⁴ In his will, proved 30/12/1857, after the end of slavery, when he was Rector of Holwell, Revd. John Wilson left his residuary estate in trust for the benefit of his wife and then her sisters, and then to the provost and fellows of Queen’s College Oxford to be applied by them ‘to the encouragement of theological learning and preparation for the Christian ministry among the undergraduates of the College in their fourth years’ standing and Bachelors of Arts in their first years’ standing by instituting prizes for the greatest proficiency to be ascertained by written essays or public examinations in the College Hall’ or by other means (PROB 11/2262/383).

¹⁵ <https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/cambridge-marks-200th-anniversary-of-slaverys-abolition> [accessed 1 Aug. 2017].

¹⁶ L. Goldman, The Life of R. H. Tawney: Socialism and History (2013), p. 12.

¹⁷ W. H. Brock, ‘Turner, Edward (1796–1837)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27848> [accessed 23 July 2012].

¹⁸ Sir Robert Christison, The Life of Sir Robert Christison, Bart. (Edinburgh, 1885), i. 130–3.

¹⁹ Letter from Edward Cust, Leasowe Castle, dated 30 Sept. 1835 (The National Archives, T 71/1610). The addressee was Henry Frederick Stephenson, and the brother-in-law referred to was Thomas William Coke, later earl of Leicester: the two men had married sisters.

²⁰ In the event, it appears that John James Amory, who on his majority inherited his father’s Clay Hill estate with 122 enslaved people in 1825, and later purchased a second estate on St. Kitts, West Farm, with 94 enslaved people attached to it, did not attend either university.

²¹ I. K. R. Archer, ‘Storer, Anthony Morris (1746–99)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26591> [accessed 19 Aug. 2016].