Scotland’s Slavery Silence: Have recent insights into Scotland’s role in transatlantic
slavery made their way into heritage presentations and if so, in what way?
Ailsa Cole
MA Thesis: Heritage and Memory Studies University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Dr. Tamara van Kessel Second reader: Dr. Paul Knevel Date of completion: 2 May 2017
1 Cover image: Image of Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art exterior displayed in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Photo taken by the author.
2
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ... 3
1. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SCOTTISH INVOLVEMENT IN THE SLAVE TRADE ... 9
2. GLASGOW: A CASE STUDY ... 20
2.1THE HISTORY OF GLASGOW AND SLAVERY ... 20
2.2THE KELVINGROVE ART GALLERY AND MUSEUM ... 25
2.3KELVINGROVE ‘GLASGOW STORIES’ GALLERY... 26
3. EDINBURGH: A CASE STUDY ... 42
3.1EDINBURGH AND SLAVERY ... 42
3.2THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND ... 44
3.3‘DISCOVERIES’GALLERY ... 45
3.4‘INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE’ GALLERY ... 54
CONCLUSION ... 65
3
Introduction
Being African and Scottish, I'd taken comfort in the notion that Scotland was not nearly as implicated in the horrors of the slave trade as England. Scotland's self-image is one of a hard-done-to wee nation, yet bonny and blithe. I once heard a Scottish woman proudly say: ‘We don't have racism up here, that's an English thing, that's down south.’ Scotland is a canny nation when it comes to remembering and forgetting. The plantation owner is never wearing a kilt… (Jackie Kay, poet and novelist, 2007)1
Growing up in Edinburgh, I was fortunate enough to live in a city with an active museum scene. Much of my childhood was spent at the National Museum of Scotland, somewhere we went if friends were visiting or on a school excursion. Of course, I was aware that Britain had been a former colonial power, with the British Empire being the largest in history when it was at its
peak.2 I knew about the East India Company and of course that the UK had been involved in
transatlantic slavery although, as Simpson demonstrates, Bristol, Liverpool, London have always
been seen as the ‘real historical villains of the piece’.3 These things I knew from reading books
or watching films and television. My history classes in school taught me about William Wallace, the Jacobite Rebellion, The Weimar Republic, both World Wars, The Cold War. Colonialism and Empire were never discussed. Should I have continued with history to the highest level at school, my two study options for my final year were: to repeat the Jacobites or Medieval Japan.4
When I moved to Netherlands a year and a half ago to start my masters, in a fairly short amount of time, I found myself forming opinions and discussing at length the Netherlands’ relationship with and handling of its colonial past. Outside the classroom, I came to see how Amsterdam, as a city built on trade and mercantile prowess, drew many thousands of tourists
1 J. Kay, ‘Missing Faces’, The Guardian, 24 March 2007,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/mar/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview25, (accessed October 25 2016).
2 B. Porter, Britannia's Burden: The Political Evolution of Modern Britain 1851–1890, Hodder Education, 1994, chp.
3.
3 M. G Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-colonial Era, London: Routledge, 2001, p.17. 4 Slavery and colonialism were made compulsory history modules in 2007 however were subsequently removed by
the Education Minister Michael Gove. It remains non-compulsory. Further research into how many choose to teach this model and Scotland’s position within the material would be worthy of further research.
4 to come and see the fruits of this ‘golden age’ of Dutch history. I witnessed debating amongst peers, public talks and discussion in the press around matters such as ‘Zwarte Piet’. This got me to thinking about the UK and her relationship to Empire and slavery and, more specifically, how Scotland handled this aspect of her past. I cast my mind back to all those hours spent in the NMS and found myself struggling to come up with any explicit discussion or obvious display of the slave trade in particular. I could not think of a single monument or act of memorialisation that made reference to slavery in the whole country. I was struck that, back in 2007 when it was debated whether the then Prime Minister Tony Blair should formally apologise during the
bicentenary commemoration year of slavery abolition, Scotland was strangely absent.5 It is
telling that Geoffrey Cubitt who was co-investigator on the ‘1807 Commemorated’ project, set up to analyse responses to the bicentenary in British museums, only mentions two Scottish
examples in passing when discussing the project’s findings.6
It is undeniable that the past twenty years has seen an increase in the discussion and exhibiting of this difficult topic. This has often been couched in terms of ‘breaking the silence’, hence the title choice for this thesis. Although this silence has never been total, it does point to the fact that slavery has been reduced to a ‘blip’ in the historical past rather than a problem that
continues to effect contemporary society.7 But has Scotland been an active participant in this
discussion? Less work has certainly been done on Scotland than England, without even
considering Wales and Northern Ireland, yet the tide is starting to turn.8 Recent studies are
paying more attention to Scotland’s role as increasing empirical evidence through projects such as ‘Legacies of British Slave Ownership’ demonstrate Scotland’s active participation in the
5 Blair actually only ended up ‘expressing regret’ for Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. Later in 2015, then
Prime Minister David Cameron on a trip to Jamaica in 2015, continued to evade a formal apology by stating that he hoped ‘we can move on from this painful legacy’ during a speech to the Jamaican parliament. See ‘Introduction’ in Donington et al.,Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’, p. 5 for further discussion.
6 G. Cubitt, ‘Museums and Slavery in Britain: The Bicentenary of 1807’, in Araujo, L., (ed.), Politics of Memory:
Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, London: Routledge, 2012.
7 D. Hamilton, K. Douglas and J. Quirk, ‘Introduction: Slavery, Memory and Identity: National Representations and
Global Legacies’ in Hamilton, D., Douglas, K., and Quirk, J. (ed.), Slavery, Memory and Identity: National Representations and Global Legacies, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012, p. 2.
8 See Morris in Slavery, Memory and Identity: National Representations and Global Legacies, and Recovering
Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection, Devine, T., (ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015 for just some of the recent studies conducted on Scotland’s role in slavery.
5
colonial system.9 This complex mix of narratives points to an equally complex history of the
position that Scotland held in the Empire and holds today in Great Britain in general: In Britain, the collective history of slavery is a contested terrain; its racialised, classed, gendered and regionalised contours threaten the fragile bonds that give meaning to a unified and unifying vision of ‘Britishness.’ In order to satisfy the construction of a Britain that champions the liberal model of freedom, free trade, democracy and equality, slavery
had to be forgotten and abolition remembered.10
This addition of Scotland to the academic debate in heritage studies about the slavery past comes at an interesting time politically in the UK. At the time of writing this thesis, the idea of Britishness and British identity is being tested and debated perhaps more than ever before. With two recent referenda- on Scottish Independence and European Union membership- questions of what it means to be Scottish/British, British/European, of identity and belonging are now hotly debated. As Donington et al. rightly note, the histories of colonialism and Empire are inextricably linked to these debates and as popular nationalism, both Scottish and British, grow in the wake of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, these
questions remain both pertinent and contentious.11
Collective memory is often characterised by its complex and conflicting nature, yet in societies where the transmission of this collective memory has been interrupted in some way, collective memory morphs into historical memory which can to some extent be ‘crystallised’ in more
permanent forms.12 These forms include museums, monuments and memorials which
collectively have come to be known as processes of ‘memorialisation’ and ‘heritagisation’.13 It is
this process of ‘memorialisation’ and ‘heritagisation’ with which this thesis is principally concerned: the recovery, recreation and representation of colonialism and slavery in Scottish
9 K. Donington, R. Hanley and J. Moody, ‘Introduction’ in Donington, K., Hanley, R and Moody, J. (ed.) Britain's
History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a National Sin, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016, p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 2. 11 Ibid., p.3-4.
12 L. Araujo, ‘Introduction’, in Araujo, L., (ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space,
London: Routledge, 2012, p.1.
6 museums and also projects beyond the museum seeking to reinforce or redefine Scottish
identity.
Memory exists in many different states and following Araujo’s writing, these states can be split into three categories. The first of these is when the memory is repressed and the social actors live in a ‘amnesiac’ state in which silence and forgetfulness prevail. In the second, memory of events is alive and well but the social actors are in a subordinate position within society therefore these memories are rarely expressed. In the third and final state, international, national and local events and projects help victims, for who the past is very much alive, to begin
articulating their memory in the public sphere.14 This thesis will examine whether these states
of memory, if any, are present in Scottish museums and community today and what this means for the memory of colonialism and slavery in Scotland. Is amnesia really taking place? Are narratives being presented in a certain way? Has the slavery narrative made its way into the national narrative or does it remain a local or regional concern? After setting out the
historiography of Scotland and the slave trade in chapter one, conclusions will be drawn through a thematic site analysis of the representations in both the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow and National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, taking both visual and discursive content into account. Projects both past and present from outside the museum in both cities will also be discussed.
But why look at museums at all? Edward van Voolen argues that the museum is a useful tool with which one can analyse state memory, for museums are very often a political statement or
seeking to serve a political motive, more so than we tend to realise.15 These motives are
numerous: to explain a nation’s past back to itself, instil shared experiences and destinies and
educate the next generation, to self-aggrandise, to attract many tourists or perhaps a mixture.16
As Lowenthal points out, ‘Pride- tribal, local, or national- is what most museums are for.’17
14 Araujo, p. 2.
15 E. van Voolen, ‘Jewish Museums Today: Challenges and Changes’, [lecture], The Allard Pierson Lectures,
Amsterdam, Allard Pierson Museum, delivered April 7 2017.
16 Ibid.
17 D. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.
7 One must always bear in mind that those in charge of Britain’s museums descend from former slaving families or certainly a similar social class whilst decedents of the enslaved remain, as a
rule, socially lower and therefore, arguably under-represented.18 Here we can look to Foucault
and his idea of ‘the regime of truth’ which, according to Jenny Edkins, is the interplay of power relations which define what is ‘true’ and that this ‘truth’ often lies on the fringes of society and is not dependent on the established authorities for approval. However, these voices will be
suppressed ‘in order to submerge conflicts and give the appearance of consensus.19 Therefore,
it can be useful to look outside the museum walls and into the community to ascertain if those feeling under-represented seek their own opportunities to have their voices heard. Can the ethnic make-up of a city or place decide whether slavery will be addressed in its institutions? This is one of the reasons that the NMS was chosen as a case study: it is Scotland’s national museum in the capital city, therefore arguably its inclusion would have been inevitable for what is said in the national museum is likely to give a good diagnosis of the overall ‘health’ and state of what is being said in the rest of the country. Or rather, it gives a good indication of what has managed to ‘qualify’ to be included in the national narrative.
Some months before deciding to write on this topic, a volume of work edited by Professor Tom Devine that dealt specifically with Scotland and Scots’ links to transatlantic slavery was
published. On reading the book, I was struck by how much of the historical context given regarding Scotland’s role in slavery was referring to the Glasgow case. Subsequent preparatory research further demonstrated to me the Glasgow-centric nature of this discussion. One of the things I encountered was an exhibition held in 2014 at the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery entitled How Glasgow Flourished. Further investigation led me to find out that elements from this temporary exhibition had gone on to be included in the museum’s permanent displays. Therefore, I decided that the Kelvingrove should be my second case study. This could lead to possibly providing interesting insights into how a national and more regional museum choose to display darker parts of Scotland’s history.
18 Araujo, p. 3.
19 M. Foucault cited in J.Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003,
8 The most logical lay out for this thesis would arguably be to start with the larger museum in the capital city to see what is being done there and then to move on to the smaller museum and draw comparisons that way. However, in this case I have chosen to put my Glasgow case study first to then be followed on by Edinburgh and the reason for that is simple. As briefly
mentioned already, there is a real dearth of systematic research and knowledge pertaining to Edinburgh’s links with slavery. The initial forays into Scotland and slavery seem to have largely come out of Glasgow and this will be discussed in greater depth later in the thesis. Therefore, I believe that the historical context that the Glasgow chapter provides is useful to the reader to
be able to frame the thesis’ main questionregarding heritage presentations and also to carry
9
1. The historiography of the Scottish involvement in the slave trade
As a former colonial power, Britain inevitably has some dark and morally questionable periods in its history by modern day standards; the years involving the transatlantic slave trade being one such period. From the early years of the seventeenth century until the abolition of slavery in 1807, the British Empire would ship over 3.4 million Africans to the New World and a life of
misery.20 This figure of 3.4 million is higher than the combined figures of all the other European
nations that were shipping to the New World at that time, giving us a fairly good indication of
how deeply involved Britain was in this ‘horrible traffik’.21
It would be as late as the 1970s, after many years of intermittent commemorative events that England would begin to see a change in the way slavery was talked about and publicly
remembered.22 As the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ – the first wave of migrants from the
West Indies – of the late 1940s and early 1950s became an established part of British (but mostly English) society, there was increasing pressure to create a more inclusive idea of what it meant to be ‘British’. This came to a head in the late 1970s and early 80s, which saw the rise of protests such as the Brixton Riots, directly leading to the creation of Black History Month and a
proliferation of ‘multiculturalism’ narratives.23 As Stuart Hall has argued, too often ‘British’ was
used as a synonym for ‘White and English’.24
What became important for England shortly after this period was to embark on a process of what Theodor Adorno refers to as ‘working through the past’. It has been noted by scholars, such as translator Henry Pickford, that Adorno’s use of the word Aufarbeitung as a way of describing the process puts it in a rather negative light, rather like a chore or something that
has to be done.25 Rosello posits that as most countries with a former colonial past are in
20 T. Devine, ‘Introduction’ in Devine, T., (ed.), Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, p.1.
21 I. Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery: 1756-1838, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 22 T. Devine, ‘Lost to History’, in Devine, T., (ed.), Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, p.24.
23 Ibid, p.24.
24 S. Hall, ‘Whose Heritage? Un‐settling “the heritage”, re‐imagining the post‐nation’, Third Text,
Vol. 13, no. 49, 1999, pp. 3-13.
25 M. Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Process, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press,
10 agreement that ‘amnesias’ and ‘silencing’ are no longer sufficient modus operandi, a new way
of ‘working through the past’ needs to be conceived.26 The notion that the past is constantly
being re-worked and translated is now widely accepted by the academic community but in order for some sort of reconciliation or reparation to occur, it is no longer acceptable to relegate certain narratives to the realm of insignificance or irrelevance whilst ‘working
through’.27
Bearing this in mind, what developments could be seen during the same period around this issue over the border in Scotland? Without making sweeping generalisations, the conversation was certainly more covert if, at this point, non-existent in the public sphere. This was due to a number of factors which are only now beginning to attract academic attention, notably with the publication of the ground-breaking volume ‘Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past’ edited by
Professor Tom Devine, which lays out some core explanations. To use the word ground-breaking regarding this book’s publication is not an overstatement in this case. In comparison with England, the Netherlands, France and other countries, so little has been published over the years specifically on Scotland’s role as a colonial actor that to produce eleven chapters on the subject that focus not only on the Scots’ role in abolition but also on their involvement in perpetuating the slave trade is an important step. Crucially, this volume has gone on to spark debate around Scotland and slavery and has awoken some awareness of Scotland’s
involvement as will be demonstrated in later chapters.
To return to the book’s contents: one of the key explanations given for the silence in Scotland around its involvement in slavery is the perception that the country was to some degree coerced into involvement in the slave trade and other imperial activity by the Act of Union in 1707 and that this involvement was not of the Scots’ choosing. Despite a legal constraint, pre-Union, prohibiting Scots from actively trading with English owned colonies, there is a growing body of evidence which suggests that Scots managed to subvert this law, by means such as the falsification of documents, smuggling, or trading from English ports, thus providing compelling
26 Rosello, p.17. 27 Ibid., p.18.
11
evidence that Scots were, even then, more than willing to take part in this trade.28 It is also
worth noting that although the failed Darien Scheme of 1699 did become an endeavour to establish a Scottish colony in Central America, it was run by an organisation named the ‘Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies’. Therefore, as has rightly been pointed out, it would be rather disingenuous to say that Scotland had no commercial or trading interest in those parts of the world and that it was only due to a union with England that they had to set
aside their moral scruples.29
Another reason given for the silence surrounding Scotland’s role in the slave trade is that the (significant) role that Scots played in the abolition movement has come to cloud the facts that Scots were also heavily involved in the trade itself and that there was also an anti-abolition movement in Scotland. There has been work looking specifically at the Scots’ involvement in abolition by scholars such as Charles Duncan Rice and Ian Whyte but it is only in the last fifteen years or so that Scottish universities have started to produce work on the country’s links to
slavery with most past work coming from the United States.30
This occlusion of certain facts over others is not a new phenomenon but one that took place over a long period of time. One good example of this is a newspaper article published in the
Glasgow Herald a mere fifty years after the Abolition Act was passed:
It is to Glasgow’s lasting honour that while Bristol and Liverpool were up to their elbows in the slave trade, Glasgow kept out of it. The reproach can never be levelled at our city as it was at Liverpool that there was not a stone in her streets that was not cemented with
blood of a slave.31
This rather brazen statement starkly illustrates the rapidity with which memory surrounding this issue became distorted. Devine often refers to this ‘forgetting’ as a case of ‘national amnesia’ and he is not alone in employing such phrases when talking about Scotland’s or
28 Devine, ‘Introduction’, p.12. 29 Devine, ‘Lost to History’, p.29. 30 Devine, ‘Introduction’, p.3.
31 Glasgow Herald, 1 June 1883 cited in Devine, T., (ed.), Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean
12
Britain’s relationship to slavery.32 But the term ‘amnesia’ or even ‘forgetting’ is not particularly
helpful when discussing this issue as it doesn’t describe the process underlying such narratives in a satisfactory way. As Donington et al. reiterate, forgetting in this context is not a passive or accidental process and amnesia, it could be argued, does imply a sense of passivity for it is something that happens to a person rather than by them:
Further, the ‘forgetting’ of Britain’s immense role in transatlantic slavery – and the obscuring of this segment of the ‘national story’ for the best part of two hundred years has relied on a great deal of mythologising about slavery itself, and in particular a ‘re-framing’ of the history of transatlantic slavery through the more morally comforting narrative of abolition[…]There is a history to the public memory of slavery in Britain, but it is fragmented, warped and partial, shaped by successive efforts to foreground abolition as
a key facet of national identity construction.33
As previously demonstrated by the newspaper article, the Victorians were prime ‘myth makers’, casting themselves in the role of saintly and moral citizens who were concerned with liberating ‘less fortunate’ populaces or as trailblazers of Empire and engineering ingenuity, not slave owners. Stoler’s use of the term ‘aphasia’ rather than amnesia gives a more accurate depiction of what is happening surrounding memory on slavery, capturing as it does both the nature of something being blocked or obstructed and also the idea of loss:
[…] it is to emphasise both loss of access and active disassociation. In aphasia, an occlusion of knowledge is the issue. It is not a matter of ignorance or absence. […] Aphasia in its many forms describes a difficulty retrieving both conceptual and lexical
vocabularies and, most important, a difficulty comprehending what is spoken.34
32 Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, Nicholas Draper, Director of the
Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership writing for the Guardian newspaper
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/15/britain-slavery-owners-british-colonies-abolition) and Michael Morris in Donington et al., Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’ are just some examples of those who use the term ‘amnesia’ when discussing Scotland and/or Britain and slavery.
33 Donington et al., p. 9-10.
13 As mentioned, aphasia comes in many forms. In order to be even more specific, I suggest
turning to the original medical term of primary progressive aphasia or progressive aphasia to
better understand the Scottish situation.35 According to the National Aphasia Association,
progressive aphasia is:
…a neurological syndrome in which language capabilities become slowly and
progressively impaired. Unlike other forms of aphasia that result from stroke or brain injury, PPA is caused by neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s Disease. Although the first symptoms are problems with speech and language, other problems associated with the underlying disease, such as memory loss, often occur later. PPA commonly begins as a subtle disorder of language, progressing to a nearly total inability to speak, in its most severe stage. The person may or may not have difficulty understanding speech. Eventually, almost all patients become mute and unable to
understand spoken or written language…36
I would argue that portraying Scotland as having entered a state of progressive aphasia over amnesia is a more helpful metaphor for colonial memory. It takes into account the warped and fragmentary nature of the narratives present in Scottish society on colonialism and slavery as Donington et. al argued above is characteristic of this subject matter. Rather than a sudden trauma causing one (or a society) to rapidly forget, we have witnessed a fairly swift and steady
process of memory degradation and a disassociation from colonialism by certain sectors of
society (white Scots). Others have been met with their voice being blocked or a complete loss of voice being inflicted on them (people of colour).
As the dynamics in each process are different, it is important to consider whether each group is afflicted by the same type of aphasia. One could argue that this is the case, but each group ‘suffers’ in a different way. The ‘winners’ of Empire find themselves in this position after a steady process of distancing and reframing history and now, as a result, can no longer
35 There is existing scholarship on aphasia within the Dutch and French contexts but none on Scotland. 36 National Aphasia Association, Primary Progressive Aphasia,
14 successfully articulate it. For the ‘losers’, slavery and colonialism are not ‘forgotten’ in the same way but their voices remain outside official narratives and they remain stuck in the same narratives, tropes and stereotypes perpetuated by others. Therefore, they too are ‘victims’ of colonial aphasia, albeit in a more indirect manner.
The gaps in knowledge created by said aphasia have provided room for other narratives to take hold and proliferate. One such narrative is that the Scots themselves were victims, giving rise to a sort of ‘victimology’. In political terms, this is a fairly new development, which took hold especially in the twentieth century. Not long after the Scottish National Party was founded in the 1930s, the economy in Scotland and the popularity of the Scottish Unionist Party (now known as the Conservative party) were waning. Even before the Thatcher years of the 1980s, this led to a rise in nationalist feeling and a real sense of victimisation within the Scottish
nation, a period subsequently referred to as the ‘Scottish Cringe’ (crisis of confidence).37 During
this time, Scotland witnessed an increase in the popular appeal of narratives such as those spun
around Battle of Culloden, the Highland Clearances and the Darien Disaster.38 Such events were
brought to life by authors such as the Anglo-Canadian John Prebble or the writing in 1967 of the song Flower of Scotland celebrating Scotland’s victory against the English in the Wars of
Independence in which ‘they fought and died for their wee bit hill an’ glen’.39 This national
feeling was evidently rather at odds with the idea of Scots being heavily involved in the Empire project, being plantation owners or slave traders.
Another way in which the ‘victimology’ ideology has developed is the persistence of the argument that whites were also slaves. The white slavery narrative is a theme that appears often in discussion which, considering the relatively little writing that exists on the subject of Scotland and slavery, is rather striking. Stephen Mullen, historian and contributor the ground-breaking book ‘Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past’, explains that the myth of Scottish slaves in the Caribbean is a sub-set of a narrative more commonly associated with the Irish in colonial America. He argues that the foundations of this particular argument have been laid by two
37 Devine, ‘Lost to History’, p. 35. 38 Ibid., p. 35.
15 polemical books: Theodore W. Allen’s ‘The Invention of the White Race’ and more recently, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s ‘White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in
America’.40 Yet, as Mullen goes on to point out, none of the authors is a professional historian -
they are respectively a writer cum activist, a television director and a journalist. On discovering Walsh and Jordan’s work, Mullen outlines what he encountered when reading the chapter on the Jacobites:
[…] (the chapter) concerns the Jacobites forcibly transported from Scotland after the uprisings in 1715 and 1746 who, according to the authors, were sometimes enslaved: those sent to the Caribbean were treated worse than those sent to America. There is no question that Jacobites were harshly dealt with in what was a concerted attack on the
Highland way of life – but they were never regarded or treated as chattel slaves. 41
This distinction made around chattel slavery is an important one. In the introduction to
‘Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past’, Devine does make mention of it, whilst also stressing that it will not be a focus of the book itself. He points out that what was being implemented in the Caribbean was a system of chattel slavery whereby those people gave up all rights and became property of their owners with absolutely no legal rights until they died. Should an enslaved woman fall pregnant, that child too would be born as its master’s property and live out a life in
perpetual servitude:42
Those modern sceptics who consider the contemporary poor at home, often eking out a miserable existence, or the indentured white servants in the transatlantic colonies, to be just as oppressed as black slaves, fail to take account of that stark and fundamental
distinction.43
Therefore, we have two separate groups that have developed. One group that feels a real sense of victimization despite having been in the position of coloniser and another group that was
40 Mullen, ‘The Myth of Scottish Slaves’, [web blog], March 4 2016,
http://www.sceptical.scot/2016/03/the-myth-of-scottish-slaves/, (accessed 21 January 2017).
41 Ibid.
42 Devine, ‘Introduction’, p.1. 43 Ibid.
16 undisputedly enslaved. The inability of both groups to successfully communicate or perhaps see the argument from the other side is something that Benjamin Stora calls ‘cloistered
remembering’.44 Cloistered memories are, according to Stora, ‘truncated, skewed and
fragmentary, made up of legends and stereotypes, elaborated out of the fear of telling the
truth’.45 His work is principally concerned with the Algerian War and the Franco-Algerian
colonial relationship and he posits throughout his writing that the various groups involved in the war adhere to strict and rigid mythologised versions of the past which makes any sort of
reconciliation process extremely difficult.46 Stora maintains that memory is a mosaic of
self-contained narratives that remain compartmentalised and cannot be fused. 47 Moreover, he also
argues that the relationship between them is hostile which, given his case study is of a colonial
war and its aftermath, is not unfounded.48
In the coming chapters, on analysing the National Museum of Scotland and Kelvingrove
Museum questions pertaining to myth and stereotypical narratives will need to be considered. For example, does either museum propagate a particular myth or stereotype pertaining to Scots and slavery? What narratives of colonialism are being offered? It is important to bear in mind when investigating if cloistered remembering is taking place that this process can often
lead to narratives being overly simplified.49 The process of each memory stakeholder
constructing their own narrative can often result in them finding themselves stuck in well-established tropes or frameworks of memory, whereby the diversity of individual and personal
perspectives can be suppressed and the disjointed and nostalgic visions lack any new insight.50
The use of the word ‘cloistered’ in considering the memory work (or lack of it) being done in Scotland regarding slavery should, I believe, be regarded as very important. I posit that we can employ this word cloistered and take it one step further by thinking of ‘cloistered geography’
44 See Stora, Appelés en guerre d’Algérie, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
45 Derderian, ‘Algeria as Lieu de Mémoire: Ethnic Minority Memory and National Identity in Contemporary France’,
Radical History Review, vol. 83, 2002, p.31.
46 Ibid., p.31. 47 Rosello, p.9. 48 Ibid., p.9. 49 Derderian, p.33. 50 Ibid., p.33.
17 when considering the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘remembering’ in the case of
colonialism and slavery memory. As Livia Sansone very insightfully highlights:
Transatlantic slavery was by definition a transnational phenomenon, which has created a universe of suffering and racialisation, spanning across many regions of what we now know, after Paul Gilroy, as the black Atlantic- a region that reaches to the tropical
lowlands of the Pacific coast of Central America and Latin America. Yet the way in which it is remembered as well as the legacy felt within today’s life and race relations, show that the memory of slavery is often a surprisingly ‘local’, relational and contingent
construction.51
In his work ‘Cloistered Imaginary’, Daniel Whistler talks of the ‘cloistered ideal’ of the
university, explaining how the ‘cloistered geography’ of the university has allowed the white
male subject to colonise the distribution of intellectual privilege.52 The subsequent chapters will
consider in more detail the following hypothesis in a two-fold manner: Firstly, do certain
geographies colonise the distribution of colonial memory, thereby making it difficult for it to
spread beyond that area to others? And secondly, within these cloistered geographies, is there a greater potential for colonial memory to be broken down and memorialised thereby resulting in this process of local and contingent ‘remembering’ that Sansone highlights? If so, how? On closer inspection, one could postulate that it is Britain’s former industrial cities that create a suitable geography or provide certain conditions within which some form of memory on
colonialism and slavery can develop. This usually takes the form of some type of sculpture, monument or a museum, often on a maritime theme or in a maritime environment such as a former dockland or quay area. Is it too cynical to suggest that this is simply an attempt being made by cities to replace the lost revenue stream from their now collapsed industries with an income generated through tourism? It is certainly interesting to note that the only two UK cities awarded a European Capital of Culture status thus far since this European cultural programme’s
51 L. Sansone cited in A. Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic,
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012, p.42-43.
52 D. Whistler, ‘The Cloistered Imaginary’, in Whistler, D., and Browne, V. (eds.), On the Feminist Philosophy of
18 inception in 1985 have been Glasgow (1998) and Liverpool (2008). The current 2017-2021 cycle of the UK City of Culture title has been awarded to Hull, yet another former industrial town with a connection to slavery. So, one could argue that there is an effort being made to ‘rebrand’ or market these cities as culturally rich, cosmopolitan places to both visit and live in.
Additionally, in the field of marketing, the idea of ‘negative place image’ whereby one focusses on the negative aspects of a place in order to in fact create or increase demand is an accepted
practice according to Medway and Warnaby.53 Yet, they do also acknowledge that this system
of ‘perverse place marketing’ often has an element of humour at its core such as a city drawing
on the fact it ranked poorly in a poll such as ‘Worst place to live in Britain’.54 When there is no
humorous element, ‘dark place marketing’ can be an appropriate approach to take where places draw on bloody or painful histories, perhaps because it is the only ‘story’ available to them.55
But this is arguably too simplistic an explanation as to why former industrial cities seem, to varying degrees, less cloistered in their memories of colonialism and slavery. One could propose that the presence of a significant, or simply active, Afro-Caribbean community is also an
important factor in breaking down the cloistered nature of colonial memory in Scotland (and also the UK). As mentioned earlier, Scotland’s black community is significantly smaller than that of England. In the last census (2011) only 1 per cent of the Scottish population identified
themselves as African, Caribbean or Black.56 However, this is an increase of 28,000 since the
previous census in 2001 and the figure continues to rise.57 Glasgow, in particular, saw an
increase in its afro-Caribbean population from 6 per cent in 2001 to 21 per cent in 2011.58
Therefore, the following chapters will also engage with the idea that perhaps an active
53 D. Medway and G. Warnaby,’Alternative perspectives on marketing and the place brand’, European Journal of
Marketing, vol. 42, no. 5-6, 2008, p.643.
54 Ibid., p.643. 55 Ibid., p.647.
56 Scotland’s Census: Shaping Our Future, [webpage],
http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/ethnicity-identity-language-and-religion, accessed March 8 2017.
57 Ibid.
58 V. Nicoll, ‘Breakdown of Glasgow’s Ethnic Minority Population’, The Evening Times, 28 September 2015,
http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/13787603.Breakdown_of_Glasgow_s_ethnic_minority_population/, (accessed March 8 2017).
19 Caribbean community can contribute to the museums in the cities in question becoming what Richard Benjamin calls ‘enabler museums’ (knowingly or unknowingly becoming vessels for socio-political change and dialogue) rather than ‘enchanter museums’ (‘must see’ attractions
that tend to focus on the object rather than the object’s ‘story’).59
The following chapter will examine the Empire and, more specifically, slave narratives present (if indeed a narrative exists) in the heritage representations at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow and observe to what extent one can make a case for the presence of colonial aphasia and aspects of cloistered remembering. Chapter three takes us to Edinburgh and the NMS where the same hypotheses will be tested, taking into account the place the NMS holds within Scotland’s museum community as its national museum. By examining these two museums and projects in each city, conclusions will be drawn as to how colonial memory around slavery specifically is being presented and whether the location of each museum dictates what is said there and, if so, in what way.
59 R. Benjamin, ‘The Museum as Enabler: Constructing and Contesting Futures’, in Lanz, F. and Montanari, E. (eds.),
20
2. Glasgow: A Case Study
2.1 The History of Glasgow and Slavery
As discussed in the previous chapter, Scotland has a prevailing tendency to see itself as a victim of oppression rather than as a colonial collaborator. However, there is research which reveals the extent to which Scots were involved in Empire, not only did they perform roles such as those of ships’ doctors, lawyers and administrators they were also involved in the human
trafficking of Africans to the New World.60 Various types of denial have emerged over the years,
and have, according to Mullen,61 largely been able to proliferate due to a lack of systematic
research. One of the principal myths that has developed is that Scotland saw no slave ships leave her shores. However, further investigation into this disproves this claim, though the picture is far from complete. The Custom Accounts for Scottish Ports unfortunately only remain for the period 1742-1830 and therefore one can only conjure up a partial overview of
Scotland’s involvement in this regard.62 In total, twenty seven voyages are recorded as having
begun from a Scottish port, nineteen of these leaving from one of Glasgow’s two ports (Port
Glasgow and Greenock).63 Approximately five thousand Africans were taken from the west
coast of Africa on slave voyages on Scottish ships, with Glaswegian ships specifically accounting
for approximately three thousand of these.64 Given that we know the total of slaves taken by
British ships from Africa to the New World was around 1.5 million, we can see that Scottish
involvement in slave trafficking was significantly smaller than that of her English neighbour.65
Nonetheless, Scotland was party to the slave trade and needs to be recognised as such. Unfortunately, we may never know the true extent to which Scotland played a role in slave trafficking but further research in this matter seems likely to further dismantle common misconceptions of this topic.
60 S. Mullen, It Wisnae Us: The Truth About Glasgow and Slavery, Edinburgh: The Royal Incorporation of Architects
in Scotland, 2009, p.5. 61 Ibid. p.5. 62 Ibid. p.17. 63 Ibid. p.17-18. 64 Ibid. p.18. 65 Ibid. p.18.
21 Another, more tacit, way in which Glasgow was involved in slavery was through her large
mercantile role in Empire, something the city has been more willing to focus on as will become clear later in this chapter. By 1707, in a population of 12,000, Glasgow had some 500
merchants operating within the city, 125 of whom specialised in overseas trade.66 In Scotland
more generally, economic growth increased exponentially. Between 1750 and 1800, Scotland’s
overseas commerce grew by 300 per cent in comparison with England’s 200 per cent.67 Scottish
towns flourished thanks to this prolific imperial trade and, in the stability of a post-Jacobite era,
new public buildings, expensive private houses and modern town planning were created.68 The
transatlantic trading of goods was limited however to those already with considerable financial means, family connections and experience, making colonial merchants some of the wealthiest
members of society.69 The tobacco trade saw rapid expansion in the early 18thcentury, using
both white indentured servants and enslaved Africans. In 1690, only 15 per centof the
workforce harvesting tobacco were black slaves. Between 1700-1740, this would increase
dramatically (approximately 50,000 enslaved people is estimated).70 Whilst the harvesting of
tobacco and legacy of the ‘tobacco lords’ were of supreme importance in cementing Glasgow’s
reputation as a hub of Empire, the prominence of the ‘sugar aristocracy’71 and also cotton
production should not be overlooked.72
In more general terms, Scots were certainly active participants in the imperial project, and this enthusiasm has led scholars to ponder over this zealous and almost disproportionate
involvement especially when considers population numbers of the time. Colley posits that it could be that whilst Englishmen, generally more educated and wealthier, had the luxury of
several job prospects on the mainland, Scots had fewer options available to them.73 Then the
rather cliched notion of having ‘nothing to lose’ comes into play. ‘Celtic adventurers’, unfazed
66 Mullen, p.25.
67 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, London: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 123. 68 Ibid., p.123. 69 Mullen, p.25. 70 Ibid., p.26. 71 Ibid., p.36. 72 Ibid., p. 46-47. 73 Colley, p.129.
22 by the idea of travelling to foreign lands to fight and work, fits in with the ‘venturesome’
behaviour that remains part of the Scottish tradition and stereotype even to this day.74
Traces of this colonial elite can still be seen in the city today. The area now known as the Merchant City came into being through the construction of the grandiose Shawfield and Virginia mansions, owned by politician Daniel Campbell and tobacco merchant George
Buchanan respectively. The ‘Glasgow Makes People’ website describes the Merchant City thus: Tucked away just behind the city centre […] where in the 18th century, Glasgow’s
Tobacco Lords had their warehouses in the city’s trading heyday. Today the merchants’ warehouses have been turned into cool boutiques, bars, restaurants and loft apartments. Visitors will find this neighbourhood with its stunning architecture fascinating to explore
on foot.75
Whilst historians are principally concerned with seeing history as an end unto itself, this new approach or rather ‘heritagisation’ process as has been mentioned before is more concerned with the emotional and phycological elements and experience; the feelings of shame, anger,
resentment or pride that a set of historical events or period can often incite.76 As Lowenthal
highlights, the idea of ‘making history’, ‘steering its course’ or reliving or improving the past to suit present needs in this manner are heritage concerns and not history, though he goes on to argue that this should not mean that history and heritage should always be seen as
diametrically opposed.77 The above description of the Merchant City demonstrates that pride is
the emotion one is supposed to feel when considering the area and its colonial history.78
74 Colley, p.129.
75 People Make Glasgow, Merchant City, [website],
https://peoplemakeglasgow.com/discover/districts/merchant-city, (accessed February 10 2017).
76 Quirk et al., p. 4.
77 See D. Lowenthal, ‘Spoils of History’.
78 It is perhaps significant to note that in 2007 when Bristol unveiled plans for its £500 million regeneration project,
to be named ‘Merchant’s Quarter’, the name had to be dropped as protestors found its insinuation of the city’s slave trading past offensive. Conservative councillor Jack Lopresti said the decision to ‘cave in did not make sense’ adding that ‘the Merchants Quarter reflected Bristol's maritime history as a city that traded with the rest of the world.’ Without going into the details of exactly what the objectives and goals behind the project were, it is nevertheless interesting to note that there has not yet been any such open debate regarding the Merchant City and all its possible connotations. See Savill, R., ‘Bristol Shuns Slave Trade Name’, The Guardian, 21 April 2006,
23 In recent years, there have been some projects which have sought to address this problem. ‘Merchant City Voices’ (2012) and ‘The Empire Café’ (2014) are perhaps the most notable examples of events which have taken place with the aim of tackling Glasgow’s slavery links. ‘Merchant City Voices’ was a series of seven sound installations, written by author Louise Welsh, placed throughout the Merchant city area in August 2012. The pieces were based on the writing of freed American slave Frederick Douglass, imagined conversations between female
abolitionists or role calls of slave names owned by Glasgow families for example.79 The
locations were chosen on the basis of their links to the transatlantic slave trade and also the
abolitionist movement that took place in the city.80 The project was commissioned by Glasgow
City Council and was included in the launch and programme of the Merchant City Festival in the
same year.81 In 2014, the year in which the city hosted The Commonwealth Games, and again in
Glasgow, ‘The Empire Café’ was hosted from the 24th July until 1st August. This week-long
programme of events was commissioned by the ‘Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme’, a joint partnership with the ‘Glasgow 2014 Organising Committee’, ‘Glasgow Life’ (which funds the
Kelvingrove) and ‘Creative Scotland.’82 The café commissioned work by various poets such as
Jackie Kay and Fred D’Aguiar, artist Graham Fagen, Hip-Hop band Stanley Odd and Dr Richard Benjamin of The Liverpool Slavery Museum amongst others. The written pieces of
commissioned work were published in an anthology entitled ‘Yonder Awa’’ which was available
free of charge on the café’s opening.83 Projects such as this demonstrate that there is some
level of institutional, and governmental (even if only local), commitment to dealing with the subject matter around slavery. As Quirk et al iterate:
From this standpoint history becomes then integral to identity with the contemporary representatives of both previously wronged and the wrong doers being collectively
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1516274/Bristol-shuns-slave-trade-name.html, (accessed February 17 2017).
79 Collective Architecture, Merchant City Voices, [website],
http://www.collectivearchitecture.com/projects/merchant-city-voices, (March 11 2017).
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid. The sound installations can be heard here: https://vimeo.com/collectivearchitecture/videos .
82 Collective Architecture, Empire Café, [website],
http://www.collectivearchitecture.com/projects/the-empire-cafe, (accessed March 11 2017).
24 defined and differentiated on the basis of grievous harms committed in the past. As a
consequence, recognising and perhaps even partially redressing the histories and legacies of slavery has emerged as a prominent avenue for efforts to promote social cohesion and
citizenship.84
One could make the argument that as events such as these are temporary phenomena and the city still has no memorial to slavery, Glasgow is still failing to sufficiently chronicle this aspect of the city’s past. Yet this does not mean that the importance of this type of commemoration should be disregarded. As James Young has asserted, the right kind of memorial shows us ‘not literally what is lost, but that loss itself is part of this neighbourhood’s history, an invisible, yet
essential feature of this landscape’.85 This interesting idea highlights that to create another
piece of civic memorialisation that harked back to the already well documented achievements of Glasgow’s merchant class, but this time also alluding to slavery, would ignore the crucial
invisible and intangible aspects to this history which have been lost.86 Projects such as
‘Merchant City Voices’ and ‘The Empire Café’ address this aspect of commemoration by including, in this case, the names of the slaves owned by the city’s merchants, the women of the abolition movement, the voices of Glasgow and Scotland’s present day Afro-Caribbean community amongst many other things.
As we move away from historiography and into the realm of heritage by looking at these projects, as briefly mentioned already, ‘The Empire Café’ and ‘Merchant City Voices’ projects were both in collaboration with, amongst other partners, ‘Glasgow Life’ which is the
organisation responsible for the running of the Kelvingrove. With ‘Glasgow Life’ participating in projects such as these outside the museum space, it is now time to turn to the museum itself to see whether such projects have managed to relate to the content displayed in the Kelvingrove and if so, how?
84 Quirk et al., p.4.
85 J. Young cited in Rice, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic,
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012, p.33.
25
2.2 The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is located in the west end of Glasgow on the banks of the river Kelvin and is probably one of Scotland’s most iconic buildings. The building opened as a museum in 1901, with the initial funding to build it coming from the profits of the 1888
International Exhibition which Glasgow hosted.87 The Exhibition was visited by 5.75 million
people, and yielded a profit of over £40,000 with the majority of its collection coming from the
bequest of Archibald McLellan, a wealthy magistrate.88 Architecturally speaking, the style that
could best describe the outer façade of the building would be the Spanish Baroque style, with the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela being one of the main influences on the design,
echoing the idea of the museum standing as a place of pilgrimage and reverence.89
Today, the institution receives it funding from a number of different sources and partners. It is operated by Glasgow Museums, a strand of the umbrella organisation ‘Glasgow Life’ which is a
registered charity.90 As described in the organisation’s 2015-2016 annual report, ‘The
87 Glasgow Life, History, [webpage],
http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/kelvingrove/about/Pages/History.aspx, (accessed February 17 2017)
88 Ibid. 89 Ibid.
90 Glasgow Life, the charity responsible for inspiring Glasgow’s citizens and visitors to lead richer and more active
lives through culture, sport and learning, [webpage], https://www.linkedin.com/company/glasgow-city-marketing-bureau, (accessed 10 February 2017).
26 Kelvingrove holds a special place in the hearts of citizens and visitors alike – and continues to be
Glasgow’s number one visitor destination according to travel website TripAdvisor’.91 In 2015, it
was rated as the 25th most visited attraction in UK and its popularity continues to grow: 92 last
year was hugely successful for the museum with attendances of over 1.3 million, an increase of
24% on the previous year.93
2.3 Kelvingrove ‘Glasgow Stories’ gallery
The following case study will draw on observations of the ‘Glasgow Stories’ gallery of the Kelvingrove, which was added permanently to the museum in 2014. The text panel at each entrance to the gallery states:
This gallery tells the story of how Glasgow grew and developed from the 1100s to the
beginning of the 21st century. It looks at five key points in the history of the city, ranging
from medieval times, through the Georgian era, the reign of Queen Victoria and Glasgow’s industrial and economic peak to its reinvention as a city of culture’
The Georgian elements of this gallery first appeared in the temporary exhibition ‘How Glasgow Flourished’ which was held between 18th April and 17th August, 2014. This exhibition aimed to explore the five elements of the ‘Glasgow System’ of business management which were
community, credit, cheap labour, slavery, products and stores.94 Whilst this exhibition was
running, the ‘Glasgow Stories’ gallery was also opened. What seems important to note is that in the case of the Kelvingrove, the barrier between temporary and permanent displays seems to be becoming more permeable. This shows a certain level of institutional commitment to displaying this aspect of Glasgow’s and consequently Scotland’s past. As Eric Gable explains, museums in democratic nations are a complex mix of wishing to create an imagined citizenry or community which it can educate and develop whilst also occasionally indulging it by catering to their wishes and demands; much like modern democracy, the museum is reliant on the
91 Glasgow Life, Annual report 2015-2016, [pdf document], available:
http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/about- us/glasgow-life-annual-review/Documents/Annual%20Review%20and%20Performance%20Report%202015%20-16.pdf, accessed February 19 2017. p.56.
92 Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, Latest Visitor Figures, http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=423,
accessed February 17 2017.
93 Glasgow Life, ‘Annual Report 2015-16’, p.56. 94 Devine, ‘Lost to History’, p.27.
27
participation of a willing public, albeit an often factionalised one.95 The result is a complex
entanglement of compromise and contestation.96 This constant process of renegotiation can be
seen in the decision to make elements of the ‘How Glasgow Flourished’ exhibition permanent. Presumably, this is what happened when taking into account the response the temporary exhibition got from visitors and also press coverage the exhibition received. One could also assume that other events happening concurrently in the wider city of Glasgow such as the Commonwealth Games, whilst not directly influencing the decision to permanently include slavery in the museum, by sparking debate over Scotland’s role and history within the
Commonwealth would have simply confirmed the museum’s assumption that this was a topic of concern within at least some areas of the Glasgow community. Increasingly, in contemporary society, one could argue that (at least for academics and recipients of higher education) history is becoming less and less about the past and more a reflection of present day concerns and/or prejudices.97
The gallery itself has two possible entrances: one that leads through from the neighbouring gallery and another that leads off from the Central Hall. This entrance is the first one you come to on your left- hand side as you walk in through the main Argyle Street entrance to the
museum so is likely to be the one of the first, if not the first, sections of the museum that many visitors will see. Coming in through this entrance to the gallery, the first main text panel on the left-hand side depicts a large image of the Forth Rail Bridge (one of Victorian Scotland’s most outstanding engineering feats) and explains how Glasgow came to be known as the ‘workshop of Empire’. As the text panel shown above explains that the gallery is presented in stages, one’s natural extinct is to follow the gallery in a linear manner with each stage. If one goes around the room clockwise, one encounters the age of Industrial revolution on the Forth bridge section first, then moves to the medieval ages. One then has to cross the room, passing the second entrance in the process and the text panels on the Georgian period follow. After that is the section on the Great Exhibition of 1888 and 1901 that were hosted in Glasgow finishing with
95 E. Gable, ‘Cultural Studies at Monticello’, in Marstine, J. (ed.), New Museum Theory and Practice: An
Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p.110.
96 Ibid., p.110. 97 Ibid. p.127.
28 the city’s contemporary cultural redevelopment. This rather confusing layout makes the overall narrative of the gallery somewhat disjointed. It makes it difficult for the visitor to stand back and see a clear picture of Glasgow’s economic and cultural development when it is presented in this rather fragmentary manner, an undeniable challenge when the gallery has two separate entrances. It is interesting to note however, that the first panel one sees next to arguably the most well-used entrance is one that depicts Glasgow as an Imperial epicentre, acting as a frame for the mercantile and trading rhetoric that continues throughout the gallery.
In terms of the ‘look’ of the gallery, unlike the Central Hall or other galleries such as the Life gallery (a large room with a high glass ceiling and intricately tiled floor surrounded by stone arches) which holds the museum’s taxidermy collection, the ‘Glasgow Stories’ gallery is, by comparison much simpler. Firstly, the space is much smaller, with a varnished wooden floor and the walls are painted a very pale pastel green. This overall setting of the room neither overshadows what is being displayed with ornate or grandiose architecture nor does it
compound the cultural status of the Glaswegian society on display in relation to its associations
with the British Empire which other areas of the museum certainly would.98
One of the first things that one notices when looking at the Georgian period section of the gallery is the display of objects, or rather, the lack of it. However, it should be noted that the gallery in general is not incredibly rich in object display. Space is at a premium so perhaps a decision was made by curators to display document reproductions within text panels rather than showing physical objects to save space. There are, however, some objects on display pertaining to the Georgian period (six in total) of which two are explicitly linked to slavery. This is not very many. This paucity in objects does not come as a surprise to Professor Tom Devine. When discussing the exhibition ‘How Glasgow Flourished’, the temporary predecessor to what we see in the Kelvingrove today, he made the following comments:
To be fair, all modern museum displays based on scholarship and material culture crucially depend on the chance survival of artefacts and images from the past. Not
98 S. Moser, ‘The Devil is in the Detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge’, Museum Anthropology,
29 surprisingly, given the record of national amnesia on slavery and the urge to forget and dissemble, these are not likely to be very common in Scotland. A long-lost story has yielded few remains apart from a rich archive of ledgers, plantation correspondence, accounts and the like, which are mainly the stock in trade of the historian rather than
those who seek to understand the past through the prism of material evidence.99
Whilst Professor Devine is right to point to the inaccessibility of such objects (going on to cite events such as Black History Month as more helpful in engaging a public audience), phrases such as ‘national amnesia on slavery’ and ‘urge to forget and dissemble’ somewhat gloss over the real practicalities underpinning this scarcity in objects. Perhaps the most helpful way to illustrate this is to look to the situation in the United States versus that in Britain, and break that down even further to Scotland, when looking at how slavery is displayed. Presentations and displays of slavery began to develop in the United States around ten years before those in
the United Kingdom (England) in the 1980s.100 As Marx famously outlined, the development of
economic history takes place ‘behind the scenes’ where issues of ownership and control are
decided.101 Slavery is undoubtedly an important component in the building of Britain’s
economic history and development, yet for certain reasons, it is rather hard to present as what
Seaton refers to as ‘museum theatre’.102 The United States has without doubt been more
prolific in this area and this can be partly explained with the following reasoning. One critical difference between British and American representations is where they are positioned in the transatlantic triangular trade. The UK in general, according to Cubitt, has certainly benefitted
from a ‘geographical distance and topographical absence’.103 As the United States was the final
destination for many of those shipped from Africa, it resulted in plantation houses, estates, sites of slave markets, slave uprising etc. remaining after abolition. As Britain was what was known as the ‘middle passage’ of that trade, signifiers remaining are fewer and further
99 Devine, ‘Lost to History’, p.27.
100 A. V. Seaton, ‘Sources of Slavery-Destinations of Slavery’, International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism
Administration, vol. 2, no. 3-4, 2001, p.113.
101 Ibid., p.116. 102 Ibid., p.117. 103 Cubitt, p. 162.
30
between.104 The industrial revolution in the UK that followed the slavery heyday of the
Georgian period has left many more tangible markers on the landscape such as abandoned mines or factories which can be adapted to suit a contemporary audience, connecting them to an aspect of the past that is no longer so readily available to them and producing an element of the aforementioned ‘museum theatre’. A Scottish example of this would be the National Mining Museum in Newtongrange, where former miners guide groups round the now disused mine, explaining how it operated, working conditions etc.
In terms of slavery signifiers, one can certainly demonstrate that in Scotland, as discussed in chapter one, there were even fewer ‘bodies’ passing through Scotland herself than her English neighbour, therefore there are even fewer locations of significance such as docks and less of the associated paraphernalia that comes with the comes from the practice of transatlantic slavery, making displays or presentations on the topic of slavery perhaps even more difficult. And here to one of the critical points when discussing exhibiting slavery in museums. The scarcity of objects often means that the few that are shown are those of punishment, or the
indirect results of slaves and their labour.105 This results in the voice of the enslaved Africans
being more or less completely lost for such objects only go on to further consolidate the image
of Africans as slaves and only slaves, leaving them no real agency.106 When talking about the
exhibits on slavery in Liverpool and Hull, Marcus Wood was critical of the decision to employ large scale slave ships to depict the horrors of the conditions for slaves crossing the Atlantic: The mock-ups of the conditions in a slave ship displayed in Hull and Liverpool attempt to concretise, to simulate, the memory of the middle passage. […] Yet surely there are subjects and objects which cannot fit within an educational framework of current
museum culture. Museum parodies of the experience of the middle passage, which claim to ‘put us there’, may well do more harm than good. [...] In inviting us to think we are getting a ‘total experience’, these exhibits simply recast the empathetic yet complacent
104 Seaton, p.117-8.
105 J. A. Carvill, ‘Uncomfortable Truths: British museums and the legacies of slavery in the bicentenary year’,
Federation of International Human Rights Museums, (online) http://www.fihrm.org/resources.html , 2007, p.14.
31 emotional substitutions with which the West has been misremembering and
dis-remembering slavery for more than three centuries.107
In terms of the choice of objects that are displayed in the Kelvingrove, the majority are those coming from the elite: a ceramic bowl that would have contained a rum punch, rich in
plantation sugar. There is also a large napkin which, while not made from cotton but linen, is nevertheless a display of the wealth that was prevalent at the time and does little to challenge the lack of African in the display case. Alongside the bowl and the tablecloth is a trade token which the accompanying text panel (pictured above) describes thus:
Glaswegian merchants would have recognised the symbols on this penny trade token. Many workers were partially paid with tokens like this. They could only be spent in certain shops, increasing employers’ profits. The African figure represents slavery, while the pineapple represents Caribbean plantations and their owner’s wealth and hospitality.
107 M. Wood cited in Tibbles, ‘Facing Slavery’s Past: The Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade’,
Slavery & Abolition, vol. 29, no. 2, 2008, p.297.
