We start with another fine article by Rohan Fernando on the cultural and institutional legacies of the British empire in India.
His study of the Great Canals in India examines the many waterways, built both to irrigate and also to navigate India, from the early nineteenth century onwards. They made thousands of square miles cultivable and opened up many parts of the Indian interior to trade and travel, and they are still in use today. Indeed, while we in Britian have all but forgotten this legacy, the great engineers and imperial public servants who oversaw the digging and construction of these man-made waterways are heroes in India. Who has heard of Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton? But there are said to be 3000 statues and shrines to Cotton in Andra Pradesh alone, at which farmers today pray for a good harvest.
Alistair Parker, who has previously written for HR on Elihu Yale and the British East India Company contributes a piece – a letter to Wells Cathedral – on their exhibition on ‘The Church and Slavery’.
He sets out the history of the Church’s financial involvement in the South Sea Company, and the Company’s involvement with slavery. He draws attention to the tradition of anti-slavery among bishops of Bath and Wells in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He also calls for a more balanced and nuanced account of the role of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Church Mission Society, both of which have been criticised as agents of slavery and colonialism.
We have published several book reviews recently. The journalist and author John Lloyd considers a collection of essays edited by Colin Kidd and Aileen Fyfe on the aftermath of the Scottish Enlightenment – ‘Beyond the Enlightenment’.
Review: Beyond the Enlightenment – Aileen Fyfe and Colin Kidd
John explains how Scottish intellectual life moved from the internationalism and universalism of the eighteenth century to the sectarianism of the nineteenth century and the nationalism of the twentieth century and beyond. The Scottish imagination has narrowed since the great era of Smith and Hume and Lloyd seeks to understand why.
Mark Stocker, meanwhile, has grappled with the new book by Dan Hicks, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and probably the most strident figure in the movement to decolonise museums and repatriate their treasures (or loot, as he might have it).
As Mark shows in a humorous review that does not take the book altogether seriously, Hicks very evidently dislikes History Reclaimed and devotes space to it and its members, including our criticisms of the current management of the Pitt Rivers Museum and our successful action against the attempt by Jesus College, Cambridge to remove the statue of the cavalier, Tobias Rustat, from its college chapel.
We also review David Eltis’s magisterial synthesis of the history of the Atlantic slave trade entitled Atlantic Cataclysm.
Review: Atlantic Cataclysm. Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades by David Eltis
Eltis is the doyen of historians of this subject, the most reliable of sources, and his book draws on the new information made available by the Slave Voyages project, developed by several American universities, that has collected data on the slave trade. Eltis demonstrates the dominance of the hated trade by Portugal and Spain for over four centuries, and shows that the British played a smaller role than hitherto imagined. The most lucrative and also the dominant slave route was from south-west Africa to Brazil, and many of the slave ships sailed directly from North and South American ports to Africa: the triangular trade and ‘middle passage’ from Europe were more marginal in Atlantic slavery than believed hitherto. Eltis is openly critical of all those attempts, from Eric Williams to the recent work of Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, to exaggerate the role played by capital derived from slave interests in the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, a point we have made several times on the HR website.
Empire, the Slave Trade, and Britain’s Wealth: A Reply to Will Hutton in The Guardian
Finally, we draw your attention to a correspondence and its aftermath about the Church of England and Slavery. On May 9th Robert Tombs published a long article on the Church and its investments in slavery in the eighteenth century in the Times Literary Supplement. It drew upon research used earlier this year in our criticism of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Both the Fitzwilliam and the Church Commissioners, who manage the Church’s funds, have been led to believe that investments in South Sea Annuities – government bonds merely administered by the South Sea Company – were derived from the profits of slavery when they were not. This undermines the always tenuous arguments supporting the Anglican ‘Project Spire’ that the Church owes reparations for historic wrongs three hundred years ago. In subsequent issues of the TLS Professor Richard Drayton has attempted to defend this research and advice to the Commissioners, and been answered in published letters from Robert Tombs, Richard Dale (the historian of the South Sea Company) and Lawrence Goldman. We hope to be allowed to republish these exchanges in the future.
However, the issues involved and the arguments deployed can soon be found in a long document about to be published on the HR website, which is a critique of a report prepared recently by Professor Drayton and Professor Helen Paul for the Church Commissioners composed to make a further defence of research undertaken for the Church. The critique has been composed by a group including the peers Nigel Biggar and Tony Sewell; the historians Robert Tombs, Richard Dale and Lawrence Goldman; the Rev. Ian Paul and Mr Jonathan Baird, members of Synod; and the educator Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert.
It answers Drayton and Paul in full. We have used David Eltis’s new work to do so where relevant. The document covers many of the issues in contention in the history of slavery and we hope readers will find it interesting. It will be sent to key figures in the Church of England and Church Commissioners.
Look out for our final newsletter of the summer later in July in which we’ll reveal the History Reclaimed ‘Books of the Year’. Meanwhile, if you can, please make a donation. We depend on readers’ support in all senses of the term.
Lawrence Goldman
Robert Tombs
David Abulafia
Alex Gray
Zewditu Gebreyohanes
