Yale and New Haven are visibly marked by their “entanglement with racialized chattel slavery” which has left “haunting shadows” not only on the campus and its archive but also on the town. The history of the United States is indelibly tied to slavery and its aftermath: Yale is part of that history. This volume—an outcome of research launched by the President of Yale in response to the reckoning hastened by the events of 2020, and led by the distinguished historian David W. Blight—documents history and the memories associated with it that the university has preferred to ignore. This means challenging the narrative of progress and telling the complicated stories of Black and White people connected with Yale: Black people as employees, neighbors and even students, White slaveholders, faculty, students, and donors, both racists and abolitionists across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mining the rich archives they have tried to be fair to all, “those whose humanity was stolen, abused, or destroyed, and those who enacted, perpetuated, or justified the practice of enslavement. All were all too human, like the rest of us” (p. 125). The book situates the narratives of multiple individuals within the wider history of early colonial struggles over land, people, and resources, conflicts with Native Americans, the growth of the slave trade unhindered by Puritan divines who claimed the rights of property in man, the foundation of the college, the significance of the West Indian trade, the American revolution, antebellum Yale, the civil war and the post-war reaction, the Klan and Birth of a Nation. Yale’s people tell the stories—the 200 enslaved owned by the college whose names have been established, the presidents and professors, the students who attended and became leading figures of the nation, some abolitionists, others proslavers (most notably John C. Calhoun, named by former Yale historian David Potter as ‘the most majestic champion of error since Milton’s Satan’).
No such history could be written about the colleges and universities of the UK. The absence of chattel slavery has meant a different history: slavery and empire were far away, distantiated, yet profoundly affecting the metropole. Britain’s reckoning with this history has begun, kickstarted by the national conversation over the slave trade and slavery which took place in the context of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007. Another step was marked by the publication of the Legacies of Slave-ownership database (www.ac.uk/lbs) in 2014, which documented those slaveowners who received compensation in the wake of emancipation and tracked their legacies in Britain and the empire. Glasgow was the first university to initiate an investigation into its links with the slavery business (tobacco and sugar) and later launched a programme of repair associated with the University of the West Indies. The death of George Floyd, the eruption of Black Lives Matter, and the dumping of the statue of Edward Colston, a Bristol slave-trader whose statue in the city had long been a source of controversy, marked another moment. Universities and colleges, along with a number of major national institutions, facing public pressure, announced investigations into their histories and made promises of modest reparation: more diversity, scholarships, changes in the curricula.
For the early foundations, the Oxbridge colleges, it was relatively straightforward, though never uncontested, to establish links with slave-owning donors and their families. (For more recent foundations, the connections are necessarily different.) Elite educational institutions provided crucial connections for the gentry and aristocracy, as well as for those who aspired to join such circles. Eton and Harrow, Christ’s Church Oxford and Trinity College Cambridge were home to many scions of absentee planter families. Edward Long, the famed historian of Jamaica known as “the father of English racism,” was determined that his sons should be educated in England and returned from Jamaica in 1768, once he had made enough money from sugar to ensure a future for the family. Schooldays in Harrow for his son, Edward Beeston, and then time at Trinity, ensured the maintenance of a natural hierarchy in which the young man would take his proper place. But Oxbridge bred abolitionists too. Thomas Clarkson’s prize-winning essay in 1786 was a major provocation for the movement to abolish the slave trade. There could be ‘no property whatsoever in the human species,’ Clarkson wrote. The slave trade was repugnant to nature, the principles of government, and common notions of equity. Thirty years later, the political scene had changed as the movement for emancipation gained pace. Zachary Macaulay, a noted abolitionist, sent his son Tom to Trinity. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England told an island story, one that eschewed his father’s antislavery passions and, despite his own formative years in India, had no space for empire.
As history developed as a discipline in the late nineteenth century, two subdisciplines—the domestic and the imperial—were constituted as separate. When the Trinidadian Eric Williams won a scholarship to Oxford in the 1930s, he was shaken by the extent to which the orthodoxy on abolition he encountered seemed to have been written “almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.” Williams’ 1962 Capitalism and Slavery was his response, a book that was relentlessly challenged in the decades that followed and has only recently been re-published. It has taken much to challenge the split between the U.K.’s domestic and imperial worlds, and it is still only partially undone: Brexit has not helped. Standard economic historians, for example, continue to deny the significance of slavery to the development of Britain’s modern industry. The presence of second- and third-generation Black and Brown Britons across higher education has, however, made a substantial difference. The legacies of slavery and empire can no longer be treated as external.
For Britain, Atlantic slavery is one aspect of a global history of empire, involving indentured and other forms of coerced labour, territorial ambitions, the dispossession of indigenous peoples and seizure of raw materials, systems of taxation which produced millions for the metropole, stolen loot on a massive scale. Researching the slave owners and their descendants who donated to colleges or left bequests does not result in structural change. A key legacy of chattel slavery was that forms of racialisation were locked into the mercantile capitalist system at every level. The “African” was destined to labor for the White man. The reorganisations of capital and labour that have happened since, from industrial to financial capitalism to today’s reworkings of neo-liberalism, have seen many reconfigurations of racialisation. But it remains central to Britain’s economy, culture and society. The problems are systemic, rooted in a long history of exploitation, extraction and accumulation. Improving figures on diversity, ensuring increased representation of Black and Brown people does nothing to tackle these structural inequalities. White dominance persists. Changes in curricula do not in themselves improve the experience of students in the classroom and beyond. Immediate investments were made in the face of public pressure in 2020 but soon terminated. Much is promised but not all delivered. The successes have, furthermore, produced a backlash. Outrage over the National Trust’s commitment to making visible slaving and imperial histories, fears over the removal of statues of imperial men and memorials to slave owners have fuelled toxic reactions. The “culture warriors” of the populist right, with their easy access to funding and the press, have their eyes fixed on history. The new government is resisting making reparation a topic for the forthcoming Commonwealth conference. Much work remains to be done, connected but distinct from that in the US, if there is to be recognition of the scale of the legacies of empire.
