Glasgow, the second city of empire, is celebrated for a variety of reasons but an honest public acknowledgement of the city’s colonial legacy is overdue. In this essay, Stephen Mullen illuminates Glasgow’s links with colonialism and examines how civic and political Scotland has dealt with the issue.
The Merchant City. A name coined as a late twentieth-century marketing strategy to rebrand the east end of Glasgow city centre, and to bring into focus streets named after eighteenth-century merchants. The historic enclave might be more accurately renamed ‘Slave Merchant City’, or even ‘Slave Produce Merchant City’, although this may be less attractive to the resident hotels, restaurants, and high-end retailers.
Within this rebranding, there remains no official acknowledgement of the contribution that enslaved people made to the development of Glasgow, an oversight given the source of the city’s eighteenth-century wealth. With simultaneous absence and a public nod to Glasgow’s (in)famous Tobacco Lords and Sugar Aristocracy – as they called themselves – it is hardly surprising that the street names, and the history behind them, have once again come under scrutiny in a recent international debate.
GREAT BRITAIN, SCOTLAND, AND EMPIRE
If Americans are now questioning their national history and how the Confederacy has been represented, it is unsurprising that Great Britain and its Empire should invoke similar debate. However, the situations are not directly comparable. The explicit purpose of the Confederate States of America was to preserve slavery and white supremacy. Whilst the British Empire was not created with the same objectives, the Empire was dependent on chattel slavery as its main economic foundation for over two centuries.
The monuments to Confederacy leaders were erected with the intention of endorsing white supremacy during the Jim Crow period, the ascendancy of the KKK, and the Civil Rights era. The presence of grandiose statues of imperial industrialists or militarists in Great Britain – such as Cecil Rhodes – sanitises colonial profiteering and oppression.
Given the pervasive role of Scots across the British Empire, it is unsurprising the Scottish debate has been reignited too – although caution is required.
Just like America, the work of historians and activists are revising public representations. David Olusoga, for example, has recently called for the removal of the statue of Edward Colston, who was involved with the Royal African Company, the premier English slave-trading firm established by the Stuarts and London merchants in the 1680s. Given the pervasive role of Scots across the British Empire, it is unsurprising the Scottish debate has been reignited too – although caution is required.
GLASGOW AND THE MERCHANT CITY
Whilst the Scottish debate is gathering momentum, history is being unconsciously misused for dramatic effect. Patrick Harvie, co-convenor of the Scottish Green Party in Scotland is on record: “We should look at the people who built great places and cities such as Glasgow and say something meaningful about the whole context. Huge numbers of people had an economic interest in the slave trade and you can trace a lot of our current economic inequality back to the extraordinary compensation.”
This sentiment is commendable but few direct slave-trade voyages actually left Clyde ports: it is widely acknowledged to have been a low-scale enterprise. Instead, Glasgow merchants were much more complicit in the trade in slave-grown produce, especially tobacco, cotton, and sugar, and as slave-owners in the early nineteenth century. And the legacy of the compensation – awarded for the emancipation of slavery in 1834, not the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 – is only beginning to be understood by historians, led by the Legacies of British Slaveownership team at University College London.
It is premature to suggest that modern inequality in Great Britain was a legacy of the compensation process, although the emancipation of slavery consolidated an imbalance between colony and metropole that endures today. The city of Glasgow does have an issue, but we need to be clear about what the terms of that issue actually are.
Whilst in America, Confederacy symbols were placed provocatively to endorse modern oppression, the street-names of Glasgow are arguably a less overt celebration. The names reflect the history of the location and remind that profits accrued from slavery nourished the city through successive phases of development.
In Glasgow, there are no statues dedicated to Tobacco Lords, the Sugar Aristocracy, or slave-traders – perhaps with the exception of King William, whose statue is near Cathedral Square (William Pettigrew’s Freedom’s Debt named William as a Governor and stockholder in the Royal African Company (RAC) in the 1690s, although his interest seems to have focused on using the RAC as a naval power against the French). However, street-names of the Merchant City – and the title itself – are said to commemorate slave-owners and profiteers.
Secondly, the brutal realities behind Glasgow’s connections with chattel slavery in the colonial period remain unacknowledged. At least two offending streets are named after the city’s most illustrious merchants. Glassford Street is named after John Glassford of Douglaston, one of the wealthiest of Glasgow’s Tobacco Lords. His famous Palladian townhouse, the Shawfield Mansion, was located on the corner of modern Argyle Street and Glassford Street. The famous Glassford family portrait damns Glassford as an owner of a young black page boy. The mansion was demolished in 1792 and the street named after the (in)famous resident who owned the area.
Buchanan Street, the centre of the ‘Style Mile’, arguably the most potent symbol of Glasgow’s image as a cosmopolitan city, is named after the Tobacco Lord, Andrew Buchanan. In 1760, he purchased the land now known as Buchanan Street and lived there for several years. Andrew Buchanan of Drumpellier was behind the construction of Virginia Mansion (situated on the site of the modern Corinthian) in 1753, and the naming of Virginia Place and Virginia Street. The building is gone although the street-names remain, testament to Glasgow’s long-term connections with North America.