Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Museum director and former Labour MP
street name and monument which highlights our imperial heritage is that future generations may become ignorant of our often brutal past. The truth is slavery is deeply embedded in the history of modern Britain, and we need to understand more of that violent, racist legacy.
Take Liverpool, it was Britain’s leading slave port in the 1700s and saw 5,000 ships sail out of the Mersey to trade African slaves and then return laden with goods such as cotton, sugar, and rum.
The yield from that human trafficking transformed Merseyside into a booming metropolis.
The “West African business”, as it was called, was commemorated in street names and monuments from
Jamaica Street to the Nelson Monument to the famous Town Hall – with its carved busts of Africans and elephants.
In the countryside, profits from West Indian plantations built some of the most beautiful stately homes and rolling estates of England. Harewood House – the West Yorkshire seat of the Lascelles family – owes its magnificence to the 27,000 acres of sugar cane fields held across Barbados, Jamaica, and Tobago, as well as a particularly inhumane fleet of slaving vessels anchored off the coast of Anomabu, Ghana.
More than that, the wealth that came from sugar and slavery gave Britain the funds for the Industrial Revolution.
Our pioneering history of industrialisation – in coal; cotton; and shipbuilding – was heavily indebted to the riches that flowed from the enslavement and sale of Africans. The beauty and elegance of Edinburgh, London, Glasgow and Bath were secured by slave investments. We need to acknowlropewalks, edge that history. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, we have traced the origins of some of our collections to slave money - and highlighted this terrible contrast between beautiful objects and the bloody funds behind them.
As museums, we have to be clearer about these uncomfortable truths in our galleries and ensure that more black voices, artefacts and perspectives are heard.
From the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool to recent sculptures by Kara Walker in the Tate Modern (exploring the imperial connections of Europe, American and Africa), there is a determination to do so.
And, of course, our schools need more time to teach this complex past. Slavery and empire are present in the curriculum, but there is simply not enough space given to history in the timetable – and so the story of colonialism and slavery, and its legacies today, is lost.
So, I hope we can add to this history, rather than subtract from it. With new plaques on old statues; contemporary memorials to those lost to slavery; and more space for black figures in our public squares and streets.
I cannot begin to appreciate the revulsion which black people will feel about passing the statue of a slave trader and local councils finally look ready to respond to that.
But heed the warning of Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s leading historian of slavery: “My view is you remove the evidence, you remove the deed. Racism is a consequence of the past.”
And now, more than ever, we need to keep reminding ourselves of that past.
Tristram Hunt is Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and former Labour MP for Stoke-on-trent.