Effigies honouring men whose past now haunts cities where they were placed on a pedestal
SCOTLAND’S two main cities both have statues that commemorate historical figures closely linked to the slave trade.
Monuments were erected to honour men who bestowed huge sums to build the cities they came from – but much of their fortunes were tied to slavery.
In Edinburgh’s St Andrew Square, the 150ft Melville Monument honours slave owner Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, who was a Scottish advocate and Tory politician.
Viscount Melville, one of the country’s most influential politicians in the 18th and 19th centuries, played a pivotal role in delaying the abolition of slavery – forcing about 630,000 slaves to wait more than a decade for their freedom.
In the same square, a bronze statue outside the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters Dundas House honours one of his nephews.
It commemorates General John Hope, the 4th Earl of Hopetoun, the nephew of Henry Dundas’s second wife. He was second in command to fellow Scot, Ralph Abercromby, commander-in-chief of the British forces in the West Indies.
Together, they helped to end the slave revolution led by French-African Julien Fedon in Grenada in 1795-6 in the fight against the French for islands in the West Indies.
Edinburgh’s High Street has a prominent statue of Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who taught that black people were inferior to whites, which drove and justified the practice of treating black people as slaves.
In Glasgow’s George Square, a statue of former Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel was erected in 1859. He is regarded as the founder of the modern Conservative Party and of modern policing in Britain.
A Lord Rector of Glasgow University, Sir Robert repealed the Corn Laws, which had placed tariffs on imported grains, which made food more expensive.
But Sir Robert also saw the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill as a threat to the cotton industry in the UK, and raised a petition against it. The Bill preventing the importation of slaves by British traders into territories belonging to foreign powers was eventually passed in 1806.