IF WE ERASE THE PAST, HOW CAN WE EVER LEARN FROM IT?

IT does not take a historian to recognise that the race protests we have witnessed lately in towns and cities across the UK are fuelled by rage – or that this rage is understandable. The death of George Floyd in the United States of America has forced not only that nation but many others – including our own – to confront uncomfortable truths about both our past and present records on race relations.

And, to an extent, I can see why statues erected in celebration of figures who we now know profited from or were sympathetic to slavery have been targeted by protesters. In the case of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston, his 125year-old statue was pulled off its plinth, dragged to a river and dumped there.

Although he was born decades after slavery was abolished in 1833, Winston Churchill’s statue at Westminster was horribly desecrated too, with the word ‘racist’ scrawled over his plinth.

In Glasgow, many of the Merchant City streets named after tobacco lords – Andrew Cochrane, Andrew Buchanan et al – have been given alternative signage, courtesy of the protesters.

They want to rename Cochrane Street Sheku Bayoh Street after the 32-year-old who died in police custody in Kirkcaldy in 2015. And the suggested new name for Buchanan Street, meanwhile, is George Floyd Street.

In the context of the rage sparked by Mr Floyd’s death in Minneapolis we can understand these reactions as outbursts of emotion, heat-of-the-moment attempts to right historical wrongs in a heartbeat.

BUT it would be a grave misjudgment to consider the obliteration of these emblems of our past as at all desirable in the long term. Quite the reverse. As a historian I would suggest that such intentions verge on the criminal.

In viewing a relic from Scotland’s past it should be obvious to us that, since it was created in the past it reflects the values and priorities of our ancestors – not our own in the here and now.

It is the failure to engage in this which leads to the wrongheaded view that, as values and attitudes change, so historical artefacts considered as obnoxious have to be altered or destroyed.

Where would that mindset lead ultimately? Certainly not to any intellectual grasp of who historical figures were or how they shaped, or were shaped by, their times.

It is with this in mind, surely, that Poland and Germany have retained as museums several of the extermination camps which, in the past century, were the scenes of slaughter on an unimaginable scale. How do we begin to imagine what went on if the evidence is swept away?

From the point of view of a historian, taking down statues, renaming streets and destroying monuments is the worst possible thing we can do in the quest to understand what life was once like and who our ancestors were as people. Far from bringing clarity to the past, it is censoring it. Nor from the point of view of the lay person should the practice be any less abhorrent. It is often these very artefacts – the street scenes, the town square statues – which provide him or her with a greater sense of the past than any history book could. Why? Because its impact can be seen with their own eyes.

None of this is to deny that, in Scotland’s case, there is much in its past to confront that makes uncomfortable reading. In fact, I find it striking that it was not until 2015 that a serious academic book emerged on the issue of Scotland’s relationship with the slavery system.

This was Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past, a collection of essays by academics who analyse Scotland’s part in the African slave trade and question why the country has been in denial about it for more than 200 years.

A few years ago I also wrote an essay of my own entitled Did Slavery Make Scotland Great? which explores the strong inter-relationship between the transatlantic slave economy and Scottish industrialisation.

Only very recently have we begun to understand that Scotland gained disproportionately from the slave system. We should know these things about our ancestors and how our nation was built, however much we may prefer that the story were different.

But destroying the evidence can and must form no part of this education. I would suggest two ways forward.

FIRST, Scotland and slavery should be embedded firmly in the school curriculum where the full complexity and impact can be taught to the next generation. The subject is far from peripheral in the national story.

Youngsters need to know why chattel slavery was almost universally accepted. They should understand that the chair which I am looking at right now had the same rights as a black man during a certain period of history.

They should be aware that the slavery accepted unquestioningly by almost everyone in the land at the time was among the worst forms there is – where a person becomes a commodity with no rights.

And they should appreciate almost no one, from intellectuals to politicians and churchmen, had any moral difficulty with the idea of slavery in the 18th century.

What a valuable learning curve for tomorrow’s generation to grasp how and why values change and to consider how far we should be condemning people in the past who lived in a very different social economic, religious and cultural context.

Second, Glasgow’s Merchant City and other areas should have information boards explaining the darker as well as some more positive aspects of the area’s history.

These should bear some representation of an aspect of the slave trade and bring historical context to buildings, street names and statues which people are seeing.

In Edinburgh, some have called for the dismantling of the statue of Sir Henry Dundas, the politician responsible for delaying the abolition of slavery in the UK.

His role in the slavery system should, of course, be understood and lamented. But not by removing him.

On his plinth there is ample room to bring 21st century context to this politician’s 200-year-old values and motivations – room even to say some would prefer it if the statue were not there at all.

But really it should be. For the key point is this: these statues do not represent nefarious criminality and immorality but significant figures who were lauded in their day. We should understand why.

These artefacts of the past must remain in place – but remain with an explanation.