Museum of slavery plan may further distort our history

Putting slavery alongside the Highland Clearances risks more historical muddle, writes Martyn Mclaughlin

The selective amnesia and denial with which Scotland’s history has been written means that when we finally arrive at a point of reckoning with the past, there is a danger that our fervour to recognise and acknowledge the wrongs that have gone before risks obscuring them even further.

The journey to shine a light on the nation’s unpalatable slave history has taken hundreds of years, yet in truth, it has barely begun. Progress has been made, but sometimes the signposts laid down confirm only how far we have to go. The Holyrood debate about a new national museum highlighting Scotland’s role in the slave trade is a case in point.

For the avoidance of doubt, it should go without saying that it is wonderful to see our parliament addressing this issue and owning our imperial history. These are tentative steps, but they have the potential to make amends for past opportunities squandered, such as the 2009 Homecoming festival, a global event which presented the chance to shine a light on the dark side of the Scottish diaspora. Instead, it became a bland, whitewashed vehicle designed to drum up inward investment and interest among North American tourists.

How things have changed in a decade. How they have changed in a year. The Black Lives Matter movement has buoyed and emboldened discussion about how Scotland lifted itself out of a period of poverty and famine in the late 17th century to become one of the most thriving industrialised nations in the world in the space of 150 years. The answer, of course, is a trade boom built almost exclusively on black chattel slavery.

Growing awareness of this grim truth has sparked spirited debate about what should be done with civic commemorations to those who amassed their wealth on the back of such suffering. The natural next step is to ask how we might ensure future generations can learn, acknowledge and recognise from that dark chapter.

The creation of a national museum is an elegant and timely catalyst for that process. The problem, however, is that the one currently being proposed risks minimising Scotland’s quotidian ties to the slave trade.

The Holyrood debate focused on a plan by Stuart Mcmillan, the SNP MSP for Greenock and Inverclyde, to establish a new Museum for Human Rights in the town’s sugar sheds, a row of cavernous, redbricked Victorian warehouses which once teemed with sugar grown on Caribbean plantations.

It is a striking waterfront location and, having lain derelict for decades, the grand structures are in dire need of a new purpose, especially in a part of Scotland with greater need than most for economic stimulation. Heritage-led regeneration, however, cannot be the primary driver behind such an important decision, and in any case, a discussion must be had about whether Greenock is the best place for such a museum.

Numerous dynastic fortunes may have sprung from its sugar and tobacco industries, but nowhere compares to Glasgow in terms of how the proceeds of transatlantic slavery transformed a single town or city’s economy and built heritage. Beyond that, could not communities across Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire who thrived through cotton mills make a similar argument as Greenock? And what of the nation’s capital, where those in charge of its upstanding financial