University’s £20m apology for slavery

Cash ‘will help atone for unethical past donations’

THE University of Glasgow will attempt to address its historical links to the slave trade with a £20million programme of ‘reparative justice’.

The money will be raised and spent over the next 20 years on founding and running the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research.

The Scottish institution is understood to be the first in the UK to set up such a programme, to be managed in partnership with the University of the West Indies.

The announcement comes almost a year after the university’s research found that many of the donations it received in the 18th and 19th centuries were tainted by slavery.

Professor Sir Anton Muscatelli, Glasgow’s principal and vicechancellor, said: ‘While you can’t change the past, you can change [its] consequences.’

The centre is to be co-located in Glasgow and the Caribbean and will host events, sponsor research and co-ordinate academic collaborations.

It also aims to raise public awareness of slavery and its impact around the world.

Last year, the university said it had received between £16.7million and £198million in today’s terms from people who derived their wealth from the slave trade.

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies, said Glasgow university’s decision was a ‘bold, moral, historic step’.

Dr David Duncan, Glasgow’s chief operating officer, yesterday said that academics had been conscious of the part the university played in the abolitionist movement and yet aware that the institution would have indirectly benefited from ‘that appalling and heinous trade’.

The bulk of the centre’s funding is expected to come from research grants and benefactions.

SNP councillor, Graham Campbell, who became Glasgow’s first councillor of African-Caribbean descent in 2017, said: ‘This action is a necessary first step in the fight against institutionalised racism and discrimination in Scotland and the UK and for the international fight for reparative justice.’

However, author and academic Joanna Williams told the BBC it was wrong to suggest those alive today bore ‘historical responsibility’ for what were ‘truly barbaric and criminal acts’.

Slavery was abolished by Parliament in 1807 but remained legal in the British Colonies until 1838.