Dundas and the slave trade

ERIC Melvin highlights some of the areas of continuing disagreement on the role of Henry Dundas in delaying the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. (“One-sided view of slavery”, May 15).

My own reading of the abolition debate of 1792 mentioned by Mr Melvin is that genuine humanitarian concern for the men and women transported on the Middle Passage was wholly absent from Dundas’s calculations of wider British strategic and economic interests in the Caribbean.

Mr Melvin says there is a risk “that we are being presented with a very one-sided view on the issue of slavery” and that it is worth remembering that the vast majority of enslaved Africans “were captured and sold to slavers by their fellow Africans”.

What is the use of the term “fellow Africans” meant to convey? West African states and societies were involved in and impacted by the transatlantic slave trade in numerous and diverse ways. Some were actively involved in supplying British slave ships, and evolved sophisticated economic networks for that purpose.

Some states sought to keep out of the slave trade altogether, realising that participation was ultimately destructive of their social fabric. Some centralised, hierarchical states used large numbers of enslaved prisoners of war to grow food for their own urban communities rather than selling them into the Atlantic system.

African historians have been researching and writing about these and many other aspects of African involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery for decades.

The participation of African elites in slavery and the slave trade does not reduce Britain’s responsibility for its slavery past. There may be no current consensus on the specific issue of Dundas’s culpability but even if criticism of Dundas was not justified, this would not make that criticism “one sided”; it would only make it inaccurate.

I believe that many of our historical statues urgently need interpretative displays and panels to provide information on the life and times of the figures on the plinths (and in much greater detail than the limited space available on a typical plaque).

Despite current controversy over the Dundas statue, a considerable degree of consensus seems to be emerging about the tone and the detail required for wider learning about statues connected with slavery and empire across Scotland.

Alan Short,

Aberdeen