Slavery museum risks conflating chapters of Scotland's chequered past – Martyn McLaughlin

Scotland is waking up to its ignominious ties to the slave trade, but clustering them alongside the Highland Clearances in a new museum risks muddling an already complex history, writes Martyn McLaughlin

Greenock has been earmarked as the home for a new national Museum for Human Rights. Picture: John Devlin

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, red-bricked 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 institutions provided loans to plantation owners?

The case for Greenock is further undermined by the blind reverence with which its authorities continue to view the town’s most famous son, James Watt. In the past year, Inverclyde Council has approved a new sculpture of Watt and clustered its cultural institutions into a new complex honouring him. It is right to be proud of Watt’s achievements. It is vital to also accept that his groundbreaking discoveries were subsidised by a father who traded in slave-grown produce, and even transported enslaved people between colonies.

Some belated candour on the part of the council can overcome this problem. Sadly, others may prove more persistent – one clue, hidden in plain sight, is the name of the museum, and the muddled purpose proposed for it.

Mr McMillan envisages the new institution as a vehicle to explore “other parts of Scotland’s negative history”, such as the Highland Clearances, the 1820 Radical War, the treatment of Irish immigrants to Scotland, and the even longer history of Scots emigres who left behind their homeland for the New World.

All of these issues warrant insightful, probing, and challenging interpretations capable of educating modern-day Scots. The question, however, is whether they can – or should – be incorporated in the one facility.

There are connections to be made between these various episodes of history – Highland landowners like the Malcolms of Poltalloch had sizeable investments in plantations, for example, and the majority of the workers in Greenock’s sugar refineries were Irish – but they are at best tangential.

In grouping them together under the ambiguous rubric of human rights, there is a danger of writing a revisionist narrative which conflates indentured servitude with chattel slavery. This would, to put it bluntly, amount to whitewashing of the past, one which downplays the unimaginable suffering of those regarded as sub-human, who were forced to endure perpetual, hereditary enslavement in the name of Empire.

Mr McMillan’s intentions are laudable, but even the inference that parity exists between these circumstances is not just misplaced, it is dangerous. The persistent myth of ‘white slaves’ is routinely peddled by white supremacists and far-right conspiracy theorists; any new national museum must refute such lies, not risk perpetuating them.

None of this is straightforward. Nor should it be. Scotland’s history is a tapestry stitched from slavery, Empire, migration, and colonialism, and it is often hard to differentiate one thread from another. Yet differentiate we must.

A helpful starting point would be to expand the short-life working group set up to develop the plans for the museum to incorporate organisations like the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, which has spent more than a decade campaigning for a museum of slavery.

It has taken Scotland centuries to arrive at this moment of reckoning. It would be a shame if our new-found eagerness had the unintended consequence of further distorting a chequered history.

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