Michael Fry: Study not shame is right response to past slavery

DID slavery make Scotland great? That was the question Tom Devine, the retiring professor of Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh, chose to raise for what was billed as his final lecture there.

At the end of an academic career of 40 years, he struck a humble note. Scots had beyond doubt played some part in the slave trade and its consequences, he lamented, and he accused himself of not having done enough to expose it in his books. Apology is a fashionable posture and some speak of ours as an apology culture. For all the world like Barack Obama or Gordon Brown or Kevin Rudd, Professor Devine was giving a conclusive demonstration of political correctness.

The trouble with this sort of trendy penitence is that it does little but butter the ego of the apologist. Everybody connected with the slave trade has been dead for the better part of two centuries. What good do our crocodile's tears do them?

We cannot alter what happened in the past. The best we can do is try to define what it might mean for us: not an easy matter, indeed, but the argument should go beyond black-and-white attitudinal oneupmanship, as unattractive in a professor of history as in a pub bore.

They lived in the past, we live in the present. They had slaves, we do not. They were wrong, we are right. They were immoral, we are moral. QED.

Here is the face of political correctness at its smuggest, but I would not bet good money on the long-term survival of its contortions. The Victorians put frilly covers on their table-legs in case the sight of curvaceous mahogany should arouse sexual desire. Our descendants may find equally laughable the scruples of a generation that refused to say black coffee (No! It's coffee without milk).

Slavery is a more serious matter. Nobody today doubts it was a great wrong yet, till only 200 or so years ago, few could see this. Most people – Scots above all – took their morality from the Bible, and the Bible has not a word to say against slavery. True, God smote the Egyptians for enslaving the Jews, but this was because they were Jews, his chosen people, not because they were slaves. Black slaves were fine, then.

St Paul says that in Jesus Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free. Translated into modern terms, he is against racism, yet he sees no need for freeing slaves: they may have a hard time, but they will be all right so long as they believe in the Christian God.

When the first sceptics of the 18th century started to look for morality somewhere other than in the Bible, one place they turned to was ancient Greece and its philosophers. None of these condemned slavery either. Aristotle did not like it but decided it was just natural, like many other unpleasant things we have to cope with. Plato was himself once briefly enslaved when captured on a journey by pirates. He got ransomed by his friends, but the shock of it all did not turn him into a campaigner against the slave trade.

Slavery in the past was a bit like sex today. While we know it may make people do terrible things to each other, we cannot get along without it, so we might as well put up with the fact that it has bad sides as well as good sides.

In these circumstances the remarkable novelty was that some enlightened Scots could manage to examine slavery without prejudice, as they tried to examine everything without prejudice, and to decide against it. They have to be weighed in the balance against those brother Scots who made money out of West Indian plantations because – well, that was the way to make money in those days and they were not in a position to dictate to an English Empire they had only just joined.

There were still Scots able to cast off the blinkers of self-interest, such as Zachary Macaulay, son of the minister of Inveraray and father of the historian Lord Macaulay. He was sent off to work in Jamaica at 16 because his family had no other way of providing for him, so he stayed silent on what he witnessed in case protest made him look "foolish, childish and ridiculous". But, having been brought up an evangelical Christian he, at length, found the courage of his convictions and returned as an adult to this country to lead the abolitionist campaigns.

More impressive on slavery was another Scottish type, the father of economics, Adam Smith. Unlike a young Macaulay torn between material need and religious conviction, Smith, being neither poor nor Christian, could look at the question coolly. And it is striking that he of all men, author of a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, makes so little of the moral case against slavery. Rather he argues that "the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of all". This was because, unlike wage-earners in a pin factory at Kirkcaldy, the slaves had no incentive to exert themselves on behalf of their employers.

Why does the moralist remain so morally neutral? Smith was always anxious to win his arguments with his society in anything from liberal economic reform to the surrender of the American colonies, with reasons as much moral as practical. In the case of slavery, his hesitation to stress moral reasons probably followed from the simple fact the morality of the time did not condemn slavery outright. Does this make the 18th century less moral than the 21st? It is a claim our age of child abuse, financial fraud and political sleaze can hardly make with a straight face.

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there," wrote LP Hartley. It is, at the least, a gross discourtesy to go abroad and scorn the local customs as a prelude to damning them. In fact, it means we might as well stay at home for all we learn from the experience of travel, which at its best can widen our human sympathies and help to make us better people. And travel in time is like travel in space. In Prof Devine's case, it brought him face to face with "A nation's shame".

Prof Devine resembles the tourist who takes a supply of curly ham sandwiches with him on foreign holidays, lest he get the squitters from the local kebabs. His lecture on slavery shows not the least desire to come to terms with another society which knew no political correctness, but only to sit in judgment on it for sharing the assumptions of its own time rather than of ours. It is a revealing statement at the end of a modish historian's career how little he has grasped, these 40 years, what he should have been doing.