TW: discussion of slavery and the slave trade
One particularly disgusting thing about living in western Europe is non-Black people's total ignorance of and refusal to engage with the fact that so much of what we have (and what we are proud of having) is built from the proceeds of trafficking slaves out of Africa. And even on those rare occasions when people do acknowledge it, they do so in a way that minimises and ignores huge parts of the history.
Take the city of Oxford as an example. It's a famously beautiful city which millions of tourists visit anually to enjoy the architecture. And when you're there you might find yourself thinking "Wow, I wonder how they could afford all this?" And if you look into it, you'll find that, yes, some of the buildings are connected to slavery, and the city has seemingly attempted to reckon with its involvement in the slave trade.
For instance, the library of All Souls College (which you can kind of see if you lean through a gate on Radcliffe Square, but you probably wouldn't notice it if you weren't deliberately looking) was built with a donation from a man who owned plantations in Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda. In 2020 the college renamed the library to remove his name, and installed a plaque to memorialise the slaves he had "owned". They also took £6 million of their funds to invest and use the proceeds to pay for three studentships for Black Caribbean students. It's a fairly meagre response, but at least it's acknowledgement, I guess.
And there are a couple of other cases like this. Exeter College calculated that 1.5% of the money donated to fund its chapel came from donors linked to slavery. Balliol College calculated that 10% of its major donors from between 1600 and 1919 were linked to slavery, and their donations amounted to at most 1.6% of the college's current funds. The impression is of a notable but limited connection to slavery, consisting of a few buildings here and there and a small percentage of this or that college's investments. It's the kind of impression that makes people say "Oh, okay, I'm glad we've reckoned with that, now we can move on."
But, honestly, this is just scratching the surface of the problem. Probably the most famous building in Oxford is the Radcliffe Camera. I've often wondered if it's connected to slavery, I've looked into it before and found no known connection, it is never mentioned in the context of slavery.
It was built with money donated by John Radcliffe, a wealthy physician who donated a lot of his money to Oxford, who apparently had no connection to slavery himself. If you look into his story, you'll find that he made his money from his successful medical practice, he served various monarchs, it's not surprising he was rich, but I think it is surprising he was quite so rich as he was. If you look a little deeper, you'll find that he made his money from his medical practice and investments. OK, I guess that's normal.
But wait, what were his investments? Well, we know that he invested heavily in the East India Company (EIC), we even know that in 1697 he was planning to invest the profits he made from a specific investment in the EIC on building works to enlarge University College Oxford. OK, what kinds of things were the EIC making money from in 1697?
Well, we don't have great records from that time, but we know that in 1685 they set up a settlement at Bengkulu, Sumatra, to manage the trade of black pepper, a settlement that experienced severe labour shortages and "required" shipments of slaves predominantly from Madagascar. We know that EIC officials in 1687 declared that they had an "absolute need" of 50 or 60 further slaves at this specific settlement because local labourers were too expensive. In 1687 company directors suggested that the slaves should have dry and comfortable lodgings. In 1690 they recommened that they should be adequately fed to encourage them to "multiply". In 1695 it was ordered that all slaves should have food and lodging. And in 1709 the EIC directors reprimanded those running the settlement and ordered that they should have suitable food and lodging and receive medical attention if they were sick, for “they are likely to be more beneficial to our affairs the longer they live.” (You can read more about this in: Slavery in a Remote but Global Place: the British East India Company and Bencoolen, 1685-1825 by Richard B. Allen, of which there is a free downloadable pdf if you search).
So, that gives you some idea of what John Radcliffe was investing in in 1697, and what he waiting for the profits from, the profits he planned to use to fund the building work to enlarge University College Oxford. And if University College investigated itself to determine which of its donors was linked to slavery and which wasn't, John Radcliffe would be classified as "not linked to slavery", because he didn't personally own or inherit his wealth from the owner of a slave plantation. And I think this example shows how totally self-serving it is for white institutions to investigate themselves for complicity and find themselves mostly innocent, based on defining "complicity" in terms so narrow that they hide the vast majority of criminality.
It's impossible to check something like this several centuries in the future, but I would quite confidently guess that there is not one single building in Oxford from that era that is *not* the proceeds of slavery. Any donation from any nostalgic University graduate who has a little money invested in the East India Company, the Royal Africa Company, the South Sea Company (as so many people did in those days) is the proceeds of slavery. Any money made by owning and renting property (as so many Oxford colleges did and still do) to someone who pays that rent using the profits from their investments in those companies, those are the proceeds of slavery. The whole city is complicit.
And you can find an equivalent to Oxford anywhere in western Europe, not just the "obvious" examples like Lisbon, Bristol, Nantes, Seville, Amsterdam, that directly profited through their roles as cities directly handling the products of slavery, but also famously beautiful urban landscapes like Edinburgh's New Town or Eixample in Barcelona were built with slave money. You simply can't get away from it, it's everywhere, and that's without even going into the fact that virtually everything built in the era of slavery was funded by wealthy investors, who acquired their wealth through previous investments in shares, which were often shares in companies who profited directly from slavery, a chain of responsibility that obfuscates where the guilt lies but cannot forgive it.
And to come back to where we started, at All Souls College, Oxford, where the meagre reparations for a library built by a plantation owner consisted of a £6 million investment whose profits would pay for fellowships for three Black Caribbean students, we have to ask (in light of the above) what exactly did All Souls College invest this money in? And, well, that's an interesting story in its own right. Just tear the whole thing down at this point.
