Following on from Cambridge University's announcement of research into its links with the colonial slave-trade, now Bristol University has announced a similar investigation. This is amid wider attempts by the city, one of three key ports for British slave traders along with London and Liverpool, to get to grips with its ties to the trade.

The university is to advertise for a permanent academic post examining the history of slavery. Whoever gets the job will oversee efforts by staff and community groups to “explore, investigate and determine the university’s historical links to slavery”. A university spokesperson said: “As an institution founded in 1909, we are not a direct beneficiary of the slave trade, but we fully understand and acknowledge that we financially benefited indirectly.” One source has reckoned that 85% of the wealth used to found the university came from the profits of slavery. Read more here.

A hard-hitting opinion piece by Cambridge student Micha Frazer-Carroll in the Independent comments on the recent news that Cambridge University is to investigate its links to the slave trade. Calling the study a "tiny step towards change" that sends a "small message" she warns: "one piece of research does not systemic change make".

"When we talk about universities’ involvement in colonialism and slavery, it’s important to remember that we are not just talking about issues of the past, but the message sent to current students and academics by overlooking histories of racism.Attending a university that has been complicit in white supremacist thinking is draining. But attending one that then fails to acknowledge its role in that history can be worse.

"The University of Cambridge approaches race uncritically. At best, like in the case of my college’s dining hall, this means being surrounded by faces that do not look like your own. At worst, the legacies of colonialism and slavery – which directly affected my ancestors as well as those of most students of colour at the university – are erased, overlooked, and thus silently condoned."
Read the full article here.

Read a Guardian comment piece by David Olusoga here. 

Cambridge University has launched a two-year study to investigate its own historical links with colonial slavery and will examine how it might have gained financially from the slave trade. A number of Universities have faced questions about the legacy of links to slavery. "It is only right that Cambridge should look into its own exposure to the profits of coerced labour," said vice-chancellor Stephen Toope. 
Read more here.

This is the question asked in an article in today's Independent by Abbinata Makoni. It begins:
"Almost every elder I know has uttered a version of the sentence: 'Jobs like those are not for people like us,' as if we’d all been conditioned to think we were only meant to go down one rigid path while others excelled and prevailed in all sorts of avenues. It wasn’t until I was 15 that it finally clicked that, unfortunately, we have been taught to think like that, because that’s exactly how racial inequality works in society." One of those avenues is academia, yet as recently as 2011 of over 14,000 university professors in the UK, only 50 were black. Another legacy issue. Read the full article here.

Manchester is gearing up for the two-hundredth anniversary of the 'Peterloo Massacre' on August 16. This article by John Harris from the Guardian (itself birthed from the massacre) explains some of the significance, not just at the time, but for today. Like colonial slavery, this event has also been neglected in school history lessons, and also carries forward a massive legacy, both for Manchester and for the working classes in Britain. EP Thompson in his classic The Making of the English Working Class wrote of Peterloo that it, “was without question a formative experience in British political and social history.” Harris comments: "Thompson saw 1819’s carnage originating in 'the panic of class hatred' and an ingrained belief that any working class crowd was always only a breath away from turning into the mob – something that has regularly surfaced long into the democratic age: witness Orgreave or Hillsborough." Read the full article here.

Many events and activities are being organised to celebrate or commemorate (depending on your point of view) Peterloo. These will include a special service at Manchester Cathedral at 2pm on Sunday July 7 (more details to follow soon). This website will be a good starting point to keep track of what will be happening over the summer.

“I think there is an issue that we, there is an elephant in the room. Right. And the elephant in the room, is the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism which no one ever wants to talk about despite the fact that it was one of the most significant and horrifying points in history probably in the entire existence of human beings. Whereby you had like for, for 400 years, people living in indentured slavery. I don’t even know, I can’t even imagine what it is like to be born into slavery and be tortured on a day to day basis.

When those people who were given freedom, or civil rights in the 60’s, between 64 – 68, it is very, very recent history. And unfortunately for some reason none of those people were ever compensated in any way whatsoever. In fact what happened was the governments, even in the United Kingdom actually compensated the slave owners as opposed to the people who were enslaved. And the problem with that was that we didn’t actually deal with any of the psychological trauma, not just to people of colour but also to Caucasian and White people who lived through that, who might have participated in it and who might have not actually believed in it.

None of that is being discussed.  We don’t discuss it in our education system. We have things like Black History month which are like thrown on at the end, which should be part of our curriculum so that all of us understand this is what happened in history; this is why these people are here. And I really feel that that would reduce the amount of xenophobia.

And I just want to say, actually funnily enough, for example, when those payouts were given, one of those gentlemen was actually an MP that I was reading about.  And there’s are a number of different people. You are talking about figures of like 65 million in today’s money; you are talking about figures like 83 million that were paid out to replace say 15,000 slaves.

And what you also have to understand is that capitalism as we know it is built on the back of slavery. Because pre-slavery in the 17th century things like banking really only existed in London.  It didn’t really exist outside of that. It was actually invented for merchants and for traders because they needed to borrow to be able to go and exploit human labour. And many of the banks that we use today, whether it is Barclays, or its Lloyds, or it is Chase - they are still benefitting, many families whether the like it or not are living are living off the proceeds of crime essentially.
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So the reason I mention this is because I don’t believe that human beings in their nature are born to be bad people or are born to be horrible people. I think that a lot of the time the fact that the governments and the people that control us to a certain extent, have chosen to kind of operate this collective amnesia and not educate us properly on what has happened, how it’s happened and how it’s affected people has actually led to this vilification of people of colour which we still live with till this day.”

On BBC's Question Time on February 7, the panel  was asked about the recent debate about actor Liam Neeson's alleged racism. The response given by model and author Eunice Olumide included a brilliant summary of the history and legacies of colonial slavery. Eunice spoke eloquently of "the elephant in the room" – the transatlantic slave-trade and colonialism – "which no-one ever wants to talk about, despite the fact that it is one of the most significant and horrifying points of history, probably in the entire existence of human beings." Find the programme here on iPlayer – Eunice's response starts at around 39 minutes.

In this article Elliot Ross says Scotland should take responsibility for the major and highly lucrative role it played in the transatlantic slave trade. He refers to a recent BBC documentary, Slavery: Scotland's Hidden Shame, which followed the publication of a major book. It gave a thorough and critical expose of an aspect of Scottish history that has often been ignored or else reduced to little more than a footnote beneath grander and more comfortable narratives about Scotland's distinctive scientific and intellectual contributions to modernity. Recent emphasis on Scottish participation in the abolition of slavery and the slave trade has come at the expense of a proper understanding of the ways in which Scottish institutions and elites were enriched by chattel slavery. This "structural amnesia compounds the original injury and extends the contempt for black life that made the transatlantic slavery economy possible to begin with." Read the full article here.

In this article in today's Independent, Deana Heath, senior lecturer in Indian and colonial history at the University of Liverpool argues that the school curriculum must stop whitewashing the British empire and start being honest about the subjugation and exploitation of millions of people.

Heath says his students come to him having been educated through a school history curriculum that focuses almost entirely on English political and religious history, and knowing “practically nothing about empire and its legacies – including in Britain. The histories they have studied and texts they have read were virtually all about or by white men, so they also know nothing about the history of women or the histories of people of colour, either.”

Referring to Jeremy Corbyn’s recent proposals that British school children should be taught about the history of the realities of British imperialism and colonialism, Heath says this would “begin to redress the phenomenal gulf between academic history and the English school curriculum.” Criticism of Corbyn's proposals from people such as Jacob Rees-Mog is based in a "state of denial about empire" and demonstrates “a profound ignorance about British imperial and colonial history, particularly about the impact of empire on not only the colonised but also the colonisers as well.”

Heath's students’ experience has been that being able to interrogate difficult histories, such as that of empire, has given them “a much better understanding of themselves and their place in the world”. Which is, surely, what education is supposed to do. 

​Read the full article here.

In a visit to Bristol this week Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said schools should teach children about colonialism, slavery and the legacy of the British empire, and give greater weight to the “immense contribution” black Britons have made. He also unveiled plans for an Emancipation Educational Trust, which would educate future generations about the impact of slavery and “tell the story of how slavery interrupted a rich African and black history”. Local civil rights activist Paul Stephenson, who played a central role in the Bristol bus boycott in 1963, should be as well known to British schoolchildren as Rosa Parks.  Read more here and two opinion pieces  here ("Corbyn's right") and here ("Thank you, Jeremy Corbyn – what you said about colonialism was spot on.").