Empire: World History - 69. A Reckoning with Slavery

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

Slavery may have been abolished in 1838, but its legacy lives on in Britain today. A lot of the nation benefited financially from the trade, none more so than the slaveholders who were compensated during abolition. Today, William and Anita are joined by Alex Renton, whose family were such beneficiaries. Listen as he argues that slavery is not ancient history: it's a bit of our past that still haunts the present in real and tangible ways. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mptopopuk.com. Welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Dremple. And we are now on the big finale for our slavery series. and I've got the wonderful Alex Renton with us, but we should fess up.

This was actually recorded at the Jai Pulitzer Festival last January, and we have an update, which we're going to go straight into before we go to the recording we made, because Alex and a few others have gone on to find something called the heirs of slavery. Alita, tell us about it. So the heirs of slavery, including people like Laura Trevelyan, who used to be a colleague of mine at the BBC,

There is a Gladstone involved. There is, I mean, there are sort of prominent names from British society whose families benefited from slavery. So the heirs of slavery are looking into the development of programs for reparations and apology for what happened. And, you know, Alex Renton's very much in the heart of this. There's also an organisation which you should know about it, which is Carricot. It's a Caribbean group of nations. And this has been like a huge topic of conversation in the Commonwealth as well, that they want acknowledgement, repair and reconciliation when it comes to slavery. But Alex and the heirs of slavery, you know, this is a new thing where they are actually going through line by line what their families did and what their families had and what their families may owe. So the heirs of slavery want the European nations that were involved in slavery, particularly Portugal, Britain, France.

Spain and Holland, to acknowledge the Carricom Caribbean Nation Plan for Reparative Justice, which means a full apology, development programs for Indigenous people, funding for repatriation programs, building cultural institutions, help tackling public health crises, developing education programs, enhancing historical and cultural exchange, dealing with psychological trauma, the right to develop through technology and debt cancellation. So it's a very ambitious and comprehensive plan. I hadn't realized it was quite so thorough. It's an extraordinary program. I mean, it is a comprehensive program, but some may say from those countries, particularly the Caracom countries, that it is about time. And that is what they are saying, particularly

Commonwealth countries, they say, you know what? If you don't want to address this, what's the point of being in the Commonwealth? So now back to the recording. This is Alex Renton recorded in January at the Jaipo Literature Festival in India on his extraordinary book, Blood Legacy. We want to sort of zoom in on a personal story which actually sheds a lot of light on some very much, well, some much bigger issues. So what if you are, I mean, this is why I think this is also why, you know, when we come to this notion of why is it so hard to discuss empire, why is it become such a battlefield? It's because some of this stuff is really hard to swallow. Like the partition stuff we talked about, do you remember that it is hard for Indians or Pakistanis to acknowledge that sometimes their forebears may have been part of that bloodlust. When my book, The Anarchy, came out in India.

You wrote a book called The Anarchy? You don't mention it very often. Okay, okay. The fact that the Indian bankers, the Jugget Sets and many others, had actually basically funded these Tindy Company and had bribed Clive to fight Sarajadha. Indeed. And so there are some things which are tricky to have in your history. And one such thing is slavery.

So there are people who have old money, old money. that is built in slavery. There are cities that are built on old money from slavery. So how do you have that reckoning? Well, all of this comes together in a rather marvelous book by a man called Alex Renton. It's called Blood Legacy. Alex is with us now. And can we start with the very personal? Why did you start even working on this book? What is it in your family, the sort of the shadows in the family that made you do it? So my grand Scottish family, who some of whom still inhabit an old house in Asher. It didn't have it part of it. Some of it's derelict. Is it a castle or more of a castle than a house?

No, it's a 18th century house. But the castle is down the road. They moved out of that in the 15th century. But good reasons. But there are a lot as a child and as an adult. And there are wonderful family archives down below in the old servants dining hall. And I was all cataloged by my historian grandfather, Sir James Ferguson, who died in in in 1971. And I was just going through his notes, his handwritten catalogue and kept seeing references to Jamaica and Tobago in it and asked my mother who said, ah, yes, well, dad told us not to worry too much about that because everyone was doing it, everyone like them, and we didn't

make very much money and we weren't in it very long. Did you know the it was actually sort of slavery implanted? Did you immediately put it together? Clearly. 18th century notes about investments in in Tobago. And of course, you know, as a journalist, an investigative journalist, that was a red rag. And to my family's slight consternation, I started digging into these, this huge archive, which really hadn't been looked at since my grandfather did 60 years ago, and tells a quite ordinary story of gentlemanly or landed gentlemanly slave ownership, slave trading. Over in the end, an ownership in Jamaica, right through to 1875, when the plantation was finally disposed of. I feel like I've done you an enormous

disservice, because of course people who do read newspapers will know the by-lines. It's just in a potted history. And White should be no surprise to anybody that you're a man who just wouldn't take face value at face value. So, what is it about you that made you keep digging? Well, I like to dig.

You're an investment in Jen. It's a great repute. I mean, I see a bit like Willie, I had one of those bizarre educations that left me feeling quite rebellious and angry. A posh education I went to Eaton and so on. And I think, you know, it happened to a lot of us. Famously, went to prep school with Boris Johnson.

I went to prep school with Dear Boris. Absolutely. But a lot of the teachers from our time there are now slowly being brought to justice. Partly through your intervention in the law court. It was one of, ptoe hunting is one of my hobbies. But the, and, you know, and productive. And, yeah, I mean, a sort of skepticism about the establishment, about the class of which, you know, to which I clearly belong.

I mean, my family post-slave ownership have been governor generals in India and elsewhere, politicians, leaders in the British army and so on. Ferguson were distinguished lawyers and historians in the Scottish Enlightenment, yeah? Yes, I mean, the central figure, Sir Adam Ferguson, to the book, who is my six-time's great-uncle, was an MP for Edinburgh and for Ayrshire. He was a friend of Henry Dundas, he's very close to Pitt. he was offered the governor-generalship of Bombay at one point and turned it down because this is in the 1790 being the foreign secretary who we've met before in this podcast because he was the guy that sent Lord Wellesley out to India to fight the French and was very much the most powerful not just Scott but the most powerful man in the empire in the early days fighting

Napoleon and also a man that finds himself in the eye of a particular storm at the moment about reputation, which we'll come to in a moment. Let's park that, but let's stick with the Ferguson's for a little while longer. So, so right at the beginning, they are, they are almost immediately on the scene as a big, important family. Yeah, I mean, really from the 17th century onwards advocates, they were on the, on the English side or the southern side during the rebellion of 1745, so they came very well out of that. And then quite naturally progressed into being peripheral figures in the Edinburgh Enlightenment. Close friends with Adam Smith. He was rector of Glasgow University immediately after Adam Smith. And also, you know, this is where it

got interesting for me. I mean, clearly for his time, a liberal, a wig, a highly red man, you know, did the tour of Europe and so on, that he has a copy of every liberal text of the 18th century in his library, which still exists. This is the crucial thing. He was not, by the standards of 18th century in Scotland, he was not a monster. He was a, he was a, he was a, an educated I'm actually the word symbolise but of course

decent let's say decent by the levels of judging today and this is something you wrestle with in your book very beautifully about these are people

which if you were to take this chapter of their life out of it are people that you would not necessarily be would be unpleasant to have dinner with they are intelligent

educated people but they had slave plantations absolutely and when I first started reading the letters stored down in that basement I realised very quickly that these were men of my time.

I mean, when you read Sir Adam's younger brother who writes back from Tobago, his jokes. I mean, you could sit and our minds would merge. I need to understand what that is. So when you say that our minds would merge, what do you mean? What was in the letters? The letters are, he arrives in Grenada, which is a sort of great area where all the new arrivals to the West Indies, in the great gold rush of the 1770s trying to get the new land from, that's come out of the truce made with the French,

lots of Scots, Scots friends, and he tells funny, gossipy stories about them and how rapacious they are and how the lawyers are so naughty. And he starts judging his fellow slavers by saying, I think they're so wrong to treat the Africans so badly. Africans isn't the word he uses.

I think clearly you should show humanity to them. That makes economic sense and moral sense. So I immediately saw... Yeah. And I started, I had to start, you know, because I'm, you know, a chain of the... people who have had this privilege ever since, to wonder if I had been me at the same time,

would I too have gone out to manage to invest the family money in Africans? And that kind of begins to drive my thoughts in the book. Yeah. A bit of background here. So Scotland prior to the 80th century is one of the poorest countries in Europe. It's way behind France, Portugal, Spain, Italy and England. And the reason that Scotland joins the Union is specifically to become part of the world of empire, which means on the east coast of Scotland, India, which is where my forebears went generation after generation and made money through both administration and loot. And on the West Coast, it meant the Caribbean slave plantations. And you get huge numbers of Scots enriching themselves. And we Scots love to think of ourselves as the victims as, you know, we're the freedom and all this stuff.

Braveheart. Braveheart and all that colonized. We got onto the bus of Empire and we piled in. Well, okay. And by the mid-18th century, per capita, there are far more Scots in English, both in India and in the Caribbean. Okay, well, I wanted to do the personal book first. But let's talk about what you've just brought up. because also actually I've heard this conversation from Irish people as well saying you know what

it is very hard for us to come to terms of the fact that so many Irish went out to fight for the colonies and and you know we've talked about the Jolianelabar massacre where it was an Irishman from Tipperary who was in charge and it was another man who went to Middleton College in Dublin who ordered fire and there were lots of Irish doing some pretty unspeakable things but is it not true and we can go back and we can talk about this and we will with your story But is it also not true that there is an interesting introspection, dare I say, that's going on in Scotland and Ireland that may not be going on elsewhere? Is that fair or not fair?

It's more complex than that, isn't it? It may be more, I mean, we've got, so I live in Edinburgh, I'm a scholar, we'd like to flatter ourselves that we had the British Enlightenment. And we've remained liberal and better educated is one of the things we tell ourselves a lot in all classes in the 20th century. and were more open-minded to this day. Is it true? I mean, we've had, the culture war in Scotland

has been as gruesome over this issue, over talking about revisiting the history of empire as it has anywhere else. It's taken some peculiarly Scottish angles, but... I tell you why I think it definitely complicates things and makes Scots more willing to face this, is that, I mean, I went to,

school in Scotland, certainly to begin with, and you grow up learning about the wars of independence for us are Ballotburn and all the fighting against it. And then you learn about body prince Charlie. And the red coats are the baddies. The red coats, you know, are the evil villains of Scottish history textbooks. So every Scots child from the age of eight grows up with the English and the red coats as the enemy. So therefore, when you're reading imperial history, or talking about the red coats in India or the evening Quebec or something like that, you're well aware that, you know, these guys are morally ambiguous. And I think that's crucially important.

Certainly I find it makes, you know, it made me much more willing to accept than many of my English contemporaries, the fact that the whole imperial story is deeply morally ambiguous from the beginning because lots of English people just grew up completely ignorant of any complicity in any... Well, they have the toy soldiers and the goodies are in the red. I mean, it's like simple like that. There's no question in my mind at all. It's a huge difference.

If you've grown up to valorise William Wallace and... Robert the Bruce. Robert the Bruce and Body Prince Charlie, it's very, very easy to understand how the English army, the British army, can be a force, a morally bad force that it commits atrocities. But I mean, your and my Scots background is quite similar. In fact, we're cousins in some way like everyone. in London Scotland. Oh my God, not another relative of Dalrymple.

This is unbearable. There was, there has to be say that when I went to Tobago, there are, well, in the London phone book, there are two pages of Drumples in the Tobago phone book. Alex, you may not know this. It's not my branch of the family.

It's a long running joke. He's related to everybody. He does kind of go, not my brunch of the family quite often. When they did something back, because I've heard that one before. Sorry, yeah. We do bad things.

And my slave or ancestors lived in what has originally at our Rimple House at New Hales in outside Edinburgh for the last during the last period of slavery. But I mean, but the instinct is like I like you was brought up on Nigel Tranter. And when we drove north of the board of the holidays, my mother would have us get us out of the car and kiss the ground at Carlisle because we were back in the land of the free. But your ancestors like mine were on the side of the red coats in 45. So it for me it becomes another of these retelling of this history to have the nicest history for yourself. And it's entirely analogous with the retelling of slavery history to say the British were the good guys and Wilberforce was a saint.

Well, let's now, we went on a digression. I don't mind it because it's fascinating and also having two sort of Scots who are in this field. Two posh Scots. Two posh Scots. But, all right, there you are. Let's go back to you in the box of letters. So there you are. You're finding this stuff, these letters, which, you know, in one sentence seemed quite decent.

And then suddenly it's because you get a better price for a well-treated slave. did you get a sense of what this family was your family was like? I mean, what were they like? Yes, because I mean, a lot of the letters are family letters and their letters, you know, as any doting uncle would write to a nephew, not least that Sir James, my four-time's great-grandfather, who was a merchant in Bombay and then with the EIC and came back to enjoy his inheritance, which included the slavery inheritance as well.

So I got a sense, I think, you know, most of all that they were not. alien beings that though their acts were monstrous but it would be wrong to picture them as monsters because they felt close to me and then I found the act of I got more and more and their portraits were on the wall as I was upstairs as I was reading this and they would have always been referred to as you know it's just that stepped out of the room they were still part of the family but then I started digging deeper and I found myself looking for good things looking for those little moral tokens that they were thinking well and

And then came across stuff that was just nauseating. Like what? Well, I think probably the first, there's a lot, but the first of all was when Jamie, the younger brother, sent out to Tobago to build a plantation and buy Africans from scratch, which is a fascinating account, writes to his older brother, Sir Adam, who's bankrolling it, saying, talking about how he's treating,

he only owns 10 Africans at the time, but he's working alongside them, cutting down the trees to make the plantation. He stripped to the waist, he says, and he treats their wounds. And he's painting a picture of brotherly love, or labour together. And in the next paragraph, he has a design. He's sort of drawn a picture, a logo, which is entwining the initials, James, J, A, and F for Ferguson. And he says, if you approve this design, I'll send a Barbados to have it made in silver before I mark the slaves.

Oh God, France. So, yes, marking the slaves is a sort of genteel way of putting a red-hot iron in a fire and then burning somebody's skin. And it's a complicated logo. It's going to hurt more because he wants all those letters in. So, and later, of course, in the book. Was that the first thing you saw that? It's the first thing I saw that made me actually gall. I mean, it was made me feel.

Relatives that these people were not actually of our world. They had your name, that they had your blood, that they came from the same sort of place. their values were utterly differently. And the key value, of course, in that it happens through right. I mean, much later, Sir Adam Ferguson, sits in the House of Commons listening to Wilberforce and Pitt debate in in 1992, debate the abolition of slavery, leaves the Commons and goes to his lodgings in St James's to write a letter to the manager saying,

get down to Kingston and buy more young women because we're going to have to breed more. Oh, God. So what you realize, I realized about these men who I was growing to like, were entirely racist because they were doing to, they were treating the Africans like animals and branding them, breeding from them, and they would not do that to their white employees.

And they had many white employees in Jamaica. So the whole enterprise is totally racist. There's no revelation, but no one taught me that at school. What did your family think? You know, I'm just sort of trying to picture what this is like. So you're doing this. I'm treating. By the day, and what were family dinners like?

You know, you must have come running down and going, oh, my goodness, I've just read this thing. What did they say? I mean, it's caused a rift. I mean, I mean, I think no one knew what was in those papers because they're all, anyone had seen as my grandfather's notes. And my grandfather had kind of covered it up to his children. Even in 1970, it was pretty embarrassing. And I think everyone thought I was going to write a sort of scholarly essay. And when the book finally appeared, they were angry that it was sensationalist.

And also because this all started before June 2020 in Black Lives Matter. But by the time it appeared, people were wondering about whether windows would start being smashed. I mean, we've seen the Draxas recently in Barbados be summoned to who still have. I mean, we should explain that. So there is a British parliamentarian called Richard Drax, who, family had plantations and now there is a serious challenge to say, right, you owe money. Yes, and one of the nice effects of this book is that I have been contacted with quite a few people in the same position as us.

They may not still be that wealthy, but they have the privilege of slavery and they know the history because if they're posh enough, posh people keep their papers, so there's no avoiding it. So, and that has led to discussions about personal reparations, and the book's website has a page on various charities in the Caribbean and educational things that we are giving money to. Well, I mean, there's that, but there's also, you know, I find, I think your book is extraordinary, by the way. I think it was hard to read. I can't imagine how hard it was to write. But you've got sort of a price list. Can I just go through some of the numbers, which are, I think, deeply, deeply affecting.

Peggy the nurse, she was worth 90 pounds. Rachel was a maid. She was worth 57 pounds. Colin the child, and this was what did it? William knows me. Collet the child was worth eight pounds. And then we also find out, Romeo, a horse was worth 40.

And the horses and cows listed just under the children in that list. The lists are really gripping. And I do often share all my transcripts of them to anyone who writes to me because they really shouldn't just be in our possession. But I mean, later in the book, I decided I needed to make a list of, because this is all about the Ferguson story, the enslaved people's story is not told and hardly known.

I mean, there are a couple of stories that emerge. But so I did a list of, they only really recorded deaths if they were violent or from disease, because that's to do with the accounting and the bonuses for the white managers. So I did a list later in the book of every, everyone who the 350 or so who died falling in the slurry pit or because of worms or often in childbirth and or wasting away because of hopelessness is one of the descriptions and those lists are you know because this was

this was a tyranny that like the Nazis lived through its accounting and can be read through its accounting those lists are deeply disturbing and moving since we're talking about money how much money came from the Ferguson plantations and what was what was happening there and where was it going. And I just want people to understand this sort of circle of complicity at the time of who was benefiting where the wealth was going. Well, it's hard to disentangle. This is great historians like Stephen Mullen and Glasgow who did very good on the economics of the later slavery period. And clearly the bankers and the insurers were making the most money. And we co-owned this plantation with the Hunter Blair family, who became very, very wealthy,

but through lending money to plant us. I think the Ferguson's owned a lot of land in Scotland. I think at best it was around 20% of income. So it was very significant. They bought three houses in Edinburgh, Newtown. Out of how many acres in Tobago? At the top, 200 enslaved people and only about 200 acres actually under sugar. And then, of course, they benefit at the end of slavery

because we were still slave. We, I say we, I'm not sure about that way. At the end of slavery, we benefited from the compensation scheme and to the tune of about three million. And just again, and we have talked about this before, but the compensation went to the owners. It didn't go to any of the enslaved people or their families. And my ancestor, by now were with Sir Charles Ferguson, who's my three times grandfather, was a well-known philanthropist, a builder of churches and schools throughout Ayrshire

and, in fact, but not a single church or school in Jamaica. for the enslaved people who were freed in 1838. This is a consistent thing in Scotland. And there's a historian in Glasgow University called Andrew McIllup, who's worked a lot, particularly on India. And he says, you know, there's barely a town in Scotland that hasn't got either a church hall or a church

or a monument or a fountain or whatever it is, which comes either from India or from the... And you have this complete transformation of Scotland in the 18th century that comes from its... participation in empire. And it's a very poor country. And then suddenly you have all these estate villages. You have suddenly all these big 18th century buildings. You mentioned new hails. But the country is completely transformed in 100 years. Because we've got listeners all over the world. We're very lucky on this. I mean, I'm really privileged on this podcast. We have listeners

from around the world. But if you were to take one of a walking tour, let's say, of Edinburgh, how much of Edinburgh and which bits of Edinburgh would be? Can I just say there was a really good black history walking tour of Edinburgh, won by a wonderful person called Lisa Williams, and she will tour you up and down the new town, and house after house, some of them owned by my own ancestors, is directly linked to slavery. There's a modern history of Edinburgh by an old historian called Michael Frye,

who you'll know, which fails to make any reference to slavery whatsoever. Nothing, none at all. None at all. It's not in the index. But actually, Lisa's tour will show you. And there are gravestones of enslaved nursemaids who were brought back by planters to Britain, to Scotland. The version of the IAS, yeah. I gave a lecture with Andrew McKillop in Glasgow just two months ago.

And this came up in the question time and people saying, you know, how much of Glasgow. And he said, I can't remember the exact figure, but he said, you know, if you were to go within 20 miles of Glasgow, you'd come across 50 estates, which would link to empire in one way or another. The University College London LBS site has a brilliant map of Britain with its estates on it. And you see the clusters in Scotland, particularly mid-ashire and then up on the north-east going up to and I think you've got a great deal of plantations to have up in the highlands too a little bit later. And again, you know, like any business operation, this was a business operation, lots of people go into it with high hopes and a lot of people are disappointed. A lot of these families are writing that their plantations are not making money and they're late in

the game and other families have got in there first. And so their concerns, what you read in so many of the letters, not that, you know, I'm horrified by the whipping, the slaves, the early deaths and all the stuff. They're just worried that their plantations are not making them the money they thought were going to bail them out. Because they borrowed deep in very dodgy banks in the late 18th century. Can we talk about, again, the personality of these people, because you also do this very,

I mean, I suppose you're trying to look for some salvation somewhere, completely human and understandable. But some of the friend's circle of Sir Adam Ferguson, I think is utterly fascinating. So, you know, we're talking about key figures of the Enlightenment. Adam Smith, he knew, David Hume, he knew. Robert Burns, he knew. Robert Burns is a very crucial bit of the story. Is he complicated?

Tell me why. So, Robert Burns is, you know, the most egalitarian person of the entire 18th century. He's writing about the poor. He's the author of the Slave's Lament. Yes. And yet, he comes to. within a whisker of taking a job in the West Indies. No, no, talk more about that, because I mean, you told me this before,

and I can't get my head around that. I mean, the legend is he was, I mean, he had his passage booked. He had an, he called it being a slave driver, is the word he used. A slave driver. On a plantation in Jamaica with another Scott, it was a route that many impoverished, educated young men, younger brothers took because it was a way to either die or make a fortune fast. And the legend is that he was on his way to Leith to get on the ship,

Roselle when word came from Edinburgh that his first edition of his poems was selling very well and he turned round. So again you see that here's someone that we think of. Yeah, a fluffy, cuddly, ruby burns. Yeah. Robbie Burns. And, you know, the, attacking the establishment and standing up for the poor, but with a slightly different twist of fate, he could be remembered as a, as a slave driver. This is again an important thing to remember in that there are many people who regard empires an opportunity and go willingly and happily lead to it. But there's also great class of people who are driven to sign up in the army, which involves a lot of brutality or even worse, sign up in the Navy because they have no money,

because times are hard. And they sign up. And those people from the bottom of society find themselves committing exactly the same atrocities as the people at the top. They're burning down Sri Rangipatnam. They're working in the plantation of slaves. They're watching slaves who escape being being punished in hideous ways and this sort of thing. Can I talk about the emotional sort of journey as well? I know it's an awful word. I know you winced and I don't blame you. But no, journey will be fine because, you know, you're there.

You're looking at the letters. What washes over you, is it? What comes first, what comes second? I'm thinking anger, I'm thinking anger, rage, disgust, shame. Tell me what order do they come in? It's interesting because it's a huge job of transcription, 18th century. letters aren't easy to read. And I, my father was dying at the time and my mother was caring for him.

So I enlisted my mother. I email her photographs of the letters. So she would transcribe and I would transcribe. And we got into a routine of going, oh Lord, have you seen this? And she texts me something over. So she, and it was kind of good because she'd been brought up the same way to see, to revere. Britain's big, in my class, are big on ancestor worship. and she saw what it really was.

But I think both my mother and I, and she was very supportive of the book, not unlike some of the family, you know, felt that we needed to take this story out to say, you know, because at this point we were getting to 2020 and things as I was finishing the book and those arguments,

some of them very stupid, were beginning to happen. And just say we acknowledge, apologize. There is no excusing. particularly not on the grounds that things were different in those days. And so I think that one's nausea, which is very real. I mean, there's some stuff later where you read about how women being enslaved women whose white lovers return home

and abandon them but free their mutual children. Those sort of issues, you continue to be horrified by it. But I think as we went going forward, the idea that you need to take this out and that people, People like me, and there's hundreds of thousands who are descended from slave owners alive in Britain today, need to take part in addressing the wrongs done on racial grounds in Britain today. Well, I tell you what, let's take a break here, and we'll come back after the break and discuss what that might look like, feel like and sound like. Welcome back. So we are in conversation with Alex Renton about an extraordinary book and an extraordinary life experience.

The book is called Blood Legacy. The experience was going. through, I think sort of being the man rummaging through the family shame, really, in boxes and finding a story that's very difficult to stomach. Yeah, absolutely. I think also, you know, I mean, as a writer, as a journalist, you're sitting going, this is an extraordinary story, which, and the descendants of slavers in Britain haven't really told their story. A lot of people in the States have, actually, that there's quite a genre of writing about dealing with the shame of that and the aftermath of that. I mean, I got to the point where, I thought actually one of the things that also shame is that none of my family had ever been there.

One uncle who died, set up the plantation and bought Africans in Tobago and died after four years. But in the 200 years since, no one had gone. So I had to, my grandfather visited Jamaica just at the end of his life. So I realized that I had to go and I dragged my wife and my daughter out with me. How old is your daughter? She was 14 at the time. It's a lot for a 14 year. I mean, how open were you with your 14-year-old?

She complains that this story has been half her life. But she's 18 now. But she, she, um, so to Tobago to go and go to the plantation, the so bloody bay, the site of the plantation and talk to people there and and really, and fess up and say why I was there. How do you even start that conversation? I mean, I'm just trying to imagine it. You know, please tell me you didn't wear a white suit and a white hat. Del Monte man from Del Monte. I mean, how do you go forth and say, uh, introduce yourself?

I felt a complete idiot and people were incredibly kind and generous. And, and we, I was, I was searching around trying to find traces of where my ancestors house might have been in Bloody Bay in this sort of mountainous bit of Tobago, where the field, because he and the Africans cleared the jungle to make the first plantation there. And it's not kind of returned to jungle. For my experience, there's all, A, Tobago is full of Scottish names. There's a place called Caleddon, there's, you know, wherever you go, Scotland is all around you.

And secondly, it's very difficult at first to square it with horrors because you go that. And it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. And we're all trained in the 20th century to think of tropical islands as as bliss as heaven. And yet, you know, you see these, they look like sort of ruined windmills, which are the plantation. Well, they are room of mills. And they're the chiven and so. And you see chimneys. And none of these plantations, of course, exist anymore.

They're all 200 years old. They're ruins. So again, not only are you brought up to think of a tropical island as a paradise. You're also brought up to think of, you know, crumbling ruins as rather romantic. And you have to make a massive jump to realize that these are not places that are gorgeous and pretty. They are places of horror where terrible, terrible things happened. But it's not like, you know, you see bits of Auschwitz and it looks threatening. And you see those gates and you see those stote tracks.

and your blood chills. There is nothing here that is immediately aesthetically chilling. That's interesting. And you kind of get, I mean, this is, they call it the white gaze, going to the tropics. But I mean, and how we see a gorgeous place to many tobagans. You see Enu aren't directly involved in the tourist. A place of enormous poverty and continuing racial problems. You know, issues I talk to people in Tobago about this around colorism,

which of course, discrimination because of the, of the, The shade of your skin comes directly from the discrimination that my ancestors' employees used. And beneath the skin, it's really very clear. I rang everybody called Ferguson in the Tobago phone book. Right. And got in touch with everyone. Were the large numbers of Ferguson's? Well, I did it in Trinidad as well.

Yeah, no, there were because there were other Ferguson's. The George Ferguson, who became governor of Tobago and defended it against the French. So there were a considerable amount, but those that didn't put the phone done on me as a complete nutter, we had the most wonderful conversations with. What is the sort of the range of people that you were talking to with a surname Ferguson? They were all black Ferguson's in, I mean, lots of people in Trondon, Tobago have some Indian blood as well,

but I think most of them would have identified mainly as African. And we did DNA tests. I took DNA tests with me in the hope of finding some cousins. Because I just thought my uncle had been there four years. He was 27 years old. He was unmarried. And white men were licensed to use the enslaved women. It wasn't great.

There was no social shame. It was no social shame. Absolutely was right. Of course it was right. No, I know. But there would have been not one whit of, this is criminal activity. No. But when I say I had wonderful conversations there in Jamaica

with the people still living on the land, what I mean is in the sense of their generosity and interest in me and, you know, preparedness to chew it all over. And really, and I think, you know, later when the book was published and people in the Caribbean and America's got in touch about it, the bottom line would say was people going, why didn't you come before and why are people like you never, we never thought people like you were prepared to talk about this?

In every aspect of this podcast, wherever we're dealing with any of these issues, whether it's India or whether the Caribbean, What's consistently fascinating is that it is only now that many of these things are being raked over and looked at and examined. What were people doing for the last 40, 50 years? It's not easy, though, William. It's really, it's not an easy thing. We talked about it with partition as well. You know, if you think that in your family, there are people who might have gone into, you know, their neighbor's homes or train carriage and massacred people.

But also that, you know, the great generation of post-Simperial British writers that we grew up. reading and so why didn't they go and look and and and I think you know because they're very busy picking over the bones and the crimes of empire I mean and and not in the way we do now but but and I think you have to go back to the fact that our education your my extremely expensive education was a an exercise in delivering propaganda about that empire which led led not only to us believing that the British were the good guise of the slave slavery story but also believing there was no story. There was nothing to look at.

Okay. So here's a funny thing. Forgive me, I have sort of mentioned this on the podcast before. But whenever, I mean, I did a book called The Patient Assassin about the massacre in Amritsa the Geno Al-Avark massacre and the revenge that was taken for it.

And for many, many people, and particularly when I've done this talk in Ireland, this is a lot, because, you know, the fact that an Irishman was presiding over the kind of tyranny that was going over, the fact that it was an Irish who'd gone to India and said fire. It's really tricky.

And I had this weird thing happen at book signings where people would come in tears and say sorry. And I actually didn't, and to this day, I don't know how to deal with it. And I find it odd. And I actually sort of say, but you've got nothing to be sorry about you didn't do this. And now, so tell me how, you know,

in that queue, where are you in this queue? And is there a difference in guilt and shame? I think it's a massive difference between guilt and shame. I can't feel guilty for the actions of my ancestors. I feel ashamed that it took me to late in my 50s that I could begin to look at them and that I'd lived, you know, as a sort of liberal, you know, metropolitan journalist type, you know, in a belief that because I wasn't racist, racism wasn't a problem. But this book taught me an awful lot about what's going on now

And I should feel ashamed that in Britain we have failed to, not just to apologize for slavery, which we'll continue to refuse to do, but also to acknowledge the rights and needs and to be in our country of the descendants of the people whom we enslaved. And there are people who are maybe listening to us who are going to hate this and who are going to say, wait a minute, what about Wilbur Force? What about Wilburne? Compare us to America. We were better than that. We're the ones who ended the slave trade. Respond to that. So what would you say to, so we are going to get those letters and we'll see the tweets. People will be saying, but Britain ended the same trade. Why are you running Britain down? Why are you running Britain down? What's your response to those people? My response is that, I mean, Wilberforce is no saint. I mean, Wilberforce, like Dundas for politicians who tried to get an amelioration. I mean, that's the word they used, of slavery through ending the trade, because they thought slaves might be treated better than if. if they were being brought in from West Africa. And actually, there will be fewer early deaths. I mean, is it turned out?

That wasn't even true. But the idea that Wilberforce and the politicians around him wanted to end British slavery just looks like nonsense and is nonsense. But why do you say it's nonsense? There was no intention of ending slavery in the West Indies. It was just ending the trading of slaves across the Atlantic. I mean, this is backed by religious people who backed slavery throughout, Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always understood from what I've read that Wilberforce was motivated

not by in a sense a burning sense of human rights, which is how we would kind of assume that he would be motivated, but because as a evangelical Christian, he wanted people to be able to make the choice of Christ themselves for free. So it was driven by what to many of us today would look at in the sense like religious phadastasism and wanting everybody to be freely able to convert to Christianity. Well, I mean, some people at the time called religious fundamentalism. I found some very interesting things working on the new book. But, you know, it was Wilberforce's insistence that the East India Company put a Christianity clause in if they were going to get their charter back.

And the East India Company said, no, bog off, that's going to get us killed. You know, if you start meddling with those gods. And he then lobbied. He did what is a very modern lobbying to get it put in. There's a whole history of the East India Company. There's 20 years. There's a guy called, I think, Charles Grant. who becomes a director and one of his big campaigns

when he becomes a director is to allow and encourage missionaries in which should be previously banned and exactly as you say the other guys who've been against it were exactly right because this is exactly what precipitates 1857

Yeah so you know there were people at the time so you're saying there's rose tinted spectacles about you mentioned the name Dundas as well we should come back to Dundas so I think it's an unfamiliar name to a lot of people. When I started promoting the book last year, I was to do a quiz in some

audiences and you'd go, when did slave British slavery end? What percentage of GDP do you reckon it was in terms of the government earning from the taxes in 1800? Could you give us the answers quickly? So it ends in 1838. That's the end of indentured slavery in the Caribbean. GDP 10, 11%, lots of people that look to this. So a major, major part of financing the wars against the, the French. And the British government earned more in taxes from our estates. I can see this in the records than the Ferguson's ever, ever earned. So one of the big issues in contemporary Scotland is that bang slap in the middle of St Andrew's Square in the middle of Edinburgh is this statue of Dundas. When I was brought up, we were very proud of Dundas. What does it look like,

Willie, for those? It's a extremely tall column like Nelson's column, and it dominates the Holocle's square, which is where I was growing up where we skipped the bus into Edinburgh from. And he used to arrive in Edinburgh, at St. Andrew Square, either Waverly Station or Sonders Square. And it was the first thing you saw is you come out of the bus station. And this is a guy who we used to be proud of because he was a Scot that took over England in a sense and ran the English foreign policy.

They called him the King of Scotland, didn't they? Yeah, the King of Scotland. And we were always rather proud that this guy had gone south and showed the English what to do. But today, of course, he's now regarded for very good reasons as an incredibly morally dubious figure. And what are those reasons, Alex? What is that about?

I mean, really grew up going into Edinburgh and knowing who that statue was of. I don't think, I didn't. I don't think most Edinburgh has ever... They sure do now, though, which is a good thing. So, I mean, Dundas, Pitt's right-hand man, fix, eventually impeached, actually, for corruption, but Minister of War, Minister of Finance and so on,

through the 1790s. And, you know, as was the way, one of the great patrons and a great friend of my ancestor as well. There's 50 or 60 letters between them in this archive. And Dundas in 1792 very cleverly slipped the word gradually as an amendment into the bill abolishing the slave trade. It shouldn't happen immediately. It should happen gradually.

What was his reasoning? What was his working out? Well, I think at the time it wouldn't have passed in the Commons. It was actually the bill was turned down in the Lords anyway, so it needn't have happened. But it became government policy that there will be a gradual end to the slave trade. So to Dundas' critics, he was the one you put your finger at for the shipping of 300,000 more Africans to death over the 15 years before the trade actually ended in 1807. His defenders, and there are some very vocal ones, will say it was just politics. He had to finance the British wars and ending this source of tax revenue would be disastrous.

And they also point to the fact that Dundas as a young advocate acted in a key case where Joseph Knight, who was an escaped enslaved person in Scotland, got the right to stay in Scotland and established in Scottish law that you could not be a slave in Scotland, a white or black. So Dundas's statue needed a rewrite and with talk about pulling it down in 2020, but a committee sat and decided on a rewording which told much more of the story of Dundas, who also is the man who's who, who's who. sent 6,000 British troops to try and capture Haiti or Sando-Mang and take it as a sugar colony for the British when the revolution happened there. And this is now a big debate in Scotland because there are some people that say rather than just a plaque, the statue should come down. Very few. I mean, I think Scotland settled quite happily around a replacking of it, most of Scotland. But there is a powerful brigade with some Scottish academics in it, some descendants of Dundas himself, Lord Melville as he became and some red-trazzed new town white men who like writing angry

letters to the Times and Spectator who will not let this one rest for me I mean they want the plaque removed do they they want the plaque removed and Dundas restored as one of the great men in Scotland and and the fight like every cultural war fight has become ridiculously personal and vicious is attacks on the great man a great man I in my view sir Jeff Palmer who's who's a Scottish academic and a descendant of slaves himself who is a black Scottish Academy we should say. Edinburgh is a small town and Scotland is a small country. When you go around Scotland, do you find people regarding you as a sort of traitor

for exposing the stuff and washing dirty linen in public? You know, I get some invective and I get a lot of nasty emails. But I mean, when I compare it with the sort of things that happened to Sattnam Sangerra questioning empire, you know, people don't, and David Olussoga, who has had to take guards to book festivals with him, And it's nothing. I mean, I think the learning process for me at book festivals and in comments, columns, and The Times and Sunday Times is I had no idea I was really innocent about just how angry people like me,

middle-aged white men get over, and women too, get over this, and just how poorly educated we had been. Okay. So, I mean, again, I just would point out, it's not just sort of the red trouser, you know, sort of white middle-aged man. We've had Suella Braverman say very recently. We've had Rishi Sunak say very recently. We have others who say very recently. You know what? Either let it go or be proud of the great history of Empire. And so when you hear that, what goes through your mind?

I mean, so the standard, as anyone who writes on this issue will tell you, the standard book festival, polite complaint is slavery has always been part of human life. Would you have a sue the Romans for raping people across Roman Britain? On the answer to that. And the answer to that, you know, is clearly Atlantic slavery as practiced by the British is sui generis because it was legal, encouraged by the government and an enormous earner for the exchequer. And it's also more important than slavery in other times and other places because it still directly affects this country today. because racism today in Britain is rooted in the divisions that started with slavery

and the other ring of black people. So that's the answer. You can't get it through, though, I have to say that. Alex, just take it back into your family again. And this is something which I'm very intrigued by. You have written about Sir Adam Ferguson with his amazing intellectual interest, this major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he's attending progressive debates,

and his friends of people like Adam Smith who hate the East India Company. And in all those ways, there's somebody that we might be able to get on with, we might imagine. But then you come across him methodically approving of collars, handcuffs, chains and brands. How do you explain that?

And what do you think that shows? What was he thinking? Lots of historians. I'm no historian. Lots of historians say that the empire was basically a story of violence and hypocrisy and racism. And I can.

not see these men likable and modern in many ways as anything but entirely racist. And their decision was that they were able to treat the Africans in this way with collars and chains and whips and stealing their babies from them and selling them to whoever they felt like because they saw them like the mules and donkeys on the plantation. And this isn't something that was different then. Sir Adam's best friend and neighbour at the Kennedy of Dalwaran, another member of parliament, was a prominent abolitionist. The clerics that he had to dinner around his table were abolitionists by the 1790s.

He knew there was another way to go. It wasn't even that key to the Ferguson finances. He could have decided to do the other thing. And with 200,000 mainly women campaigning and petitioning parliament by the 1790s to stop slavery, he knew perfectly well the arguments against it as a Christian as well. One final, final question. What to do about it today? You're not guilty for the fact that your ancestors bought brands and branded people and kidnap people and took them to Bego. But what can people do today to make up for this? What's the, what's our, what should, ordinary people sitting listening to this podcast, taking their dogs for walk, doing the washing up,

driving their car to work? What, what can they do to respond to the fact that this is a was a huge earner for our country and hundreds of thousands of people, not just from the upper classes like your family, but from all walks of life, like Robbie Burns, were involved in it. I think the first thing I'd suggest is do an audit of your own history. Go on to the University College of London, Legacies, British Slavery database,

and put your surname in. And if your surname's at all unusual, you may find some very interesting things. And from that point, and a lot of people do write to me having found out those disturbing, and interesting things, start to think about the way you lead your life today, the fact that our former colonies where we enslaved people and, you know, my ancestors bought railway shares to make themselves richer with the compensation money they got, our former colonies

are still much poorer than I. Guyana is one of the poor, full of Scots DNA, one of the poorest countries in the world. And whether, you know, it is right that this imbalance persists. So we do You need to talk about reparations, reparative justice. It's not just about money. It's about better relationships, education, about technology, transfer, debt forgiveness. And those are really potent things. At the moment, unlike some other European countries, the British government is saying we won't even talk about it. I know you said final, final, final, final question.

This is the final, final, final, because I'm just... Okay, I do hundreds more questions. I think this is, it's just such a prism to look at our own day and age. Have you taken the family portraits down? would it be better to take them down or better to put an explanation of who they really were? It's a... You don't have the family portraits yourself.

I don't live in that. Okay, that's easy then. That's the easy answer. You know why I'm asking. This is Rhodes Must Fall. This is statues that don't exist. Do you take them down or would... If you, if it was in your house,

do you take down your ancestors or do you tell everybody who comes, this is who they were? You explain properly. I mean, it's a good topic. It's a fascinating topic of conversation. I mean, why are you explain? Why not be open and talk about it?

I mean, other nations that have been through appalling periods and done appalling things, a lot of people in the Caribbean go, why can't you behave like the Germans did after the Second World War on this? And you go, yeah, why can't we, actually? It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very much. The book is called Blood Legacy. We've been speaking to Alex Renton, and, you know, it's really well worth a read. That's kind of all we've got time for this week.

Thank you, Alex. That was incredible. Yeah, really. It's a wonderful book. I highly recommend it. I read it in one sitting. It's an extraordinary book. Well, until we come back next week, it's goodbye from me. And goodbye from me. And goodbye from me. Thank you.