Behind Edward Colston and Scotland's slave traders

ON Sunday the statue of Edward Colston was torn down in Bristol. The action by protestors taking part in a Black Lives Matter demonstration happened because Colston was a merchant who made his fortune in the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Seen by some as an act of vandalism and by others as a legitimate protest against Britain’s years of involvement in slavery, the toppling of Colston has been shown internationally and is undoubtedly the main image of a weekend in which tens of thousands took to street and parks across the UK to demonstrate about the murder of black man George Floyd, 46, by police officers in the city of Minneapolis in the state of Minnesota in the USA.

WHO WAS EDWARD COLSTON?

BORN into a mercantile family in Bristol in 1636, Colston soon joined the family firm, trading to Europe in goods such as wine and cloth. As the 17th century progressed, new markets opened up trading to America and the West Indies.

Bristol, like Glasgow and other Clyde ports, was ideally placed for trade with the Americas and after Colston and his family moved to London, he was in exactly the right place and with the right connections when the Royal African Company was established in 1660 by King Charles II and his brother the Duke of York, the future King James II, along with prominent merchants.

READ MORE: Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol bring down slave trader's statue

From 1680, Colston became a leading member of the company which had been given exclusive rights to trade in gold, silver, ivory and slaves on the west coast of the African continent – its 1663 charter specifically mentioned slavery. He became Deputy Governor of the Company, in effect its boss, at the time when the slave trade was booming – in the 1680s, the Company was transporting 5000 slaves a year from Africa to the West Indies in particular, where slaves suffered a horrendous life on sugar plantations.

After the arrival of William and Mary on the thrones of England and Scotland, Colston went into business for himself, and it is estimated that in his time at the Royal African Company and afterwards, he was involved in the transportation of tens of thousands of slaves. He owned as many as 40 ships, most of them working out of Bristol but after selling his shares to King William, he withdrew from the slave trade in 1692 and went into banking and money-lending.

He saw no irony in his Christian devotion while selling fellow human beings, and after a short spell as Tory MP for Bristol – though he did not actually live there – he died at his home in Mortlake, Surrey, on October 11, 1721, aged 84.

He had showered Bristol with philanthropic works and the city named streets and schools after him, though the 18ft-high bronze statue was only erected in 1895.

WAS BRISTOL THE CENTRE OF THE SLAVE TRADE?

It was one of them, and after the Royal Company of Africa’s monopoly was removed, Bristol became the leading port in the so-called triangular trade – ships would fetch slaves from Africa, take them to the USA and Caribbean islands, then bring back goods such as cotton to England via Bristol.

Edward Colston's statue was thrown into the harbour in Bristol on Sunday

Other major centres of the slave trade were London and Liverpool in England, and Port Glasgow and Greenock on the Clyde. Bristol’s heyday was between 1720 and 1740 following London’s many decades as the main slave trade centre. Liverpool gradually became the main slave trade port until slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1833, though the trade had been in decline for many years before that as the campaign grew to outlaw slavery.

HOW LONG WAS SLAVERY LEGAL?

Centuries. The Domesday Book records that one tenth of the population of England were slaves in 1086. But Norman influence and the opposition of the Catholic Church saw slavery – white slavery, it should be added – peter out by the year 1200.

There have been reports that some white Scots were sold as slaves by Oliver Cromwell after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, and Jacobites were ‘sold’ by the British authorities after the ’45 Rising. But in fact these ‘slaves’ were actually indentured servants – the difference between a slave and an indentured servant was a matter of semantics, mostly.

The enslavement of black people was always legal, right up to 1807 in England. A court case – Knight v Wedderburn – established that slavery was illegal in Scotland from 1778, but Scots still took part in the trade down south. Britain was not the only state involved in the African slave trade, but did it better than most – better that is, if you consider ‘only’ 20% fatalities during the two-month passage to the Americas to be something to be proud about.

SCOTLAND HAD ITS FAIR SHARE OF SLAVERS?

Indeed, though their apologists will always point out that many Scottish merchants were ‘merely’ tobacco lords who didn’t control or own slaves, but simply got rich on the back of products picked by slaves.

There were many Scots who were involved in the slave trade and in the management of slaves on plantations in the Caribbean. One of them was nearly Rabbie Burns – he wrote the Kilmarnock Edition to fund his trip to Jamaica where he would become a book-keeper on a plantation. The poems made him an overnight sensation and he stayed in Scotland.

The merchants included Andrew Cochrane, Andrew Buchanan, George Wilson, John Glassford, James Oswald, John Gordon, Archibald Ingram, and Colin Dunlop. They all have streets named after them in Glasgow which also has Merchant City commemorating these men who exploited slaves. Nor should Edinburgh feel cosy – a large part of the New Town was built with the profits of plantations.