BBC Scotland will tonight broadcast a documentary called “Scotland, Slavery and Statues”, which deals with the current controversy over Henry Dundas. A member of the UK Government, he was, in particular, the ruler of Scotland around the end of the 18th century.

In a ministerial career spanning 30 years he dealt with almost every aspect of Scottish affairs, while also organising the British war effort in the struggle against revolutionary France. Always a controversial figure, he made many enemies but also enjoyed high renown among a wider public. For instance, he greatly improved the conditions under which the sailors of the Royal Navy served their country. Collectively they paid for his memorial, the statue that still stands today atop a column in St Andrew’s Square, Edinburgh, his home town.

Although dead now for more than two centuries, Dundas from time to time still steps into the limelight, usually in some contentious context (which he would have relished). The present example is a good one. There have recently been calls for his statue to be toppled, or at least for its column to be adorned with an extra inscription warning us not to treat him as a man that modern Scots would like to meet: too reactionary, too imperialist, etc.

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The BBC’s programme is intended to explore these questions.

I had better declare my own interest, which has two aspects. The first is that I was invited to appear on the programme, and indeed was interviewed for it. I’m still not sure I will in fact appear, partly because I did not get on well with the producer and in answer to her questions gave answers that it struck me she was none too eager to hear – for instance, that Dundas had his good sides and his bad sides but proved overall to be a benefactor of his country.

For instance, I made the point that, with his cheeky sharp practice, Dundas was a fairly typical sort of Scottish politician, not only of the 18th century but also of the 21st. There are elements of our public life that just give rise to crooks, and perhaps there is something typically Celtic in the tendency. Columnist Iain Macwhirter remarked that a powerful politician who is also a bit of a rascal made him sound preferable to the grimmer types who rule the UK nowadays. I agree.

Secondly, I have an interest because I am also the author of the most recent biography of Dundas, published in 1993 by Edinburgh University Press. I wanted to write it because he had distinguished himself in activities that made him one of the leaders of his age in Scotland.

He reconciled his country to the Union of 1707 and so guided it into a global role it would never have found otherwise. He was an outstanding war leader for the whole UK against Napoleonic France, and in particular made our victory at the Battle of Trafalgar possible. And he was one of the constructors of the later British empire, especially in India.

Yet the case I could make for Dundas in the present dispute has nothing to do with any of these points. Instead, I feel called to defend him against the charge that, in his own time, as domestic pressures grew for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, so he deliberately obstructed them and made sure that, in the British colonies, the abuses would be maintained and preserved so long as he had anything to do with it.

A member of the Cabinet under William Pitt the younger, Dundas was the perfect figure for a delicate task it wanted performed. In moving against the slave trade, the government had to take care not to alienate the many backbench MPs with connections in the City of London, where much of the wealth was held in the form of distant plantations and the wretched blacks who worked them. These MPs had thrown out all previous abolitionist motions.

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The political need was to give them some reason for moderating their hostility, so as to allow the abolitionists their first victory of some kind. Dundas said plainly in one of his speeches: “The slave trade ought to be abolished.”

HE had to be taken seriously because he was in parliamentary politics a Mr Fix-it, a man less interested in government as a branch of philosophy and more as a matter of practical achievement. He was judged the right operator for this job because, as a jovial man-about-town, he had political friends on every hand. If anybody could shape a compromise, it was him.

Dundas decided the key would be to refer to the abolition as “gradual”, implying that slave owners were not to be dispossessed overnight. What the term would actually come to mean might be decided later. Meanwhile, it would show that the vested interests involved were getting a hearing. One reason Dundas could be entrusted with doing a deal was that he had often done deals in the past, especially if the deal extended the liberties of the subject. He had, for example, led the way in Parliament in showing there was a large body of MPs ready to accept the reality of an American victory in the War of Independence.

Within Scotland, he had acted for a former black slave, Joseph Knight, when he petitioned the Court of Session to free him from his master after both had returned from Jamaica. Scotland thereby abolished slavery on its own soil, except in a single detail that still allowed white people to be held in bondage if they happened to have been born into it, an outdated custom among miners and salt panners. Dundas passed legislation to free them.

In respect of more general civil rights, Dundas again proved to be a liberator. In the Scotland of his time, people might still be politically disfranchised for their religion. Neither Catholics nor Episcopalians were allowed to vote. In Ireland, the same was true of Catholics and Presbyterians. Dundas repealed the Scottish disabilities in 1793, and would have done the same for Ireland as part of the package for its political union with Great Britain in 1801. But King George III refused to accept his Cabinet’s advice on this and they, including Dundas, had to resign.

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If Dundas had not, through his abilities, risen to the top levels of government and stayed there – the first of his countrymen since 1707 to do so – then he might well have made a political career as a reformer, like his contemporary William Wilberforce. Indeed, with his acute sense of the state of opinion in the House of Commons and in the country, Dundas might have made a better reformer.

As it was, he became Pitt’s right-hand man in a government that been elected with a mandate for radical reform in the UK, but saw too many of its hopes dashed as the French Revolution dragged it into 20 years of war with an old enemy in a new guise.

Here, too, Dundas, as the architect of British naval supremacy after the Battle of Trafalgar, served his country well. That supremacy was now used to suppress the transatlantic slave trade.