"Don't keep your head down. Look up." Whether you're trudging through Glasgow in the summer sleet, or the winter snow, the local sometimes needs reminded to contemplate the grandeur of the place. Edinburgh's skyline sucks the air out of you, a jagged man-made silhouette of spikes and spires. Glasgow's mountainous legacy of wealth is more easily overlooked.
Its richly appointed statues stand sentinel over the bustling streets, peering down from formidable stone piles and Corinthian columns. Folk only rarely seem to notice the bombast and effrontery of the city chambers. We're more taken with the Duke of Wellington's famous headgear than the tobacco lord's townhouse which now hosts the Gallery of Modern Art. Familiarity breeds - not quite contempt - but a curious kind of taken-for-grantedness. I've been a more attentive reader of the many towns I've visited as a tourist than the fabric of the city in which I now live. I suspect I'm not alone.
Kevin McKenna has an interesting piece in the Observer this morning, arguing "we Scots must face up to our slave trading past." This passage particularly struck me:
Well, a lot more of us ought to know now and we ought also to be demanding that we quietly take down the grotesque Merchant City signage and simply desist from using the term. And while we’re at it, we can also start looking at more appropriate names for Jamaica Street, Tobago Street and the Kingston Bridge, as well as the other roads and avenues that bear the imprint of evil. After all, we rightly celebrated renaming St George’s Place as Nelson Mandela Place. Of course there is a body of resentment over “reopening old wounds” and “raking up the past”.
I squirmed with discomfort here. Wouldn't renaming these streets represent only another erasure? Don't these streets quietly avow the past? I have a good deal of sympathy with Kevin's basic thesis. Scotland's role in legally-sanctioned kidnap and forced labour still feels marginalised in the public memory, not least in Glasgow. This can amount to what Stephen Mullen has described as a "myth of detachment and non-involvement" in slavery: "it wisnae me."
My secondary education contained next to no Scottish history. Needless to say, slavery and colonialism also went almost entirely unmentioned. In law school, I went on to study how Roman law was used to devise the early-modern duties and responsibilities and master and slave. I read the famous (1788) case of Joseph Knight, in which the Court of Session declared that Scots law did not recognise the institution of slavery. But overall? My understanding of this city's and this country's involvement in the exploitation of slaves remains sketchy, impressionistic. Again, I suspect I'm not alone.
My secondary education contained next to no Scottish history. Needless to say, slavery and colonialism also went almost entirely unmentioned. In law school, I went on to study how Roman law was used to devise the early-modern duties and responsibilities and master and slave. I read the famous (1788) case of Joseph Knight, in which the Court of Session declared that Scots law did not recognise the institution of slavery. But overall? My understanding of this city's and this country's involvement in the exploitation of slaves remains sketchy, impressionistic. Again, I suspect I'm not alone.
All that rum and cotton, that blood and toil and tobacco and molasses, has settled mutely into opulent stone I toddle past, all too often, bovine and unthinking. Jamaica Street doesn't (only) bear the imprint of the evil of slavery, but the imprint of our history. That history may not be inscribed on our memories. But these echoes - these nudges - preside over our streets, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. They ensure, every day, that Glaswegians have no excuse for failing to "face up to our slave trading past."
Virginia and Antigua, Buchanan and Ingram, these names are indicting, they're our history, and they should stay.
