University Publishes Report on 'Legacies of Empire'

After four years in the making, a report revealing the University’s colonialist and imperialist ties was published on 13 March and is available to read online.

The report entitled ‘The University of St Andrews and the Legacies of Empire, 1700-1900,’ was commissioned in 2021 following growing calls for British institutions to be transparent about their role in the Atlantic slave trade, as explained in Principal Sally Mapstone’s email announcing its publication and summarising its key points. Professor Aileen Fyfe led the project, working closely with Professor Lorna Milne, as well as Dr Isabel Robinson in the report’s early stages.

The report’s findings mainly examine financial benefits the University received from colonial sources, including from enslavement, within the specified time period.

It names several donors to the University such as James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, who was a director of the slave-trading Royal African Company in the early 1720s. Alexander and David Berry’s £100,000 donation to the University in the 1880s derived from exploiting Indigenous land in Australia and displacing its original and rightful occupants. At least two eighteenth-century Principals of the University had family ties to enslavers, and several alumni in the two-hundred year period were found to have worked for the East India Company or participated in other colonialist undertakings. The University also contributed to studies falling into the category of what is commonly termed ‘scientific racism’, possessing stolen ancestral remains of Indigenous people from across the globe throughout the twentieth century.

The University has taken steps to address its colonialist history in recent years, with more plans underway. However, some members of the University community, including members of the BAME Students’ Network, would like to see a bolder commitment to reparations. BAME Students’ Network Vice President Isaac Pickrum was asked to review a draft of the report before publication and shared his thoughts with The Saint.

Pickrum’s primary concern was about the report’s language, which he felt skirted around the racist reality it was meant to describe. For example, the report refers to University groups and professors studying “racial anthropology” in the nineteenth century through the “acquisition and display of human remains,” some of which likely came from “the disturbance and desecration of burial sites.”

“The term they’re looking for is phrenology and scientific racism,” Pickrum said. “If you want to come to terms with these histories, you need to be honest about what happened here. They were collecting skulls from Africa and elsewhere to scientifically argue about the intelligence of different human races,” he continued.

He made suggestions to make the wording of the report more direct in a three-page commentary to Fyfe and Milne, but these suggestions were not taken. “They essentially changed nothing,” he said, and expressed frustration about this considering he was specifically called upon to take time to read and review the report.

Professor Fyfe told The Saint that she and the other writers made intentional decisions about this language. “It has been a genuine challenge to write a report that (in contrast to other university reports of this type) ranges from the horrors of racialised chattel slavery in the Atlantic world, to the ruthless search for profits by the East India Company, to the violence done to Indigenous peoples and their lands in Australia.”

“These are all consequences of British colonialism and imperialism, but they are also all very different from each other. Words that might be appropriate in one context may not be in another,” Fyfe said. She believed the choices to use certain phrases would be more “historically precise while also covering a wide range of different cultural and geographical contexts.”

Pickrum asserted that foregoing the use of phrases like ‘scientific racism’ or ‘phrenology’ in favour of ‘racial anthropology’ is not historically accurate, as ‘scientific racism’ is more established jargon. When he raised this point, he recounted that Fyfe and Milne said they wanted to prioritise using “largely neutral tones.”

For Pickrum, it is important to consider that historical writing can never truly be neutral. “The way you choose to describe things affects their veracity, their truth historically. Like when you say you acquired things through ‘unequal trade,’ which is theft, you can just say theft, and by not saying theft, you’ve reduced the truth of what happened.”

Fyfe explained the reasoning behind these choices stems from uncertainty about the history: “In the case of collections items in particular, all too often, we do not know for certain what the conditions were under which an item was acquired. We may guess at ‘theft’, but we rarely know for sure. And there are various other ways in which the power imbalance between Europeans and Indigenous peoples could have played out.”

Fyfe continued: “Personally, I think that ‘theft’ is too simple to cover the range of possible ways that natural historical specimens, cultural heritage items, and even human remains, could have been acquired. I hope that by explicitly mentioning ‘violence’, the ‘desecration of burial sites’ and the possibility of trade, we will encourage readers to reflect on those complexities.”

Pickrum hopes that, in future projects, there will be more consideration of the people impacted by colonialism, not only an examination of the perpetrators. “I think the next steps for [the BAME Students’ Network] is to really try and get people in the BAME community involved in reading this material, seeing how it connects to them,” he said.

Dr Akira O’Connor, Chair of the Race Equality Charter (REC), reviewed a draft of the report and shared a similar hope after reading the published version. While he praised the extensive investigation into past University leadership’s imperialist connections, he said: “A key issue in any work like this is how it acknowledges and represents the people affected by colonialism and empire.”

This in mind, O’Connor expressed that “it is an important document to look at alongside accounts that focus on the voices of those who encountered and were directly impacted by those St Andrews staff and alumni considered in the report.”

Part of the five-year REC Action Plan is to “foster dialogue and build an open culture of conversation around these issues.” Now that it is published, O’Connor said that the REC team will develop “a specific action that will facilitate engagement with and conversations about the Legacies of Empire Report.”

The publication of the report marks a significant step in the University’s acknowledgment of its colonial past.

Image by University of St Andrews