The ingratitude of academia
by Daniel Dieppe, Artillery Row:
The University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent should celebrate their historic donors, not castigate them.
Wishing to end Britain’s self-congratulatory narrative of being the first country to abolish slavery, the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University jointly commissioned a five-year study into the universities’ historical connections to transatlantic slavery.
The review, a thinly veiled piece of ideological dogma, concludes that the enslavement of Africans greatly enriched the largest donors and therefore the University should act to “remedy the disadvantages and offensive vestiges of transatlantic slavery.”
The problem is, none of these historical conclusions should be considered remotely true. Firstly, the review relies upon the serially disputed Marxist arguments of Trinidadian historian Eric Williams that slavery kick-started the industrial revolution. At best, this is a hugely contested historical conclusion — at worst, as Nigel Biggar points out, it “has been wholly discredited by scholars.” The review accepts the Marxist thesis without explanation.
The bulk of the review examines the source of wealth of major donors to the universities. By far the largest donor was Jesse Boot, the Nottingham-based founder of Boots the Chemist. According to the review, Boot donated 16 times more to the University of Nottingham than any other donor and was financially facilitated by the transatlantic slave economy. How was Boot, born 43 years after the abolition of the slave trade, linked to such a heinous crime?
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