Glasgow authorities have apologised for town’s function within the Atlantic slave commerce, saying the “tentacles” of cash from the follow reached each nook of Scotland’s largest metropolis.
The apology comes as Britain more and more reckons with the legacy of its colonial previous within the wake of world Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests.
It follows the discharge of an educational research Glasgow metropolis council commissioned concerning the metropolis’s connections to the commerce in human beings.
“Observe the Atlantic slavery cash path and its tentacles attain into each nook of Glasgow,” council chief Susan Aitken informed colleagues at a gathering on Thursday.
“It’s clear what this report tells is that the blood of trafficked and enslaved African individuals, their kids and their kids’s kids is constructed into the very bones of this metropolis.”
One of many report’s principal findings was that 40 out of 79 lord provosts or mayors from Glasgow had been related to the Atlantic slave commerce between 1636 and 1834.
Some sat in workplace whereas proudly owning enslaved individuals.
At the very least 11 buildings in Glasgow are related to people who had been concerned with the commerce, whereas eight implicated people have monuments or different memorials to them within the metropolis.
A complete of 62 Glasgow streets are named after slave homeowners who constructed their fortunes on tobacco plantations.
These embody Buchanan Avenue and Glassford Avenue, named after the “tobacco lords” Andrew Buchanan and John Glassford.
James Watt, whose enhancements to the steam engine drove the Industrial Revolution, was personally concerned in trafficking a black baby on the market to a household in north-east Scotland, the report mentioned.
“It will possibly not be ignored and the modification that I’m shifting right now asks us to do three issues: to acknowledge, apologise and to behave,” Aitken mentioned.
Glasgow council’s chief government, Annemarie O’Donnell, mentioned town acknowledged that black, Asian and minority ethnic residents wished the council to “recognise the historic legacy of chattel slavery primarily based on the exploitation of enslaved Africans”.
The report, by the College of Glasgow educational Stephen Mullen, who has written extensively on town’s hyperlinks to slavery, was “a step in the direction of therapeutic the anger and frustration” felt by these residents, she added.