My day job at Glasgow Museums has focused an awful lot on slavery recently. Recognizing Glasgow’s complicity in the slave economy has been a long, slow process, from outright denial in the nineteenth century to grudging acknowledgement in the latter half of the twentieth century. Now Glasgow seems to have fully embraced its legacy of slavery and empire. Glasgow University is leading the way with its recent launch of a reparative justice programme to atone for its funding that stemmed from the slave economy and there are also calls for a new museum of slavery in the city, along the same lines as Liverpool.
This of course reflects a wider movement, certainly in the UK, to recognize and address the widespread complicity of cities and organizations in profiting from enslaved labour. Many are also looking beyond the transatlantic slave trade to wider injustices stemming from the exploitation of foreign lands and people in the name of empire. The irony is that this is happening against the backdrop of increasing polarity and state sponsored aggression towards immigrants and foreigners on both sides of the Atlantic.
The history of slavery is essentially a maritime story and some fine work has been undertaken in recent years that has advanced our understanding of this terrible trade and its impact. The forced movement of people is just one aspect of the wider impact of maritime trade on humanity, with ships having a pivotal role in joining together and spreading different cultures.
Ships themselves have also long been melting pots of humanity, with crews drawn from all corners of the world. The use of cheap foreign labour has always appealed to those in charge of the bottom line and the traditional Chinese and Indian crews of empire days have now largely been replaced by Filipino seafarers. As the novels of Conrad and Melville show, this was not always a benign or harmonious coming together of people of different nations aboard ship and wherever there are minorities there will always be tyrants to oppress them.
This is an increasingly important area of study. Maritime history conferences on toxic masculinity and black, Asian and minority ethnic seafarers are becoming much more prevalent. As this work matures it will start to feed into The Mariner’s Mirror and other journals. The maritime world is often seen as a microcosm of society and there will be much to learn from this new approach that can inform our understanding of prejudice and intolerance. There are far too many abuses of history being perpetuated at the moment by politicians who are either woefully ill-informed or who are wilfully distorting history to pursue an agenda based on fear and hatred. A glance back at history will show that this approach does not end well. The role of maritime history has never felt so relevant.