#despot

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Collective Effort Fest 2025

October 14, 2024:

Storm Tertiary, Aether, Crackle.

April 28th 1742 saw the birth in Dalkeith of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, the lawyer and politician who became the last person to be impeached in the United Kingdom.

We don't have to be proud of all our Scots in history, we also can't ignore them, I doubt anyone would say we could be proud of a man like Henry Dundas.

You wouldn’t think that a man who crushed a rebellion against the Highland Clearances and played a part in delaying the abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade by 20 years would have a memorial in Scotland’s capital – yet Henry Dundas sits atop one of Edinburgh’s tallest monuments.

Also known as the “Grand Manager of Scotland”, politician Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville played a defining role in late 18th-century politics.

He was the first secretary of state for war and the last person to be impeached in the UK for embezzling public funds.

During his life he also oversaw the transportation of Thomas Muir and the Scottish radicals demanding the right to vote – a case that inspired Robert Burns to pen Scots Wha Hae – and was said to be key to the expansion of the British Empire in India and the West Indies.

Yet despite this record, the Melville Monument on which he stands atop, located in St Andrew Square in Edinburgh, simply states that he was “a dominant figure in politics for over four decades” and that “besides being treasurer to the Navy, he was also Lord Advocate and Keeper of the Scottish Signet”.

doesn’t have the most distinguished history when it comes to the slave trade, writes Andrew Learmonth. Henry Dundas wasn’t the only prominent Scot to have made huge amounts of money on the back of other people’s enslavement.

Many in Glasgow became obscenely rich due to their trade in the tobacco and sugar businesses; two industries entirely reliant on the efforts of slavery. James Ewing, former Lord Provost and MP, below, who has a memorial in the city’s Necropolis, was a slave plantation owner.

And when slavery was abolished, plenty of prominent Scots became very wealthy thanks to a ludicrously generous compensation scheme.

A database of the compensation paid out showed there were slave owners all over Scotland. Scots on the database include Colonel John Gordon of Cluny, who in 1851 forced some 3,000 of his tenants on the Outer Hebrides to emigrate to Canada, and James Cheyne, who cleared tenants from the Isle of Lismore in the 1840s and 1850s.

Read more about Dundas here, but not with pride, it is with a sense of shame.