Focusing on Glasgow’s Tobacco Merchant’s House (TMH) at 42 Miller Street, the overarching aim of the project is to offer the first focused and full-length study of Glasgow’s involvement in transatlantic slaving economies through a spatialised longitudinal research framework that brings into dialogue historical and postcolonial perspectives. TMH got its name from one of its first inhabitants, Robert Findlay, a prominent merchant with ties to two major slaving economies, Virginia and the West Indies. Today, TMH is the last surviving Georgian villa with this history in Glasgow’s Merchant City. The research, drawing on interdisciplinary methods that cut across history, social sciences and Genealogical Studies, will elucidate and interrogate TMH’s ties to the slave trade and explore translocal dimensions, decentring and reevaluating the voices and legacies of the beneficiaries and agents of transatlantic slavery. This will facilitate the platforming of the voices of enslaved people and those who continue to experience colonialism’s ongoing impact, whether in former slaving colonies or in Glasgow, where communities continue to be impacted by racism, marginalisation, and social inequality.
In establishing this framework, the project builds from ongoing decolonising initiatives surrounding heritage sites—particularly English country houses (Huxtable et al. 2020)—as a means to advance our understanding of the impact and legacies of what are now postcolonial city spaces. Critically, the framework will build on recognising the importance of space as a social structure, drawing on Simmel’s (2009) ideas about the social importance of spatial contexts in people’s interactions. Adopting a spatialised framework will enable a novel perspective on the role of the built environment in facilitating and maintaining—as a social space—the commercial, political, and wider networks of the Findlay family. While the networks merchants operated in have been acknowledged, the spaces in which they operated locally and translocally, and the role of these spaces in facilitating slaving economies, have not been subject to detailed investigation. Ultimately, the project seeks to engage space as embedded in the reproduction of not just society, but specific places. This process is neither confined to the past nor static, thereby opening up perspectives on how TMH, its history and legacies in Glasgow and translocally, now function in a postcolonial world.
The project’s research questions are:
- What roles did spaces like TMH play as the home of a merchant engaged in transatlantic slaving economies?
- To what extent were these spaces both a physical and social space linked into slaving economies?
- How can a spatialised approach to understanding transatlantic slaving economies expand our knowledge of Glasgow’s history and the history of those whose enslavement generated the city’s wealth?
- And how can a spatial perspective provide new insights on the postcolonial present of buildings, including persistent social inequalities in their place-based context?
We are able to advance this knowledge-shaping research through collaboration with the Scottish Civic Trust (SCT) who own and maintain offices in TMH. SCT seek to understand and reinterpret the history of TMH as part of their ‘Strategy to Address Racism Against People of Colour.’ In Scotland, buildings, monuments, and street names memorialising the slave trade have become a touchstone for discussions and action on racism, slavery, and colonialism today (Mullen 2022b).
The proposed project would significantly enhance the wider aims that flow from these actions, probing, for instance, how TMH came to be referred to as such, and what the intentions behind this were over time, for instance how does this relate to attempts to whitewash the history of Glasgow’s Merchant City in the era of abolition? Asking such questions will support reflection on the ‘hidden histories’ of Glasgow’s built environment.
Supervisory Team:
- First Supervisor: Dr David Wilson, david.wilson.101@strath.ac.uk
- Second Supervisor: Professor Tanja Bueltmann, Tanja.Bueltmann@strath.ac.uk
