Former Fellow Professor James Walvin OBE was one of the very first scholars to visit IASH after our foundation in 1969. Jim conducted research at the Institute in 1971, as you can see in our 50th anniversary timeline, and he writes here about the ways in which his time in Edinburgh impacted on his work and career.
My new book, A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Rise of Global Power (Robinson and University of California Press 2022), has roots which stretch back to my fellowship at IASH 51 years ago – and beyond. During that Fellowship I wrote Black and White: The Negro and English Society 1555-1945 (Allen Lane 1973), the first serious academic study of its kind, and the winner of the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize. But equally important, I found myself in the company of a small group of brilliant and generous colleagues: George (Sam) Shepperson, Christopher Fyfe, Ian Duffield and the irrepressible Paul Edwards. Paul and I subsequently wrote Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade (Palgrave Macmilan 1983), based partly on my time at IASH.
The Fellowship allowed me to mix with and to learn from distinguished scholars – and all were great encouragers of much younger colleagues. It also allowed me to chance my arm in unexplored areas of history, and accumulate research material which has flowed through a number of subsequent books. I also fell in love with the city.
At the time – and it is hard to overstate this – slavery was a minority interest, of little concern to most British academics; Edinburgh was a great exception. Today, slavery is ubiquitous both in academe and in political and social conversation. Few today would deny that slavery occupied a central position in the shaping of modern British history, hence the title of my new book. And hence the current widespread preoccupation with surviving traces of slavery and the British well-being it generated.
In recent years, my research has broadened. I began my publishing career, with Michael Craton, in a study of a single slave plantation in Jamaica: Worthy Park. Today, I try to make sense of African slavery in its global setting. Here, after all, was an institution which not only blighted Africa, enabled the settlement of the Americas and enhanced the well-being of the Western word – but also had consequences for the wider world.
As for the changes since 1971… what once seemed small noises off-stage have become a deafening clamour: slavery has taken its rightful place as a central issue of wide concern to anyone interested in the development of Western life and well-being since, say, 1600. My own work in helping to make this point was greatly assisted by my Fellowship at IASH 51 years ago.
I am now Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York - where I spent most of my career, but with teaching positions and research fellowships in the USA, the Caribbean and Australia. My publications range widely over the field of modern social history, but most – and most recently – are concerned with the history of slavery. In 2008, I was awarded an OBE for services to scholarship.
