Exeter College and the Legacies of Slavery Project Report

Exeter College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford and the fourth oldest college in the university. Founded in 1314 by Devon-born Walter de Stapeldon, the college has a rich history that spans more than seven centuries. The college’s report adds to those that have come from a number of British higher-education institutions that have sought to explore their connections to slavery and the colonial past. Some of these institutions include the University of Glasgow, King’s College London, Jesus, St Catharine’s and Gonville and Caius Colleges, Cambridge and Balliol and St John’s Colleges, and Oxford. Some, such as the University of Glasgow, have discovered that they had substantial financial ties to slavery while the findings of others have been more modest. Yet all have committed to considering several issues connected to slavery and its legacies in order to make positive recommendations for action. Exeter College has now also committed to engaging more fully with its own institutional history.

forgotten histories

The Exeter College Legacies of Slavery project was established in March 2020 as a result of the growing awareness that conducting research into the historic association between Oxford and Cambridge colleges and the institution of slavery was both timely and important. There were four key objectives, namely: i) To investigate whether any Exeter College undergraduates and Fellows were significantly connected to slavery in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries; ii) To determine if donations were made to Exeter College by persons with significant connections to slavery or whether Exeter College holds endowments, estates, chattels, or paintings with significant connections to slave-owning wealth; iii) To determine if the Fellows and students of Exeter College contributed substantially to scholarship that underpinned slavery; iv) To excavate the forgotten histories of any Exeter students of colour that it is possible to discover within the college archives in the period before 1945.

A key methodological issue emerging was how best to capture the range and types of connection to slavery of Exonians in the period from 1700 to 1900. We developed a working model of six types of connection: (i) Alumni who were the direct recipients of compensation through the Government’s reparation scheme of 1833 while matriculated at Exeter College; (ii) The payment of individual student fees to Exeter College as the result of profits generated by enslavement or enforced labour within the British Empire and its colonies; (iii) Exeter alumni with direct involvement or ties of kinship to colonial enslavement as slave-owners or plantation-owners within three generations (parents, grandparents and children); (iv) Donations, bequests, chattels, or any other form of financial benefit received by the college from individuals with a connection to enslavement and/or coerced labour; (v) Alumni (including those ties of kinship outlined above) with business interests in overseas colonies with systems of enslaved labour and/or with connections to a business or organisation which may have benefited from the proceeds of such labour; (vi) Alumni who both openly favoured or denounced the abolition movement.

The project has sought to discover the nature and range of the college’s potential connections to transatlantic slavery and the ways it may have benefited from these connections rather than confining itself to a simple financial investigation. As the full report reveals, what we have uncovered is a broad web of connections over several centuries. This is noteworthy not because Exeter College benefited from particularly substantial donations derived from slave-ownership – it does not appear to have done so – nor were any Exonians among the leading figures of the transatlantic slave economy. Rather, the significance of what we have found lies in the breadth and range of connections between members of Exeter College and transatlantic slavery and in the unexceptional character of these connections.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

To date, our research has uncovered 45 individuals (on an annual basis, our student POIs never amounted to more than about three per cent of the total student population) who had a demonstrable connection to both Exeter College and to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, in its varying iterations, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. These individuals, or Persons of Interest, as we have termed them, attended or had some association with the college over a broad timeframe and demonstrated a range of connections to slavery. Some of the families of former Exeter students had deep historical ties to slavery and sometimes sent multiple generations of family members to study at the college. Many passively inherited enslaved persons that they managed from afar while some were resident in the colonies, closely and actively involved in the handling of affairs. Others engaged actively with the system of slavery as merchants, colonial officials, clergymen, or politicians. Yet another group provided intellectual support to the institution of slavery or contributed to public discourse about abolition.

The current state of our investigation into donations, endowments, estates, chattels, and works of art with significant connections to slavery given to Exeter College has revealed that between c.1670 and c.1900, the college was in receipt of a steady trickle of donations and gifts from individuals who derived some of their wealth from slave ownership. Our findings reveal that Exeter College’s financial resources were not significantly increased as a result of donations derived from slave ownership. Rather, what our research into this issue again uncovers is the ordinary character of ties to the slave-holding economy as well as the ongoing financial benefit to British institutions of such ties.

Overall, as this brief summary suggests, the initial findings of the Exeter College Legacies of Slavery Project provide a clear example of the extent to which connections to the trade in and exploitation of enslaved labour, and the profits arising from it, were – as a matter of course – accepted and embedded in British society and institutions, including those in higher education. Finally, the report recommends some new lines of research into additional potential connections and ways to shed more light on those already identified. Such additional research would contribute further to the growing body of research by a range of institutions revealing how fundamental transatlantic slavery was to the development of modern Britain.

The full report can be accessed at: https://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/documents/Exeter-College-and-the-Legacies-of....

Send feedback to reparation.research@uwimona.edu.jm.