On February 16, Yale University issued a formal apology for its historical association with slavery. “Today … we recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery … and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery,” the Ivy League school said in a statement.
This came alongside the release of the book Yale and Slavery: A History, which gives an account of Yale’s dark past, authored by Yale history professor David W Blight and the Yale and Slavery Research Project.
Among other things, the book talks about the Indian connection of Elihu Yale (1649-1721), after whom the university is named. Yale spent over a quarter of a century in India, mainly in Madras (now Chennai), and made a considerable fortune through various activities, including the slave trade. We take a closer look.
From Massachusetts to Madras
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Elihu Yale was born in 1649, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a wealthy merchant family. At the age of three, his family moved to Britain and he would never set foot in America again.
In 1670, 21-year-old Yale became a clerk for the East India Company. After working for a year at the Company’s London office, Yale would be picked as a ‘writer’ — a term for the junior-most employees of the Company — to be stationed in India.
Elihu Yale with his Servant. Oil on canvas by James Worsdale, ca 1692-1767 (Courtesy: Yale University Art Gallery)
He arrived in Madras in 1672. Over the next two decades, he rapidly rose the ranks of the Company to ultimately become the governor-president of Madras from 1684-85, and again from 1687-92.
Yale’s involvement in the slave trade
During Yale’s time, the East India Company conducted an enormous amount of commerce from Madras. Apart from trade in spices and textiles, the Company also engaged in the sale and purchase of human beings. Yale “oversaw many sales, adjudications, and accountings of enslaved people for the East India Company”, according to Yale and Slavery: A History.
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Historian Joseph Yannielli wrote that in the late 17th century, Yale served on the governing council at Fort St George, which was the British fortress in Madras. He added, “A devastating famine led to an uptick in the local slave trade … Yale and other company officials took advantage of the labor surplus, buying hundreds of slaves and shipping them to the English colony on Saint Helena.” (‘Elihu Yale Was a Slave Trader’ in Digital Histories @ Yale, 2014).
Precisely how many people Yale personally may have owned (and sold) is not known. He likely made most of his fortune from trade in “cloth, silks, precious jewels, and other commodities” (Yale and Slavery). But, as Blight points out, “this commerce was inseparable from the slave trade.”
“There can be no question that some portion of Yale’s considerable fortune, amassed while British governor-president in Madras, derived from his myriad entanglements with the purchase and sale of human beings,” he writes, adding that “the records further demonstrate that in this busy and valuable port of the British Empire, varying practices of slavery were ubiquitous.”
The ‘enslaved child’ painting
Perhaps the most famous telling piece of evidence linking Yale and slavery is a now infamous painting, donated to the Yale Center for British Art (YBCA) in 1970. It shows four white men, with Yale at the centre, in costly 18th-century outfits posing around a table, smoking pipes and sipping wine.
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Elihu Yale with Members of his Family and an Enslaved Child. Oil on canvas by John Verelst, ca. 1675–1734. (Courtesy: YBCA)
In the right corner of the canvas, however, is a child pouring wine for the group. Of African or Indian descent (there is some debate about this), he wears fine clothes but has a silver collar locked around his neck, indicating enslavement.
“This collar is not used to tether someone to another set of chains,” Edward Town, assistant curator at YBCA told The Smithsonian Magazine. Rather, “[o]ne of the invidious, cruellest things about it is that these collars would have been highly finished, high-status objects.” In other words, they were symbolic markers of their wearers’ enslaved status and prevented them from running away.
How Yale University got its name
Yale returned to England in 1699. By then, he had made a fortune in India through his work for the Company, engaging in illegal but commonplace private trade, and some good old corruption. In fact, he was removed from his governor’s post in 1692 due to allegations of embezzlement.
Also Read | With the Netherlands’ apology on slavery, a look at the Dutch role in history
He left the country with a “record of arrogance, cruelty, sensuality, and greed” with stories galore of his unforgiving ways. For example, he once ordered the hanging of an Indian stable boy who had absconded with a Company horse.
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Upon his return, he was one of England’s richest men and spent much of his time as “a collector of art, jewels, Chinese porcelain, textiles, fine furniture, and books”. Here, he became the biggest benefactor of the Collegiate School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States.
Calvinists (who follow a branch of Protestantism) established the school in 1701, but it had struggled for funds till Yale entered the scene. Between 1713 and 1721, he sent hundreds of books, a portrait of King George I, and other merchandise to support the Collegiate School. These commodities were sold and the proceeds were put into building the college house.
Blight writes: “In honour of Elihu Yale’s contributions, and to entice him into additional donations, the Collegiate School constructed a building called Yale College [in 1718]. From that day forward, the third-oldest institution of higher learning in America would be known by that name.”
