Elihu Yale and India
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A backgrounder
Chidanand Rajghatta TNN, February 18, 2024: The Times of India
Washington: Infamously named after a corrupt and rapacious British-American administrator whose egregious excessess in 17th century colonial Madras included hanging a stable boy who absconded with a horse, Yale University has apologised for its ties to slavery.
It took a mere 800 pounds accrued from the sale of goods sent to the cash-starved institution in 1717 by Boston-born Elihu Yale, who was at that time East India Company’s “President” of Madras, to affix his name to a new building that became Yale College, and eventually Yale University. A tablet at Scollay Square, near the site of Yale’s birth, even commemorates the event.
Elihu Yale’s direct involvement in slave trade, which at that time flourished in Madras, is disputed. Some accounts say he opposed it, and others say he permitted a law that allowed at least ten slaves to be carried on every ship bound for Europe. Nevertheless, the institution said on Friday that “we recognise our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labour, the experiences, and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologise for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery.”
The apology came after the university launched what it said was a comprehensive, long-term examination in 2020 to better understand the university’s history — specifically its formative ties to slavery and the slave trade. The findings were detailed in a peer-reviewed book, “Yale and Slavery: A History”.
In the book, Elihu Yale is described as a “major benefactor” of the institution, who spent many years in Madras, first as a clerk, then as a writer, eventually becoming governor of the East India Company in that lucrative outpost of the British Empire. “In accepting Yale’s largesse, those pious, dissenting ministers —who kept one pecuniary eye on the main chance —were forced to avert their eyes and accept books, cash, and other goods from an Anglican donor who shared none of their orthodox Calvinist heritage,” the book says, referring to other founders.
Outlining Yale’s time in Madras, the book says he arrived in India in 1672 and moved up the ranks in the colonial council until 1687, when he was appointed governor of Madras and agent in charge of Fort St. George. The East India Company, it says, conducted enormous commerce out of Madras, and “it sanctioned and regulated part of the Indian slave trade from Yale’s post.” “The Indian Ocean slave trade, which eventually matched the Atlantic in size and scope, did not become so extensive until the nineteenth century. But on the Indian subcontinent, the trade in human beings along its coasts as well as inland and to islands was very old. Yale...oversaw many sales, adjudications, and accountings of enslaved people for the East India Company,” the book reveals.
Citing historical records, the book says that in the 1680s, adevastating famine led to an uptick in the local slave trade in Madras. As more and more bodies became available on the open market, Yale and other company officials took advantage of the labour surplus, buying hundreds of slaves and shipping them to the English colony on Saint Helena.
“Precisely whether or how many people Yale personally may have owned is not yet discernable, nor perhaps even a key question... There can be no question that some portion of Yale’s considerable fortune derived from his myriad entanglements with the purchase and sale of human beings,” the book says.
Yale is among a growing number of US institutions — Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia among them — that has begun to acknowledge their ties to slavery, a self-examination galvanised by the death of George Floyd. Yale, like Harvard, has a profound and outsized influence in American politics and public life. The university has given five US presidents — William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, Bush Sr, Bill Clinton, and Bush Jr — compared to Harvard’s eight. India, too, has strong ties to the university. Its Indian alumni include former Pepsico president Indra Nooyi; journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria; former PM Manmohan Singh’s daughter Amrit Singh, a human rights lawyer; Hillary Clinton’s former aide Neera Tanden; and US law expert Akhil Amar, and his brother Vikram, also a legal scholar.
