Toronto’s Dundas Imbroglio

This article examines the current campaign to eliminate the name of Dundas from the streets of Toronto. Derivative of the controversy in Edinburgh, a petition was mustered in 2020 to remove Henry Dundas’ name, on the principal ground that this premier Scottish politician delayed the abolition of the slave trade by fifteen years and sent half a million slaves into slavery. The article highlights the fallacies of this claim, the limitations of the historical evidence behind it, and the questionable way in which it was pushed through Toronto city council. The Dundas episode illustrates a disturbing trend in historical reckonings in which everything is judged by anachronistic standards of contemporary social justice. Henry Dundas was a man of the enlightenment and a man of empire, who was in power during decades of revolutionary upheaval and black rebellion. His differences with other abolitionists were essentially about the means, not ends – admitting the injustice of the slave trade and slavery but unwilling to risk a transition to emancipation without safeguarding British imperial and capitalist interests. In this respect, Dundas represented the mainstream of British parliamentary opinion. Quite apart from the logistical difficulties of pursuing abolition in time of imperial war, Dundas cannot be scapegoated for singlehandedly sending thousands of Africans into slavery. Indeed, his pragmatic approach to abolition ultimately proved the way forward.