Trinity's Colonial Legacies. Transparency, Instrumentality, and Agency in an Engaged Research Project

Abstract

This chapter will draw on the experiences of a research team at the heart of a four-year Colonial Legacies Project (TCL) at Trinity College Dublin, focused on unpacking the institution’s historical ties to colonialism since its foundation by royal charter in 1592.1 Conducted by three historians, the project extends beyond a narrow exploration of slavery, aiming to illuminate complex heritage issues in an Irish university and on a global scale. In this way it stands apart from projects that have concentrated solely on a university’s relationship to slavery, including at Yale, Harvard and Georgetown in the United States.2 Closer to Ireland, there have been significant projects on colonial legacies at Universities in Glasgow, Cambridge, Bristol and Oxford.3 Globally, projects at universities at Dalhousie, Cape Town and elsewhere have all informed Trinity’s approach, especially in matters of engagement and transparency.4 Trinity’s positionality as both an instrument of British colonialism in Ireland and of the significant Irish contribution to imperialism abroad offers historians a distinctive and complex case study of contested heritage. The project’s other explicit aim was to be a public history project: to work with others to raise awareness of the college’s physical and intellectual colonial legacies, monuments and endowments in the present, and to some extent, foster and enable a more critical appreciation of their significance in our contemporary moment.