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Legacies of empire, racism and colonial exploitation can be concealed and complicated. Back to Lord Leverhulme. He bankrolled CH Reilly @LivUniArch, it’s dept of Civic Design and its journal, the Town Planning Review
I feel in a strange bind here - one thing that hasn’t been much talked about in the current context is Leverhulme’s rapacious exploitation of the natural resources of the Congo, namely in pursuit of palm oil 4 the production of Sunlight Soap through forced labour of Congolese men
It was tantamount to genocide.
In pursuit of a confused idea of ‘moral capitalism’ it also involved the construction of Leverville. Read more about it here: https://copperbelt.history.ox.ac.uk/2017/10/02/hubris-and-colonial-capitalism-in-a-model-company-town-the-case-of-leverville-1911-1940-benoit-henriet/
You can read more about it in Jules Marchal’s 'Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts' which forensically recounts the system he presided over in cahoots with the Belgians. It's on sale @VersoBooks atm: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2300-lord-leverhulme-s-ghosts
On the other hand, Lever was a Liberal and a progressive, built Port Sunlight on the Wirral to house his manufacturing base and industrial workforce, set a standard for social housing it emerged in late c19 and c20
He bought Stafford House in St James’s, renamed it Lancaster House and bequeathed it to Londoners - the @MuseumOfLondon was housed there for many years
Moreover, it was his profits that fed into the Leverhulme Trust - which funds research across disciplines at all career stages, including my own. What do we do with Leverhulme? Clear analogies to Rhodes - though without a convenient statue - which need thinking through
I hope to come back to Rhodes later on.
