Gilbert Slater (27 August 1864 – 8 March 1938) was an English people economist and social reformer. He is known for rural developments he initiated in India.
Slater is also known for his love for Dravidian culture and civilization and for theorizing that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by several different writers at different times.
Early life
Slater was born at
Plymouth,
England on 27 August 1864 to a schoolmaster, Daniel Slater.
Academic career
Slater graduated in economics and taught the subject as an academic. He wrote one of the first PhDs at the London School of Economics.
Enclosure of Common Fields in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries was published in 1905. (LSE Magazine Winter 2010)
Principal of Ruskin College
Slater served as the Principal of
Ruskin College,
Oxford from 1909 to 1915.
In India
In 1915, Slater sailed to
India to take over as the first Professor of economics
and head of the new
economics department of the University of Madras which was founded in 1912.
and chaired the economics department of Madras University from 1915 to 1921. Even before he arrived in India, Slater had learnt the
Tamil language and was ready for his new assignment. During his tenure, Gilbert and his team performed a detailed survey of the
villages in the Madras Presidency and analyzed the prevailing economic conditions. One of the people who assisted Slater in his study was South Indian businessman M. Ct. Muthiah Chettiar.
The results of the survey were published in the book
Some South Indian Villages.
During his tenure, Slater worked hard to eradicate poverty.
Slater also demonstrated a keen interest in the culture and civilization of South India. Back in England in 1924, he published his book The Dravidian Elements in Indian Culture.
Slater was nominated to the Madras Legislative Council in 1921 and served for a year until his return to the United Kingdom in 1922.[Dravidian, Pg 174][Southern India, Pg 7] During his term in the council, he recommended the appointment of a committee to investigate the feasibility of the adoption of a common script for the whole Presidency.
On the choice of medium of instruction, he wrote:
Slater co-authored the book Indigenous Banking in India along with L. C. Jain in 1929.
The Seven Shakespeares
Back in England, Slater studied Shakespeare and proposed a new variation of theory that the works attributed to Shakespeare were not his. In
The Seven Shakespeares (1931) he argued that the works were actually written by seven different authors:
Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Sir
Walter Raleigh, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, Christopher Marlowe,
Mary Sidney, and Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. This so-called "group theory" revived
Delia Bacon's early model of collaborative authorship and brought together all the most popular recent candidates.
Death
Slater died on 8 March 1938 at the age of 73.
He had married, in 1897, Violet, daughter of Joseph Oakeshott, of East Barnet, and Eliza Maria, née Dodd; she was a sister of the civil servant and
Fabian Society Joseph Francis Oakeshott and of Harold Oakeshott, the husband of
Grace Oakeshott.
[Radical Reformers and Respectable Rebels: How the two lives of Grace Oakeshott defined an era, Jocelyn Robson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. xvii][Full of Hope and Fear: The Great War Letters of an Oxford Family, ed. Margaret Bonfiglioli and James Munson, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv]
On 22 January 2009 a portrait of Gilbert Slater was unveiled at the campus of the University of Madras by the Finance Minister of Tamil Nadu, K. Anbazhagan.
Notes
Works
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(republished as "The Growth of Modern England" in 1939)
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External links
