Gilbert Slater

Slater was born at Plymouth, England on 27 August 1864 to a schoolmaster, Daniel Slater.{{cite journal|title=Obituary:Dr. Gilbert Slater |doi=10.1038/141544a0 |year=1938 |journal=Nature |volume=141 |issue=3569 |pages=544 |doi-access=free }}

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)

Slater served as the Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford from 1909 to 1915.

In 1915, Slater sailed to India to take over as the first Professor of economics{{cite news|title=Portrait of economist unveiled|url=http://www.hindu.com/2009/01/22/stories/2009012258140200.htm|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090125020015/http://hindu.com/2009/01/22/stories/2009012258140200.htm|url-status=dead|archive-date=25 January 2009|work=The Hindu|date=22 January 2009}} and head of the new economics department of the University of Madras which was founded in 1912.{{cite web |title=Department of Economic, Chepauk Campus |url=http://www.unom.ac.in/eco1.html |publisher=University of Madras |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20081029025651/http://www.unom.ac.in/eco1.html |archivedate=29 October 2008 }} 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.{{cite web |title=Biography of Muthiah Chettiar |url=http://www.hinduhighschool.com/lifesketches/life_sketches6.htm |publisher=The Hindu High School |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20090207191503/http://www.hinduhighschool.com/lifesketches/life_sketches6.htm |archivedate=7 February 2009 }} 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 174Southern 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. Slater's motion was, however, defeated by a huge margin.

On the choice of medium of instruction, he wrote:

{{quotation|All India labours under a very serious disadvantage because the language which is the medium of all higher instruction is different from the language of the home. For the present Dravida suffers least. On the average a student of the Madras University saves about a year, as compared with students of other Indian universities in the time necessarily spent in the preliminary study of English before beginning his chosen course of study. But, on the other and, the development of Bengali, Hindi or Urdu into an efficient medium for scientific and general education is a much more hopeful proposition than the modernising of any Dravidian language to attain the same result. Northern India can reasonably hope to make one of its vernaculars the literary and scientific organ of between two and three hundred million people; unification of the language of the masses with the language of the learned in South India is most likely to be reached with the disappearance of the Dravidian vernaculars|Gilbert Slater, The Dravidian Elements in Indian Culture, pp. 172–173}}

Slater co-authored the book Indigenous Banking in India along with L. C. Jain in 1929.

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, Countess of Pembroke, 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.{{cite web|title=The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare"|url=https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muchado/readings/hoffman.html|location=New York|author=Julian Messner|website=PBS |year=1955}}

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 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. xviiFull 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.

{{reflist}}

• {{cite book|first=Harold|last=Pollins|title=Slater, Gilbert (1864–1938)|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2004}}

• {{cite book|title=Co-operators, the State, and the housing question [by G. Slater]|year=1901}}
• {{cite book|title=English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields|year=1907|url=http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001323103}}
• {{cite book|title=The Making of Modern England|publisher=Houghton Mifflin Company|year=1915|url=http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001315361}} (republished as "The Growth of Modern England" in 1939)
• {{cite book|title=Ideas at War|publisher=Williams & Norgate|year=1917|isbn=978-1-59017-297-1|author=David Cole.}}
• {{cite book|title=Some South Indian Villages|url=https://archive.org/details/somesouthindian00slatgoog|publisher=H. Milford, Oxford University Press|year=1918}}
• {{cite book|title=The Dravidian Element in Indian Culture|url=https://archive.org/details/pli.kerala.rare.23738|year=1924|publisher=Ernest Benn|first=Gilbert|last=Slater|ref=Dravidian}}
• {{cite book|title=Indigenous Banking in India|url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.55083|author=L. C. Jain|year=1929}}
• {{cite book|title=Poverty and the State:A Study of English Conditions|publisher=Constable|year=1930}}
• {{cite book|title=Seven Shakespeares: A Discussion of the Evidence for Various Theories with Regard to Shakespeare's Identity|publisher=C. Palmer|year=1931}}
• {{cite book|url=https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/Documents/Detail/currency-credit-and-the-unemployment-crisis-1932/100041 |title=Currency, Credit and the Unemployment Crisis|publisher=The Fabian Society|year=1932}}
• {{cite book|title=Southern India, Its Political and Economic Problems|url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.51946|publisher=G. Allen & Unwin|year=1936|ref=Southern India}}
• {{cite book|title=The Growth of Modern England (with Vera Anstey)|author=Vera Anstey, Vera Powell Anstey|publisher=Constable|year=1939|title-link=Vera Anstey}}

• {{Gutenberg author|id=48434}}

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Category:1864 births

Category:1938 deaths

Category:Writers from Plymouth, Devon

Category:British people in colonial India

Category:English economists

Category:Ruskin College

Category:Academic staff of the University of Madras