Pennies from the people overseas: Securing investment from the fortunes of Empire : Securing investment from the fortunes of Empire 

There is an oft repeated phrase that dominates histories of Aberystwyth university’s foundation. ‘Pennies from the people’ refers to the last Sunday in October 1875 when chapels throughout Wales declared ‘university Sunday’ and collected contributions from over 70,000 people raising £3,100. This is a story embraced by those wishing to connect a history of grassroots self-sacrifice with the institution’s contemporary values. The chair of university council’s introduction to the 2022-23 annual report declared, for instance, that: ‘We were known as “the people’s university” when we first opened our doors in 1872 and that rings true today – our teaching and research has made an impact on daily lives, locally, nationally and internationally.’ Similarly, in a foreword for the 1972 centenary-driven institutional biography (Ellis 1972) Prince Phillip notes: ‘So many universities have been established by far-sighted benefactors, or by enlightened authority, but few can claim, with Aberystwyth, that they were founded in response to popular pressure.’ But the ‘pennies from the people’ story distracts from other more significant sources of investment which were underpinned by the profits of military imperialism and settler colonial wealth. This chapter examines international funding raising tours by university leaders and their broader leveraging of financial obligation on expatriate wealthy Welshman who were urged to return some of their new fortune back home to Wales. It joins an emerging conversation within critical and abolitionist university studies about the disconnect between universities’ official histories of private philanthropic giving and the problematic origins of that income (Pellew and Goldman 2018, Warren and Bell 2014).