The University of Edinburgh played an “outsized” role in the creation of racist scientific theories and greatly profited from transatlantic slavery, a landmark inquiry into its history has found. The investigation, seen by the Guardian, reveals that the university raised at least £30 million from former students and donors linked to the enslavement of African peoples, the plantation economy, and exploitative wealth-gathering throughout the British empire.
The inquiry found that Edinburgh became a “haven” for professors who developed theories of white supremacism in the 18th and 19th centuries, and who played a pivotal role in the creation of discredited “racial pseudo-sciences” that placed Africans at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. The university still has bequests worth £9.4 million from donors linked to enslavement, colonial conquests, and those pseudo-sciences, which fund lectures, medals, and fellowships that continue today.
Sir Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal, who commissioned the investigation, said its findings were “hard to read” but that Edinburgh could not have a “selective memory” about its history and achievements. In an official statement, Mathieson extended the university’s deepest apologies for “its role not only in profiting materially from practices and systems that caused so much suffering but also in contributing to the production and perpetuation of racialised thought which significantly impacted ethnically and racially minoritised communities”.
The university had explicitly sought donations from graduates linked to transatlantic slavery to help build two of its most famous buildings, Old College in the 1790s and the old medical school in the 1870s. The donations were equivalent to approximately £30 million in today’s prices, or up to £845 million based on economic growth since then. The university holds nearly 300 skulls gathered in the 1800s from enslaved and dispossessed people by phrenologists who wrongly believed skull shape determined character and morals.
Fewer than 1% of its staff and just over 2% of its students are Black, well below the 4% of the UK population. The report’s authors urged the university to redirect money from those bequests to hiring academics from Black and minority backgrounds and on research and teaching about racism and colonialism. Among 47 recommendations, the review also asked Edinburgh to support the unadoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and to sell off investments in companies with significant contracts with the Israeli government.
