Edinburgh University had 'outsized' role in racist science

The Herald Scotland

27-07-2025

A report entitled Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University of Edinburgh's History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism found that the institution raised the equivalent of at least £30million today from slavery and empire linked sources, with the value potentially over £800m if measured by 'Relative Output' which measures the amount of income or wealth relative to the total output of the economy.
It found that: "The University of Edinburgh was a haven for professors and alumni who developed theories of racial inferiority and white supremacism, such as the idea that Africans were inferior to whites and that non-white peoples could be colonised for the profit of European nations.
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"These ideas provided powerful intellectual justifications for enslavement and colonialism and underpinned the rapid expansion of European empires around the world.
"University of Edinburgh professors and alumni played an outsized role in developing racial pseudo-sciences that created civilisational hierarchies and habitually positioned Black people at the bottom and white people at the top.
"These ideas also provided the basis for British ethnology. Examples include Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, David Hume, James Cowle Prichard, Robert Knox and Arthur James Balfour who, through research and teaching, proliferated racist ideas against African, Asian, Middle Eastern and other non-European peoples that underpinned enslavement and colonialism."
In a modern context, the report found many students and staff from racial minorities face ongoing racism, with reporting systems 'potentially inadequate' as these did not tend to be reported.
The report also made reference to the Balfour Declaration, the letter from British foreign secretary and chancellor of the University of [[Edinburgh]] to Lord Rothschild favouring the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
The UK Government had pledged to recognise Arab independence in the region in exchange for support against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, and had also secretly agreed with France to divide what was then Ottoman Syria between the two nations.
A protest at the University of Edinburgh (Image: Newsquest) Following the war, British Mandatory Palestine was established and eventually partitioned to create modern day Israel and Palestine.
The report said: "One of the University's longest serving Chancellors, Arthur James Balfour (1891–1930), played a unique role in establishing and maintaining a century-long process of imperial and settler-colonial rule in Palestine through the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
"This Declaration led to the partitioning of Palestine and the permanent exile of many Palestinians from their homeland.
"Balfour assumed race to be a social and biological fact and upheld the right of white Europeans to govern and dominate non-Europeans. This racist view directly affected his attitude towards his governance of imperial and domestic affairs.
"The University of Edinburgh continues to be entangled in the historical harms that Balfour instigated through its direct and indirect investments that are supporting the Israeli government's human rights and international law violations against Palestinian people today."
Students currently enrolled at the University have protested about the institution's ties to [[Israel]] in the context of its ongoing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and it's military operations in the former.
The report said: "To date, the University of Edinburgh's senior leadership team and Court have not demonstrated sufficient direct engagement with the requests emerging from one of the most well-supported community mobilisations in the history of the University.
"Importantly, this mobilisation is comparable to the successful divestment campaign that took place in the 1970s from another apartheid state, South Africa. In 1971, the University of Edinburgh listened to students and staff, and after intense protests it sold all its investments complicit with apartheid. 148 But in the case of Palestine, the senior leadership team has deployed a 'conflict agnostic' approach, a term that denies the Nakba and its settler-colonial afterlife.
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"This approach also means that the University of Edinburgh runs the risk of eluding due diligence and exposing itself to complicity with genocide, crimes against humanity and an illegal occupation."
The report recommended that the University of Edinburgh de-adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.
The IHRA definition, which is used by most UK universities, includes 11 examples to support that definition, seven of which reference the state of Israel.
Falling under its definition of antisemitism are "claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour", "applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation", and "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis".
The University of Edinburgh report said: "The IHRA definition violates academic freedom and freedom of speech by framing any criticism of Israel's policies of settler-colonial dispossession driven by state racism as a form of antisemitism."
The report further found that donations explicitly sought from slavers were used to help build the Old College on South Bridge in the 1790s and the old medical school near Bristo Square in the 1870s.
The university had at least 15 endowments derived from African enslavement and 12 linked to British colonialism in India, Singapore and South Africa, and 10 of those were still active and had a minimum value today of £9.4m.
It currently has close to 300 skulls gathered in the 1800s from enslaved and dispossessed people adherents of phrenology, a racist pseudoscience which holds that intelligence can be determined by skull shape.