Robert Halliday Gunning was a Victorian success story, an Edinburgh-trained doctor who amassed a fortune in Brazil’s goldmines before lavishing his wealth on philanthropic gifts. It also appears he was eaten by guilt.
In later life, he ensured his legacy would be linked to acts of benevolence: from the 1880s onwards he paid for endowments, prizes, medals, lectures and academic posts at Edinburgh University, several of which still bear his name. Today they are worth £5.3m.
Gunning, a former Edinburgh medical student and anatomist, had been enmeshed in Brazil’s enslavement-based gold mining industry. Decades after slavery was criminalised in Britain, he was widely believed to own up to 40 enslaved people – a charge he denied.
Gunning was one of hundreds of Edinburgh graduates who made fortunes from the slave trade, on plantations or profiting from the empire. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/The Guardian
A recently discovered letter suggests his gifts were a calculated act of reputation washing.
He told the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, another institution that enjoyed his largesse, he had “come forward without being asked, to relieve my conscience, and leave behind what I cannot take away when life ends, and I feel it no sacrifice but an honour to do so”.
Gunning was one of hundreds of Edinburgh graduates who made their fortunes from the transatlantic slave trade, on plantations in the Americas or profiting from the empire. They served as doctors on slave ships, administrators, lawyers to enslavers, merchants, plantation owners, or were slavers themselves.
The scale of Edinburgh University’s entanglements with transatlantic slavery and colonialism has been exposed by new research, commissioned by the university. It has established that Edinburgh raised the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds from donors implicated in slavery or colonial wealth-building.
A study by Dr Simon Buck, a research fellow, has found Edinburgh raised at least £250,000 (in historical money) from slavery-linked and colonial donors from the late 1700s until well into the late 1800s. The university sought out those donors, despite bitter and public divisions among students and staff over the morality of enslavement.
Buck calculates the donations were equivalent to at least £30m based on current retail prices, derived from tobacco, sugar, cotton, gold, silk, indigo, linen, iron and opium production and trading. Based on present-day earnings, a different measure, that is equivalent to £202m today, or as much as £845m based on the UK’s growth in overall wealth and productivity since then.
Buck calculates at least £6,258 (in historical money) was raised from hundreds of slavery- and empire-linked donors between 1789 and 1794, about 17% of the total philanthropic donations. That equates to about £1m today based on retail price inflation, or £11m based on growth in earnings.
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How we present the worth of historical sums of money
There are different ways of calculating the present-day value of money spent in previous centuries.
Based on work by the Measuring Worth Foundation, Edinburgh University’s academics have adopted three measures: the most conservative model is relative price worth (RPW) which measures purchasing power, followed by relative wage or income worth (RWIW) and then finally relative output worth (ROW).
For comparison, Edinburgh calculated that the £6,258 it raised in the 1790s to help build a new college building would be worth £955,000 today using the RPW model, £10.9m using the RWIW measure or as much as £78.7m using the ROW measure.
The Guardian tends to use relative price worth as its main figure, but we have included the other measures for comparison.
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Similar networks were deployed to fund construction of a new medical school nearly a century later. Between 1873 and 1885, its fundraisers targeted alumni in Britain’s colonies, principally India, the Caribbean, where indentured labour remained rife, and Brazil, where slavery was lawful until 1888. Other UK-based donors had also been enriched by slavery or slavery-derived wealth.
The University of Edinburgh medical school. The report calculates that 20% of the fundraising to build it came slavery-linked sources. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
In all, Buck calculates that £22,600 came from slavery-linked sources and £3,360 from empire-derived wealth, equivalent to 20% of the medical school’s fundraising.
As well as the many hundreds of one-off donations for those buildings derived from slavery or colonial wealth, the Edinburgh report found 27 specific endowments from donors directly linked to the slave trade and colonial profiteering. They were given to establish professorial chairs in music, agriculture and engineering, or to fund student bursaries, prizes and scholarships.
Ten bequests are still active, including Gunning’s, which are worth at least £9.4m today, a total that does not factor in the awards paid out over the past two centuries. The sums involved, Buck argues, are an underestimate.
The lives of those who were enslaved are largely invisible, but some people have been identified. In 1817, Carpenter Quacco, Nanny Pungy, Phibba and Benneba were among 364 enslaved people registered by Samuel Athill, an Antigua-born medicine alumnus and donor who fought against abolition.
There are glimpses of other sources of slavery- or empire-derived funding. Some were directly implicated in enslaving people. During the 1690s, before the union of the Scottish and English parliaments, several professors at the university, its rector and several future donors became investors in the Company of Scotland, a Scottish attempt to create a slavery-based plantation business.
Best known for its failed attempt in 1699 to found a colony in Darién, Panama, the Company of Scotland traded in enslaved people and cargo linked to slavery in 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1708 in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean. There were bursaries active at Edinburgh until at least 1971 funded by its investors.
According to the report, Edinburgh’s town council, which originally owned the university, gave it money raised from taxing slavery-linked ships carrying tobacco, sugar and cotton in the port of Leith. Queen Anne, one of many British monarchs with clear links to transatlantic slavery, funded professorships.
New College Edinburgh, on the Mound, is one of the buildings constructed with help from slavery-enriched donors. Photograph: Photo-Loci/Alamy
Many of the ways in which the university benefited from enslavement are hidden from view, but some are still very visible. Five of Edinburgh’s best-known historical buildings were constructed with help from slavery-enriched donors: two former sites of the Royal Infirmary hospital – which was partly run using profits from a Jamaican plantation it owned; the St Cecilia’s Hall music collection; the New College, built on the Mound by the Free Church of Scotland, and the Edinburgh College of Art.
And the university’s accountants were shrewd investors. Buck has discovered its slavery-derived wealth was invested in numerous Scottish Highland estates, war bonds, railway companies and colonial government bonds between 1896 and 1946. Limited time made it impossible to calculate how much profit those investments generated.
