The most famous enslaver in Jamaica, the island that was one of the most profitable of Britain’s Caribbean colonies, is a ghost. One of the tellings of the legend has it that young Annie Palmer, the “White Witch of Rose Hall”, was a sadistic 19th-century killer and torturer who terrorised enslaved people, murdering the grand-niece of her African lover, Takoo, with a curse, before he killed her. Annie’s spirit now apparently haunts a golf course in Montego Bay.
Even as a kid, touring the beautiful island with Jamaican loved ones on holidays, I noticed the British men who had controlled the island’s sugar plantations were largely forgotten.
It was the heroes of the 18th- and 19th-century resistance against slavery’s violence who were everywhere, such as the guerrilla commander Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who was said to have been able to catch bullets. Or Sam Sharpe, a pioneer of liberation theology whose uprising led to abolition, or the political activist Paul Bogle. Their faces were on the banknotes we used to buy pineapple soda.
This is one way descendants process the legacies of enslavement: through the memory of ancestors who resisted their oppressors, the worst of whose crimes were so obscene that they became spectral, like Annie Palmer, or the pirates of Port Royal, swallowed by an earthquake.
But the legacy of slavery in Jamaica, and across the Americas, is pervasive in persistent inequality, in generational trauma, and in the elite schools and words plantation owners left behind. Some of those words are Scottish. Scottish surnames, such as Campbell and Gordon, and placenames, including Aberdeen and Dundee, are everywhere in Jamaica. But until fairly recently, in the UK, there was relatively little interrogation of this deep Scottish imprint.
Edinburgh University’s report into its history, reported in the Guardian this week, is the latest research into this legacy. It illuminates the forgotten mechanics of Scotland’s colonial project, exposing the institution’s racial ideologies as algorithms of exploitation, from the 18th century onwards.
The 2015 book Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past, edited by Prof Tom Devine, detailed how, at the height of transatlantic slavery, “a fifth of the ship captains and two-fifths of the surgeons” on ships sailing out of Liverpool, which dominated the trade, were Scots. “Scots owned and managed enslaved people – from Maryland to Trinidad, from St Croix to St Kitts,” comprising, in the late 18th century, a third of Jamaica’s white population.
The new report complements these histories, revealing that Edinburgh University was a “haven” for white supremacist thought between 1750 and 1850. It found the institution had an “outsized role in developing racial pseudo-sciences” that “habitually positioned Black people at the bottom and white people at the top” – even hoarding Black people’s skulls.
The report charges moral philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Dugald Stewart – men long appreciated as intellectual giants – with leaving a “damaging” legacy of ideas used to justify enslavement and colonialism, which in turn fuelled Edinburgh University’s growth.
In an era of “anti-woke” backlash, this research is bound to invite accusations that the university is putting dead heroes of their time on trial, excavating their bones to shore up a present-day reputation. But the research undoubtedly matters. Building on Eric Williams’s seminal 1944 work Capitalism and Slavery, it fights the false, seductive notion that enslavement, critical to sectors from commodities to finance and philanthropy, was a discrete chapter, separate from the wider story of British national development.
It throws down the gauntlet to other institutions reluctant to examine their past. But, most importantly, research of this kind, though unsettling, matters to descendants of the millions of enslaved Africans trafficked to the Americas, as the Caribbean’s determined genealogists seek answers.
“New World” slavery societies offered lots of opportunities to Scottish settlers, “sojourners” and landowners. Devine’s book describes Scotland, for centuries, as a country in which “emigration was the norm”. Slaving voyages from Scottish ports were only a fraction of the British total, but “nomadic” Scots went to the West Indies as professionals and adventurers seeking social mobility, as well as indentured workers, pirates, and transplanted Jacobite prisoners, in smaller numbers, leading to a “greater per capita Scottish stake” in slavery than any other UK nation.
Scotland’s claimants accounted for 15% of compensation payouts after abolition, with Glasgow’s enslavers representing “one of the largest regional groups of claimants”. The Caribbean provided markets for Scottish textiles and herring, supplying Scotland in turn with coffee, cotton, rum, sugar and tobacco.
Against this backdrop, Edinburgh’s thinkers sustained a racial “ideology that helped to exploit, kill and dominate”, says Prof Tommy J Curry, who co-chaired Edinburgh University’s report, adding that “Scotland has a moral debt to pay”.
The Enlightenment had a shadow. In the same climate in which the values that underpin liberal democracy developed, so did “some of the most damaging ideas in human history”, says the university.
For Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal, these revelations align with the Enlightenment’s “enormously important” spirit of inquiry, opposing the comfort of “selective memory”.
The reasons why Edinburgh University assumed this “outsized” role lie in the modern, unified, secular structure it had by the 18th century, attracting some of Europe’s most curious minds. The city was in the vanguard of medicine, which meant it produced doctors for slavers’ ships and plantations in countries such as Jamaica, which took these theories of race with them, before funnelling back profits from the plantation economy.
The “great irony” of this, says the university’s Ian Stewart, was that while their racial ideas were adopted by the enslavers of the American south, Scottish Enlightenment figures such as Ferguson and Dugald Stewart were “lifelong, vocal abolitionists”.
“They understood the law of unintended consequences better than anyone,” Ian Stewart says. “They wouldn’t be phased one bit by the fact these ideas took on an awful life of their own.”
Edinburgh University didn’t invent racism. What it did was provide a thinktank, codifying ideologies – in the yellowing handwritten books examined for the first time in years for the new research – that aligned with the basest interests of capital.
But from the Windrush scandal to racial inequalities on maternity wards, to the UK government’s refusal to formally apologise and pay reparations for slavery, and on to the far right’s “Dark Enlightenment”, the ghosts of Edinburgh’s theories still haunt.
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