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T<\/span>he legacies of some of Edinburgh\u2019s most celebrated professors and graduates have come under new scrutiny, after new evidence emerged about their roles in forming and perpetuating racist theories, or donating money gained from transatlantic slavery to the city\u2019s university.<\/p>\n Edinburgh University will consider renaming buildings and repurposing some of its most famous events and prizes linked to these figures. The people named in the university\u2019s investigation into its own history and legacies of enslavement and colonialism include:<\/p>\n <\/span>Dugald Stewart was the most popular lecturer of his day, the review said; he has a modern building named after him. <\/span> Photograph: Corson: Scott Papers\/24, Corson Collection, Heritage Collections, University of Edinburgh<\/p>\n A famous 18th-century moral philosopher and mathematician (1753-1828) who lectured Edinburgh students \u2013 including a future British prime minister \u2013 that black Africans were inferior to Europeans because they were \u201csavages\u201d.<\/p>\n He opposed slavery and said \u201cinferior\u201d races could be perfected over time. Yet in common with predecessors such as Adam Ferguson at Edinburgh and the French philosophers Buffon and Montesquieu, he upheld the view that humans were ranked in six tiers, with white Europeans at the top.<\/p>\n The university\u2019s slavery and decolonisation review said Stewart was the most popular lecturer of his day. Students, \u201cmany of whom went on to elite careers in politics and imperial administration\u201d, crowded into his lectures. Some went on to build careers as race scientists. \u201cThrough his pedagogy, he exerted great, if somewhat indirect, influence on the intellectual landscape of early 19th-century Britain,\u201d the review found.<\/p>\n The university\u2019s review has said renaming the Dugald Stewart building, a prominent modern block on its Edinburgh campus opened in 2008, would be a \u201cstrong test case\u201d for its new renaming policy.<\/p>\n <\/span>Robert Halliday Gunning funded numerous academic prizes and scholarships. <\/span> Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert\/The Guardian<\/p>\n A former Edinburgh medical student, Dr Gunning (1818-1900) became extremely rich after settling in Brazil, where slavery was legal and endemic, to become a physician to the local elite, including Emperor Pedro II. He later served as a doctor and then commissioner for a major gold mining enterprise that exploited enslaved miners.<\/p>\n Britain had outlawed slavery in 1833, making it illegal for Britons to enslave people, yet Gunning is widely believed to have held up to 40 enslaved people on his Palmeiras estate near Rio de Janeiro. He denied that, claiming they bought their freedom by working for him. Gunning invested in other colonial enterprises, including gold mines in India and shipping firms.<\/p>\n He became a noted philanthropist, donating significant sums in Britain and Brazil, including funding numerous academic prizes, scholarships and academic posts at Edinburgh, particularly in theology and medicine, which are believed to have paid out millions in benefits to recipients. Those include three of Edinburgh\u2019s best-known current honours: the Gunning Victoria Jubilee prizes in medicine and in divinity and the Gunning lectures.<\/p>\n The university\u2019s slavery and decolonisation review has found it holds \u00a35.4m derived from his gifts. It has recommended that money be repurposed to fund anti-racist decolonisation projects and help pay for a new centre for the study of racisms, colonialism and anti-black violence.<\/p>\n <\/span>A trust from George Combe\u2019s estate continues to fund a visiting fellowship. <\/span> Photograph: Hodgetts, RM\/The University of Edinburgh<\/p>\n One of the most prominent advocates globally of the racist science of phrenology, which wrongly linked skull shape with intelligence, George Combe (1788-1858) co-founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society with his brother. It gathered a skull collection absorbed by the university and still held by it. He also backed other phrenologists, including in the US, and wrote one influential text that heavily outsold Charles Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species.<\/p>\n The Combe brothers studied medicine at Edinburgh. The Combe Trust was set up from the assets of George\u2019s estate (wealth partly derived from his writing and lecture tours advocating phrenology) and endowed the university\u2019s first professorship in psychology in 1906, known as the Combe professorship.<\/p>\n The Combe Trust now funds a visiting fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities lasting two to three months. The fellow must deliver a lecture \u201cemerging from the interests of George Combe\u201d, on areas such as religion and religious education, physiology and health.<\/p>\n <\/span>Margaret Stuart Tyndall Bruce\u2019s legacy of scholarships was funded from her inheritance which included her family\u2019s estate in India. <\/span> Photograph: Talbot Rice, David\/The University of Edinburgh<\/p>\n The \u201cmost distinguished\u201d students in logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh each year are given prizes set up by Margaret Stuart Tyndall Bruce (1788-1869), an heiress whose mother was Indian and her father a Scots lieutenant in the Bengal artillery who had substantial estates in India, England and Scotland. Her brother John Bruce was Edinburgh\u2019s professor of logic and metaphysics, while her uncle John bought Falkland Palace, one of Scotland\u2019s best-known medieval houses, and its surrounding estate in Fife.<\/p>\n She inherited her father\u2019s and uncle\u2019s wealth after they died, which was significantly derived from her father\u2019s Indian estates. In 1865, she left \u00a310,000 to the university for scholarships named in memory of her uncle Prof Bruce. The school of philosophy, psychology and language sciences still awards \u201cBruce of Grangehill prizes\u201d, which have a current accumulated value of \u00a31.6m, funds which may be repurposed after the university review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The legacies of some of Edinburgh\u2019s most celebrated professors and graduates have come under new scrutiny, after new evidence emerged about their roles in forming and perpetuating racist theories, or donating money gained from transatlantic slavery to the city\u2019s university. Edinburgh University will consider renaming buildings and repurposing some of its most famous events and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[6182,5642,357,788,364,777,781,6181],"class_list":{"0":"post-12554","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-colonialism","9":"tag-edinburgh","10":"tag-inquiry","11":"tag-key","12":"tag-people","13":"tag-slavery","14":"tag-university","15":"tag-universitys"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Dugald Stewart<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Robert Halliday Gunning<\/strong><\/h2>\n
George Combe<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Margaret Stuart Tyndall Bruce<\/strong><\/h2>\n