{"id":298258,"date":"2025-07-28T10:42:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T10:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/298258\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T10:42:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T10:42:11","slug":"jamaicans-with-scottish-enslaver-names-a-society-still-in-trauma-edinburgh-university-has-much-to-answer-for-chris-osuh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/298258\/","title":{"rendered":"Jamaicans with Scottish enslaver names; a society still in trauma. Edinburgh University has much to answer for | Chris Osuh"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most famous enslaver in Jamaica<\/a>, the island that was one of the most profitable of Britain\u2019s Caribbean colonies, is a ghost. One of the tellings of the legend has it that young Annie Palmer, the \u201cWhite Witch of Rose Hall\u201d, 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\u2019s spirit now apparently haunts a golf course in Montego Bay.<\/p>\n

Even as a kid, touring the beautiful island with Jamaican loved ones on holidays, I noticed the British men who had controlled the island\u2019s sugar plantations were largely forgotten.<\/p>\n

It was the heroes of the 18th- and 19th-century resistance against slavery\u2019s violence who were everywhere, such as the guerrilla commander Queen Nanny of the Maroons,<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/strong>that <\/strong>they became spectral, like Annie Palmer, or the pirates of Port Royal<\/a>, swallowed by an earthquake.<\/p>\n

But the legacy of slavery in Jamaica, and across the Americas<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Edinburgh University\u2019s report into its history, reported in the Guardian<\/a> this week, is the latest research into this legacy. It illuminates the forgotten mechanics of Scotland\u2019s colonial project, exposing the institution\u2019s racial ideologies as algorithms of exploitation, from the 18th century onwards.<\/p>\n

The 2015 book Recovering Scotland\u2019s Slavery Past, edited by Prof Tom Devine, detailed how, at the height of transatlantic slavery, \u201ca fifth of the ship captains and two-fifths of the surgeons\u201d on ships sailing out of Liverpool, which dominated the trade, were Scots. \u201cScots owned and managed enslaved people \u2013 from Maryland to Trinidad, from St Croix to St Kitts,\u201d comprising, in the late 18th century, a third of Jamaica\u2019s white population.<\/p>\n

The new report complements these histories, revealing that Edinburgh<\/a> University was a \u201chaven\u201d for white supremacist thought between 1750 and 1850. It found the institution had an \u201coutsized role in developing racial pseudo-sciences\u201d that \u201chabitually positioned Black people at the bottom and white people at the top\u201d \u2013 even hoarding Black people\u2019s skulls.<\/p>\n

The report charges moral philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume<\/a> and Dugald Stewart \u2013 men long appreciated as intellectual giants \u2013 with leaving a \u201cdamaging\u201d legacy of ideas used to justify enslavement and colonialism, which in turn fuelled Edinburgh University\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n

In an era of \u201canti-woke\u201d 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\u2019s seminal 1944 work Capitalism and Slavery<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s determined genealogists seek answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew World\u201d slavery societies offered lots of opportunities to Scottish settlers, \u201csojourners\u201d and landowners. Devine\u2019s book describes Scotland, for centuries, as a country in which \u201cemigration was the norm\u201d. Slaving voyages from Scottish ports were only a fraction of the British total, but \u201cnomadic\u201d 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 \u201cgreater per capita Scottish stake\u201d in slavery than any other UK nation.<\/p>\n

Scotland\u2019s claimants accounted for 15% of compensation payouts after abolition, with Glasgow\u2019s enslavers representing<\/a> \u201cone of the largest regional groups of claimants\u201d. The Caribbean provided markets<\/a> for Scottish textiles and herring, supplying Scotland in turn with coffee, cotton, rum, sugar and tobacco.<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, Edinburgh\u2019s thinkers sustained a racial \u201cideology that helped to exploit, kill and dominate\u201d, says Prof Tommy J Curry, who co-chaired Edinburgh University\u2019s report, adding that \u201cScotland has a moral debt to pay\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Enlightenment had a shadow. In the same climate in which the values that underpin liberal democracy developed, so did \u201csome of the most damaging ideas in human history\u201d, says the university.<\/p>\n

For Peter Mathieson, the university\u2019s principal, these revelations align with the Enlightenment\u2019s \u201cenormously important\u201d spirit of inquiry, opposing the comfort of \u201cselective memory\u201d.<\/p>\n

The reasons why Edinburgh University assumed this \u201coutsized\u201d role lie in the modern, unified, secular structure it had by the 18th century, attracting some of Europe\u2019s most curious minds. The city was in the vanguard of medicine, which meant it produced doctors for slavers\u2019 ships and plantations in countries such as Jamaica, which took these theories of race with them, before funnelling back profits from the plantation economy.<\/p>\n

The \u201cgreat irony\u201d of this, says the university\u2019s 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 \u201clifelong, vocal abolitionists\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey understood the law of unintended consequences better than anyone,\u201d Ian Stewart says. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t be phased one bit by the fact these ideas took on an awful life of their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Edinburgh University didn\u2019t invent racism. What it did was provide a thinktank, codifying ideologies \u2013 in the yellowing handwritten books examined for the first time in years for the new research \u2013 that aligned with the basest interests of capital.<\/p>\n

But from the Windrush scandal to racial inequalities on maternity wards<\/a>, to the UK government\u2019s refusal to formally apologise and pay reparations for slavery, and on to the far right\u2019s \u201cDark Enlightenment\u201d, the ghosts of Edinburgh\u2019s theories still haunt.<\/p>\n