Tuesday briefing: The story behind the Edinburgh University ‘skull room' – and a reckoning over its history

The Guardian

29-07-2025

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Today's newsletter takes you behind a series of locked doors at the University of Edinburgh's Anatomical museum. The 'skull room' is at the end of a long corridor, rarely visited by anyone outside the university – and inside it are mahogany-framed glass cabinets containing appropriately 1,500 human skulls, some with peeling labels and catalogue numbers, others bare.
Hundreds of these were shipped to Scotland by supporters of 'phrenology', the belief that you can calculate someone's intelligence and character by looking at the shape of their skull.
Spoiler alert: it was all nonsense. But back in the 18th century it carried weight. Generations of Edinburgh alumni dispersed across the British empire with beliefs about racial superiority encapsulated by the collections in this room. These skulls tell a story about ​the role played​ by one of the UK's oldest and most respected universities in creating and perpetuating ideas about white superiority from the late 1700s on.
That is what prompted the university to commission the most extensive review by any UK university into its connections with transatlantic slavery and empire. For today's newsletter, I spoke to the Guardian's Scotland editor, Severin Carrell, on what has been found in this landmark inquiry and what the university is going to do about it. That's after the headlines.
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In recent years there had been debate from within the university about its role in slavery. 'Working in Scotland for the Guardian for the past 19 years, I have been watching and following stories about Scotland's entanglements with transatlantic slavery and empire,' says Severin.
In 2018 the University of Glasgow became the first UK institution to critically examine its role with transatlantic enslavement. That triggered other institutions – including the Church of England and the National Trust – to look into this issue. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 turbocharged these conversations. The Guardian has also done its own investigations into its founders' complicity with the slave trade in the Cotton Capital series.
The Edinburgh review, though, is the most extensive investigation of its kind carried out by any university in the UK. The inquiry examined its own academics' conduct at the time, and also did investigations into the university's current demographics and its underrepresentation of Black professors and students. This included having two research fellows spend months going through archives, reading reams of lecture notes from the 1700s. 'Now that is a substantial advance on what other UK universities have done so far,' says Severin.
It's likely that other universities might find similar material in their archives, says Severin. 'One of the interesting arguments that's levelled about Edinburgh is that, in its day – in the late 1700s early 1800s – it was one of the most significant and important academic institutions in Europe and possibly the world. The Edinburgh medical school was one of the world's first, so it had a disproportionate impact on the teaching of medicine, and also what the doctors it then taught were doing when they went out to work in the British colonies or immersed themselves in the plantation economies of the Americas.'
What do we know about the skulls?
The University of Edinburgh skull room was part of the former anatomy museum built in the 1880s (the museum is still there, just smaller). It was open to the public and was where the university could showcase its research. The skulls were obtained through networks linked to the British empire and the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. Many heads were taken without consent from prisons, asylums, hospitals, archaeological sites and battlefields. In the 19th century scientists were intent on classifying the natural world into taxonomic categories. Typically, non-white populations were depicted as inherently inferior (a convenient truth for those promoting colonialism).
Some of Edinburgh's most celebrated intellectuals argued that different human races were so distinct that they ought to be considered separate species. Despite the fact that phrenology was never formally taught at Edinburgh (it was criticised by some for its unscientific approach) the skull room was built to house these collections. Modern genetics has since shattered the idea that there are biologically distinct racialised groups – although this piece by Hannah Devlin shows there is a resurgence in interest about theories of racial exceptionalism.
Once a source of pride, these heads are now a source of shame to the university. The skull room has been preserved in situ, but 'it's not accessible to the public and is rarely visited by anybody outside the university', explains Severin, who described coming face-to-face with the skulls as 'quite unsettling and sobering'.
More than 100 of these skulls have already been repatriated, with plans for many more to be returned. In 2023 the remains of four tribal warriors were returned to Taiwan. Many of the skulls will never be identified and their provenance is likely to remain unknown. 'The university now regards this as a place which needs to be protected and looked after with respect and decorum. It's not a place they want people ogling,' says Severin.
What has the inquiry found?
The inquiry found that Edinburgh became a 'haven' for professors who developed theories of white supremacy in the 18th and 19th centuries. These individuals played an important role in the creation of discredited 'racial pseudo-sciences' that placed Africans and their descendants at the bottom of a racial hierarchy.
Hundreds of graduates went on to make fortunes from the transatlantic slave trade or generally profiting from the empire. They served as doctors on slave ships, administrators, lawyers to enslavers, merchants, plantation owners, or were slavers themselves.
The university raised the equivalent of at least £30m today from former students and donors with links to slavery or colonial wealth building, the report found. That £30m can, however, be interpreted in different ways: it can be argued it should be seen as the higher figure of £202m based on the growth of wages since they were received, and as much as £845m based on economic growth since then.
The report's authors have said their findings show a darker side to the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries during which time the university became famous for the work of celebrated individuals such as the economist Adam Smith and the philosopher David Hume. Sir Peter Mathieson, the university's principal, who commissioned the investigation, said Edinburgh could not have a 'selective memory'.
Severin says: 'It's crucial that we understand our history accurately and are candid about what our country's societies, economies, history has involved in the past, and denying the bad things is not an intelligent way of grappling with our inheritance.'
Demands to decolonise the curriculum
One of the academics leading the university's inquiry is Tommy J Curry, who is the first Black philosophy professor in the university's 442-year history. The point is not to simply produce a report but to act, he said. Fewer than 1% of its staff and just over 2% of its students are Black, well below the 4% of the UK population, and despite Edinburgh's status as a global institution.
The university will set up a new race review implementation group, which will actively support the review's call for Edinburgh to establish a centre for the study of racism, colonialism and anti-Black violence. Reparations are a key part of recommendations. 'Academics argue it's not about cutting a cheque, it's about making substantive change which addresses all of the damage and violations from our past, and making sure that we repair the harms,' says Severin.
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