The history of racist science in British universities | Universities

I read with interest the two pieces on the University of Edinburgh’s human cranium collection and its use in theories of biological determinism and racial superiority, beginning in the 18th century (‘Taken without consent’: The complex history of Edinburgh’s skull room, 29 July)(Edinburgh University’s ‘skull room’ highlights its complicated history with racist science, 28 July) and (‘It’s shockingly bad science’: Phrenology, IQ tests and their far‑right revival, 29 July).

Stephen Jay Gould’s tour de force The Mismeasure of Man (1981) thoroughly explored the history of craniology (skull measurement) and its misuse in promulgating race-based theories of human intelligence. Gould revised and expanded his book in 1996 in part to refute the arguments supporting race-based theories of human intelligence put forward in The Bell Curve, the 1994 bestseller that is mentioned in one of your articles.

Gould focused on the work of one Edinburgh alumnus, Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia physician and natural scientist who had amassed more than 1,000 human skulls, which became the source of “data” for his scientific racism as promoted in American institutions of higher education at the time.
Prof Catherine Hennessy
Crieff, Perth and Kinross

The University of Edinburgh’s embracing racist theories and practices was not, of course, an unusual occurrence. When I joined the geography department of Newcastle University in 1968, the departmental library had a long shelf of bound annual volumes of Eugenics Review. Libraries take journals to support the research of staff who subsequently list articles from the journals on reading lists for students. I know of no one, staff or student, using this academic resource in 1968. My point is that a very simple way to explore the embrace of race theories in British universities is to investigate past subscriptions to journals such as Eugenics Review.
Peter Taylor
Tynemouth, Tyne and Wear

The novel that remains really worth reading for a deeply emotive and human understanding of the mechanics and processes of the slave trade is Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, which deserves to be seen in the same small league as Moby-Dick. Though its British hub is Liverpool, it includes Scottish deckhands among its characters, as well as a meeting near the African coast between the slave ship at its centre with a rival slaver captained by a Scotsman, Macdonald. Accounts of ideological superstructure, such as those encouraged by Edinburgh University, provide a surface veneer of the true horror that only great fiction truly plumbs, and in this respect the Unsworth novel is incomparable.
Rukun Advani
Ranikhet, India

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