David Hume's ties to Grenadian plantations revealed

As debate over Henry Dundas’s statue has grown in recent weeks, the commemoration of David Hume in Edinburgh has fallen under suspicion.

David Hume Tower is one of the most prominent buildings on the University of Edinburgh's campus.

A former David Hume fellow at the University of Edinburgh has urged the institution to “consider carefully” whether it can continue to name a building after the 18th century philosopher, given Hume acted as an intermediary for brokers purchasing slave plantations in the Caribbean.

Dr Felix Waldmann, a lecturer and fellow in history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, said it was inevitable that the focus on the involvement by prominent Scots in slavery meant suspicion would fall on commemorations of a man regarded as a titan of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Dr Waldmann, a Hume fellow at Edinburgh in 2016, said that while there was no doubt as to Hume’s brilliance as a philosopher and someone who shaped Scottish culture, he was a man who only endorsed slavery, but justified it.

Dr Waldmann, an academic specialist on Hume, discovered a previously unknown letter he wrote in 1766, in which he encouraged his patron, Lord Hertford, to buy a plantation in Grenada.

Hume even went so far as to write to Victor-Thérèse Charpentier, the French governor of Martinique, on behalf of his friend, John Stewart, a wine merchant involved in the purchase of several plantations.

Hume also lent Stewart £400 in early 1766. Dr Waldmann believes it is “not inconceivable” that they money was invested in the slave trade. The indentures of one plantation owned by Stewart, held in the National Library of Jamaica, show that by November 1767, it held 42 slaves.

Hume’s correspondence, uncovered at Princeton University Library, remains the only surviving evidence of his involvement in the slave trade. Although it was published by Dr Waldmann in a 2014 collection of Hume’s letters, it remains little known outside of select academic circles.

Now, with a petition to rename the university’s David Hume Tower attracting more than 1,750 signatures and the backing of Edinburgh University Students’ Association, Dr Waldmann said the university and city council face a reckoning.

He said that while the future of the David Hume Tower was “not my decision to make,” he would expect the university to “ask whether Hume’s views and conduct - considered comprehensively - are consistent with their values.”

He said: “There can be no doubt that Hume was a genius, a luminary among the university’s alumni. But there is a difference between venerating Hume and remembering him.”

Debate has also centred around the removal or reinterpretation of Alexander Stoddart’s statue of Hume in the city’s Royal Mile, which Dr Waldmann dismissed as a “highly misleading depiction of Hume with virtually no artistic merit.”

He added: “On that basis alone, I’d prefer to see it removed. If it were a better statue - one which actually resembled Hume, for example - my judgement of its aesthetic merits would be different.”

Dr Waldmann details his research into Hume’s ties with the slave trade in an article in today’s Scotsman. In it, he writes: “His views served without doubt to fortify the institution of racialized slavery in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

“More importantly, the fact that he was involved in the slave trade is now a matter of record.”

Dr Waldmann said it was “absurd” to suggest that Hume did not appreciate that what he was doing was wrong.

“He was not deferential to social convention and he was aware of the widespread denunciation of slavery by his contemporaries,” he explained.

“Anyone possessed of Hume’s talents would recognise the obvious enormity of slavery. But Hume endorsed slavery; indeed, he justified it.”

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