Cambridge University is embarrassingly stupid if it thinks exploring the Antarctic was ‘colonialism'

Telegraph

28-04-2025

Right now, somewhere in Antarctica, a waddle of politically active penguins is drawing up a list of demands for Keir Starmer.
Two-hundred-odd years after an injustice that's still too painful for many to talk about, these flightless marine birds have decided to seek reparations. They want justice and redress for the historical harm colonialists caused them when they effectively invaded the continent. They want financial compensation, apologies and restitutions for the exploitation their tuxedo-wearing forefathers endured. Also, a dozen large barrels of krill, please.
The penguins had no idea they were victims of colonialism until this month. None of us did. But thanks to a new display at the University of Cambridge's Polar Museum, our eyes have been opened to a lesser-known act of historical abuse. And by 'lesser-known', I mean grievously, historically inaccurate.
As part of the latest effort by the university's museums to deal with subjects related to empire (and if you're not afraid of wild and illogical tangents, almost every subject can be), and a project aimed at 'confronting Cambridge's colonial story', new signs have been put up informing visitors that expeditions to the South Pole were 'in the colonial mould'. One sign for an Antarctic display at the museum reads: 'The colonised Antarctic?' And every journalist will have laughed at the question mark – famously the hallmark of a completely unsubstantiated story. (So the next time you see a headline like: 'Is your bubble bath killing you?' rest assured, it is not.)
The Polar Museum, however, seems to be completely po-faced, continuing its blurb with: 'at the beginning of the 20th century little was known about Antarctica. This set the stage for a number of famous expeditions to reach the South Pole. At the same time, these expeditions were in the colonial mould – claiming land, mapping, prospecting for resources, even sending stamps as a sign of ownership.'
Even when we are not the villains, certain institutions are hell-bent on portraying us as villainous. And that curators have added the line, 'the only difference was that there was not an indigenous population in Antarctica', makes this desperate attempt to drag colonisation into things still more farcical. By 'the only difference', what they mean is: 'the only thing that makes the above statement completely invalid and nonsensical… is the fact that the continent had no inhabitants aside from penguins to conquer or exploit at the time.'
Definitions are no longer definitive, as we know. Today, even after a judge has ruled a woman a woman and a fact a fact, they are basically considered elastic, open to interpretation – to a person's 'lived' (or indeed un-lived) 'experience'. And whereas most dictionary definitions of colonialism would be variants on 'the policy or practice of acquiring control of another country and its people and exploiting both economically,' the Cambridge Dictionary broadens it out to: 'the belief in and support for the system of one country controlling another.'
Call me naïve, but I was sort of hoping that the era of wilful biological and historical inaccuracies was nearing an end. As useful as it obviously is for woke institutions to be able to twist words and expressions to fit their agendas, there is the problem of it being misleading – of young people leaving the Polar Museum and telling all their friends down the pub: ' Did you know that we colonised Antarctica? '
This is particularly problematic in the case of museums, given that they are essentially churches of fact. The one thing they are supposed to worship is historical truth.
Beyond that, I can't help but wonder whether Cambridge is showing itself as a little outdated here – embarrassingly behind the curve in the way that only universities can be? Because after reaching peak worthiness in the early 2020s – when museums came close to selling hair shirts beside the tea towels in their gift shops – there has now been a noticeable pushback against that self-flagellatory culture, with the new director of the British Museum, Dr Nicholas Cullinan, setting the tone.
Asked, last year, whether he was keen on the 'sort of hyper-politically correct labelling of exhibits we've seen elsewhere, notably at Tate Britain', Dr Cullinan was unequivocal. 'No. What I mean is making sure our scholarship is up to date, not conforming to a particular sort of political agenda.' I think most would agree that for a museum, that should be the focus.