Cambridge causes bitter row by linking scientists such as Stephen Hawking to slavery

Yahoo

22-03-2025

Cambridge University has become embroiled in a row over claims that scientists including the late Professor Stephen Hawking benefited from slavery.
The university's Fitzwilliam Museum is holding an exhibition titled Rise Up, which covers abolition movements, rebellions and modern-day 'racist injustices'.
It claims that figures including George Darwin, Charles Darwin's son, were supported by investments in the slave trade.
A catalogue that accompanies the exhibition also states that Hawking and others benefited from slavery-derived funds given to Cambridge two centuries before the physicist was born.
But Cambridge professors and leading historians have hit back at the claims.
Dons have insisted that the claims are based on a misreading of history and have asked Cambridge to correct the record – a request which the university has refused.
The foreword to the exhibition book states that while 'facts continue to matter' in discussions of slavery, 'anger, frustration and sadness – historic and present – are also important considerations'.
A central claim in the book is that 'slave trade financial instruments shaped the intellectual life of the university by supporting the country's most renowned mathematicians and scientists'.
The museum itself welcomes visitors with a sign setting out its own links to the slave trade.
Hawking, Darwin, physicist Arthur Eddington, and 'father of the computer' Charles Babbage held Lucasian and Plumian professorships respectively.
The accompanying book for the exhibition in Cambridge states that funding for these positions was derived in part from the gift in 1768 of £3,500 from a mathematician and university vice-chancellor named Robert Smith.
This was from stock bound up in 'South Sea Annuities', stock the Fitzwilliam has claimed was linked to investments in the slave trade.
Leading British men of science are therefore linked to what the book exhibition terms 'dark finance', the exhibition material claims.
The claims have been disputed by leading historians, including Lord Andrew Roberts, Sir Noel Malcolm and Cambridge professors David Abulafia, Lawrence Goldman and Robert Tombs.
They argue that their own research has revealed South Sea Annuities to be unrelated to investments in the slave trade.
The group of academics have submitted a signed letter of protest to the director of the Fitzwilliam, Dr Luke Syson, urging him to take action over the alleged falsehoods.
Dr Syon, whose foreword to the exhibition book sets out a commitment to tackle 'unaltered power structures', has refused their request.
Prof Tombs said: 'We are sadly accustomed to seeing our great institutions damaging themselves and the country that supports them.
'This case is doubly dispiriting as a great university institution shows itself resistant to argument and indifferent to evidence.
'There seems to be this unbelievable determination to tarnish the reputation of people we are proud of, even when they are completely innocent, like Stephen Hawking.'
The Rise Up exhibition was launched in February to document the history of black and white abolitionists, particularly those linked to Cambridge.
The exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which greets visitors with a trigger warning upon entering, gives an overview of life on plantations and the move toward abolition.
It states that 'some' African merchants participated in the slave trade.
The book created for the exhibition, which also begins with a trigger warning about 'violence against black people', contains a number of academic contributions on the slave trade.
The volume opens with a statement that the 'fight for true equality, justice and repair continues'.
A spokesman for Fitzwilliam Museum said: 'We believe that it is profoundly damaging to ignore or minimise the impact of the Atlantic slave trade as a source of wealth for both individuals and institutions in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, and thereafter.
'The academic research on this important matter presented in the Rise Up catalogue is factually correct.
'But history should always be a place of debate and we therefore welcome thoughtful discussion and encourage multiple perspectives, which we see as essential to deepening understanding of these important and often challenging histories in all their nuance and complexity.
'Among the aims of the Rise Up exhibition and catalogue are to explore the current complexities of historically tainted investments and to illuminate the contradictions in the biographies of individuals whose lives are considered here more completely than has usually been the case.'
Under the directorship of Dr Syson, the Fitzwilliam rehung its art collection and introduced a warning suggesting that paintings of the British countryside can evoke dark 'nationalist feelings'.
Dr Syson said of the move in 2023: 'I would love to think that there's a way of telling these larger, more inclusive histories that doesn't feel as if it requires a pushback from those who try to suggest that any interest at all in [this work is] what would now be called 'woke'.'
Signage states that pictures of 'rolling English hills' can stir feelings of 'pride towards a homeland'.
The University of Cambridge was contacted for comment.
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