29-03-2025
Cambridge museum offers reflection room for ‘triggering' slavery exhibit
Cambridge's leading museum has provided a reflection room for visitors 'triggered' by an exhibition about the slave trade.
The university's Fitzwilliam Museum has launched a flagship exhibition titled Rise Up Resistance, Revolution, Abolition, which explores the fight to end transatlantic slavery.
The show's accompanying book has caused an academic row at Cambridge over claims that Prof Stephen Hawking benefited financially from slavery.
In addition to a content warning on entry to the exhibition, curators have provided a room for those who 'may feel overwhelmed or triggered by this subject matter'.
The Fitzwilliam will also host events designed to facilitate dialogue and centre on key themes in the exhibition.
The first of these will cover issues including the 'transmission of cultures by people of the African diaspora in response to empire, colonialism and the slave trade'.
The room in the Fitzwilliam provides pamphlets to guide visitors to 'wellbeing' material and other resources.
These include the websites of mental health charities, including specialists with the Black African and Asian Therapists Network, and curriculum material covering black history. The guide also directs visitors to citizens' advice.
The large room is furnished with tables and soft chairs and filled with books covering issues of race, including volumes by TV historian David Olusoga.
Also available is Richard Dyer's set of essays, White, which looks at the 'representation of whiteness by whites in Western visual culture'.
The Fitzwilliam website states that the exhibition is suitable for children and 'for everyone' because 'all live with the consequences of transatlantic slavery, and we cannot understand today's world or the legacies of structural racism and inequalities without knowledge of it'.
It covers everything from abolition movements to modern-day racist injustices and has an accompanying book-length catalogue.
A central claim in the catalogue is that 'slave trade financial instruments shaped the intellectual life of the university by supporting the country's most renowned mathematicians and scientists'.
This states that men including Hawking, Charles Darwin's scientist son George, and physicist Arthur Eddington benefited financially from the slave trade.
It says that their professorships were paid for through an initial request 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'.
However, the research has been disputed by leading historians, including Lord Andrew Roberts, Sir Noel Malcolm, and Cambridge professors David Abulafia, Lawrence Goldman, and Robert Tombs.
Prof Tombs criticised the work of Cambridge to attach historic guilt, saying that '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.'
The Rise Up exhibition was launched in February to document the history of black and white abolitionists, particularly those linked to Cambridge.
It offers an overview of life on plantations and the move toward abolition and states that some African merchants participated in the slave trade.
The book created for the exhibition contains a number of academic contributions on the slave trade and opens with a statement that the 'fight for true equality, justice and repair continues'.
The Fitzwilliam said the research was correct and important.
A spokesman said: 'The Rise Up reflection space gives the opportunity for visitors to explore, create, read, learn and reflect after viewing the exhibition.'
