Cambridge University has become embroiled in a row over claims that scientists including the late Professor Stephen Hawking benefited from slavery. The Telegraph has more.
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 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 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 Roberts of Belgravia, 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 Syson, whose foreword to the exhibition book sets out a commitment to tackle “unaltered power structures”, has refused their request.
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