By GB News (World News) | Created at 2025-03-23 09:36:04 | Updated at 2025-03-25 03:55:01
1 day ago
The University of Cambridge has sparked fury over its claims that Professor Stephen Hawking’s research benefited from the slave trade.
In an exhibition called Rise Up, the institution’s Fitzwilliam Museum provides information spanning across abolition movements, rebellions as well as today’s “racist injustices”.
Other accusations have been thrown at George Darwin - the son of the famous naturalist - for being backed by investments in slavery.
A catalogue alongside the exhibition reads that Hawking and other leading academics benefited from slavery-derived funds given to the university more than 200 years before he was even born.
Other accusations have been thrown at George Darwin - the son of the famous naturalist - for being backed by investments in slavery
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“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.”
Hawking and Darwin both held Lucasian and Plumian professorships - funding for which came from a gift from mathematician Robert Smith of around £3,500 in 1768.
The finances came from stocks in “South Sea Annuities” which the exhibition has said was connected to slave trade investments.
The exhibition book reads that “facts continue to matter” when speaking about slavery, but “anger, frustration and sadness - historic and present - are also important considerations”.
The museum’s exhibition provides documentation of black and white abolitionists connected to Cambridge, including histories of plantations.
At the start of the exhibition, a trigger warning is provided for “violence against black people”.
The University of Cambridge has sparked fury over its claims that Professor Stephen Hawking’s research had benefited from the slave trade
GETTY
A spokesman for the 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.”
