Cambridge University sparks row over claims Stephen Hawking 'benefited from slavery'
22 March 2025, 19:27
One of the country's most prestigious universities has sparked over claims leading intellectuals including Professor Stephen Hawking benefitted from slavery.
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Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum is hosting the Rise Up exhibition, which covers the British slave trade.
It has become embroiled in a row for claiming a number of prominent figures benefitted from this industry.
Most notably, it claims Professor Stephen Hawking - the renowned space expert who attended Cambridge himself - reaped the benefits from slavery-derived funds given to the academic institution decades before he was born.
The exhibition also claims George Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, benefitted from investments in the slave trade.
Experts have raced to pour cold water on this claims, with several insisting they are based on a misreading of history.
Now, dons have requested that Cambridge to take action over the alleged false claims, which The Telegraph reports were refused.
A group of academics wrote a letter to a signed letter to gallery director Dr Luke Syson urging him to correct the record.
It was signed by leading historians, including Robert Tombs and Lord Andrew Roberts.
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.”
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.”
A 2022 found that fellows from Cambridge colleges were linked several salve trading companies, including the East India Company and the Royal African Company.
The university also accepted donations from investors in both firms, and directly invested in another company - the South Sea Company - that was active in the slave trade, the study revealed.
The Legacies of Enslavement report said: "Such financial involvement both helped to facilitate the slave trade and brought very significant financial benefits to Cambridge."
Stephen Toope was appointed in 2019 by the university's vice-chancellor to carry out the study.
He said: "It also offers a glimpse into some of the ways in which, as a provider of education, the university played a role in promoting some of the ideas that underpinned the practice of enslavement."
