Cambridge to study how it profited from Atlantic slavery

The University of Cambridge said on Tuesday it would conduct a two-year academic study of how it benefited from or validated the Atlantic slave trade and other forms of coerced labor during the colonial era.

The study will explore the financial gain Cambridge might have accrued from the slave trade and also investigate the extent to which scholarship might have reinforced race-based thinking between the 18th and early 20th Century.

Estimates vary widely, but somewhere between 10 million and 28 million Africans are believed to have been shipped across the Atlantic between the 15th and 19th centuries. Many died on the way.

Those who survived endured a life of subjugation on sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations. Britain abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807 although the full abolition of slavery did not follow for another generation.

Martin Millett, the chairman of the eight-member advisory group overseeing the Cambridge study, said it was unclear what the investigation might turn up but that it was reasonable to assume that Cambridge had benefited from the slave trade.

“It is reasonable to assume that, like many large British institutions during the colonial era, the University will have benefited directly or indirectly from, and contributed to, the practices of the time,” said Millett, a professor of archaeology.

“The benefits may have been financial or through other gifts. But the panel is just as interested in the way scholars at the University helped shape public and political opinion, supporting, reinforcing and sometimes contesting racial attitudes which are repugnant in the 21st Century.”

The inquiry will be conducted by two full-time post-doctoral researchers based in the Centre of African Studies. The research will examine specific gifts, bequests and historical connections with the slave trade.

It is unclear what action Cambridge will take if it does find that it benefited from slavery or validated it.