The Final Report has been published. It has seriously irritated the Daily Telegraph, which alone is promising.
The research looked into the ways in which the University may have been involved financially and otherwise in the slave trade or other historical forms of coerced labour connected to colonialism, and the University’s contribution to knowledge that may have supported the validation and dissemination of racialised and racist social structures and beliefs. Given the University of Cambridge’s role as an educational institution, this latter point is important and often overlooked.
Here are some extracts from the report.
Engagement in ownership of or trade in enslaved people
While we have not seen any evidence that Cambridge institutions directly owned any plantations that exploited enslaved people, individuals closely associated with Cambridge and its Colleges did own plantations and were deeply involved in colonisation and in establishing the institutions of slavery from its inception.
For example, leaders of the Virginia Company that was established by James I in 1606 to colonise the east coast of North America were educated at St John’s College, Cambridge. Enslaved African persons were taken to the Virginia colony from 1619 and to the colony of Bermuda from 1630. The minister John Cotton, a former Emmanuel Fellow, helped to draft the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties, which legalised indigenous and African slavery in New England.
All three of the Cambridge graduates who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 – Thomas Nelson, Jr. of Virginia, and Arthur Middleton and Thomas Lynch of South Carolina – were enslavers. The family of Arthur Middleton of Trinity Hall owned more than a dozen Carolina plantations and over 3,500 enslaved persons over many generations. For New World enslavers, an education at Cambridge was a powerful symbol of their social status and a means to forge connections on both sides of the Atlantic.
Direct investment in the Atlantic slave trade and beyond
Cambridge’s most significant and direct financial involvement in Atlantic slavery centred on its investments in the South Sea Company. Cambridge Colleges directly purchased South Sea Company shares and annuities during the years of the company’s major participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge Colleges also received bequests from donors who were major investors in colonial companies such as the Royal African Company, the South Sea Company, and the East India Company.
Such financial involvement both helped to facilitate the slave trade and brought very significant financial benefits to Cambridge.
Long-term benefits derived from the ownership of or trade in enslaved people
Most prominent is the donation that supported the foundation of the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1816. Lord Fitzwilliam’s South Sea assets had come to him from his grandfather, Matthew Decker, a governor of the South Sea Company at its inception, a director of both the Royal African Company and also of the East India Company. There were many smaller gifts, in aggregate representing considerable sums.
Tobias Rustat’s donations, which include significant funding for the University Library, may not have derived directly from the profits of the slave trade, but he was a leading figure as a director of the Royal African Company: as such he played an important institutional role in promoting and sustaining the slave trade.
Role in abolitionist and anti-abolitionist movements
Cambridge has often celebrated its association with the struggle for abolition since individuals such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce were educated and developed their campaigns here. However, pro-slavery ideas are equally to be found in Cambridge’s history too. Amongst those defending slavery and racism was Thomas Thompson of Christ’s College who, in 1772, argued that slavery ‘rescued’ Africans from the oppression of their homelands. This precipitated responses from those who became leading Cambridge abolitionists. Those who stood in favour of slavery were equally active and committed, with Stephen Fuller, a former Fellow of Trinity College and Jamaica’s agent in Britain for 30 years, from 1764 to 1794, perhaps the most prominent.
Role in intellectual work underpinning of racism
Throughout the period under discussion individuals at Cambridge were writing about race, and presenting ideas that were used to justify the enslavement. In the 1670s Dr Thomas Townes, the son of a Barbadian enslaver and a Christ’s alumnus ascribed differences between white and Black persons to biology rather than to environmental factors. His ‘scientific’ work, drawn to the attention of the Royal Society by Martin Lister, one-time Fellow of St John’s College, marks the start of a long line of Cambridge thought that was used to justify racism and slavery.
Even after the demise of slavery, racist discourses continued to be developed in Cambridge. And in the 20th century this was connected, for instance, to a rigid conception of race within eugenics.

This raises the question of reparative justice. If such institutional and intellectual actions are to be meaningful, they must be developed through dialogue with those communities that continue to be disadvantaged by the legacies of enslavement today.

A complete version of the research undertaken will be published in an open access, peer reviewed academic monograph in 2023.
The full report can be read here..
It is well worth reading.