Slavery

Topic description and stories

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance

21 Sep 2023

A major new exhibition explores Cambridge's role in slavery, the people it affected and their resistance to it.

Legacies of enslavement: report and response

22 Sep 2022

Research indicates that Cambridge had connections to the Atlantic slave trade. The University is creating a Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Fund...

Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry delivers initial report

15 May 2020

The University of Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry delivered its first report this week outlining its plan of action and initial...

Jasper Ware Emancipation Badge carrying the words 'Am I not a man and a brother?'

Cambridge University launches inquiry into historical links to slavery

30 Apr 2019

The University of Cambridge will conduct an in-depth academic study into ways in which it contributed to, benefited from or challenged the Atlantic...

Image from Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles, Credit: Mélanie Lamotte

Before race mattered: what archives tell us about early encounters in the French colonies

16 Nov 2016

As Europe expanded its overseas colonies, fixed ideas of racial differences took hold. Historian Dr Mélanie Lamotte, whose forebears include a slave...

Happy trafficking: how criminals profit from an iniquitous trade

04 Dec 2015

The term ‘happy trafficking’ appears deeply contradictory, but new research reveals a shocking dimension of an escalating trade. George...

Christopher Evans of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit shows local schoolchildren around the excavation site.

Earliest church in the tropics unearthed in former heart of Atlantic slave trade

06 Nov 2015

Remains of a church on Cabo Verde’s Santiago Island, off the West African coast, dates back to late 15th century – when Portugal first colonised the...

Detail from a list of the names, ages and prices of slaves bought by British plantation owner William Philip Perrin from John Broomfield in 1796.

Price of Britain’s Slave Trade revealed

13 Aug 2015

Letters and papers revealing in detail how human beings were priced for sale during the 18th century Transatlantic Slave Trade have been made...

Co. E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, Ft. Lincoln, defences of Washington.”

Forgotten poems recovered by American Civil War research

04 Oct 2013

American Civil War poetry that sheds light on a neglected chapter of the era’s literary history has been recovered and made freely available online...

Darwinian ideas explored on the big screen

21 Oct 2012

Charles Darwin’s relevance to today’s society will be explored in a four film series at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse from Monday.

The remarkable story of Alexander Crummell

20 Oct 2011

A talk at the University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas this evening will focus on the extraordinary life of Alexander Crummell – the son of a...

History’s bitter pill

27 May 2010

The British Empire presided over innumerable atrocities and acts of appalling cruelty, but what use is acknowledging those injustices when they are...