Torn, smudged, and stained with the passage of time, a county ball notice stands as testament to Cambridge’s many entanglements with the age of Atlantic slavery. The Tharp family of Jamaica’s papers contain a notice of a ball held at the Town Hall on 20 November 1833, around three months after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. The dancing commenced at half-past nine with Weippert’s Band in attendance, and both town and gown would have been excited. (The Tharps were prominent in both the county and university since John and his son Joseph had attended Trinity College as fellow-commoners and had been Justices of Peace.) George Weippart’s Band was a significant drawcard: they had recently performed for the February birthday celebrations of Prince Adolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, in St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle, with 250 distinguished guests and numerous gentlemen in attendance from Eton College. Turn the invitation over, and one is confronted with a rather different world to quadrilles, punch, and town festivities. An unknown individual had pencilled on the back a ‘list of the Tharp Estates & number of Negroes in 1817’: Covey with 451 enslaved, Goodhope with 448, Lansquinet with 400, Merrywood with 218, Pontrepant with 358, Potosi with 306, Wales with 355, Chippenham Park Pen with 133, Top Hill Pen with 67, and Windsor Pen with 214 – in total, 2,950 people were enslaved on these estates. (Due to the Slave Registry Bill of 1815, Parliament required slavers to construct an accurate record of their labourers’ names, skin colour, and whether they were African or creole.) Ink from the invitation had bled into the plantation inventory, providing a striking visual of how intrinsic enslavement had been to Cambridge social and cultural life.¹

Almost 200 years have passed since abolition, and the pressure has grown for Britons to “turn the page” and recognise their entanglements with their own nation’s slave empire. On the university’s bicentenary celebration of the abolition of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, held at St John’s College (which had memorialised Wilberforce in 1887), Cambridge engaged in a weekend of festivities that involved Professor Ruth Simmons, the President of Brown University, who had initiated an investigation into that college’s ties to enslavement in Rhode Island. Professor Simmons made a fascinating admission: ‘You know’, she commented, ‘I am very intrigued by the fact that you can hold this celebration here. Right now in the United States I don’t think it would be possible to celebrate the end of slavery on a national basis, even today’. In 2021, President Biden made Juneteenth, which commemorates the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in the state of Texas, a federal holiday, but Britons continue to find it difficult to discuss enslavement. Abolitionism remains a powerful nationalistic rallying-cry for Britons who are, with some justification, proud that their ancestors were the second European nation to abolish the slave trade after Denmark in 1803 (the Danish no longer believing it economically expedient to defend that coercive trade). Cambridge has taken centre stage in that larger national narrative because it educated Clarkson and Wilberforce; still, public and historical discussions of that institution’s many interconnections with enslavement and abolition are concentrated on the lives of two men. A more complicated and accurate recounting of Cambridge and, by extension, Britain’s, imperial past would recognise the varieties of connections that many Britons had to enslavement and empire, rather than focus on the few who left vast record collections or the most prominent abolitionists whose ideas and ideals obviously inspire much more sympathy in modern times.²

The antidote to such monochrome histories or national memories is a consideration of Britain’s involvement in and opposition to enslavement, particularly in spaces where African slavery was thought not to reach. These historical efforts in Britain are flourishing, and attention has been paid to the interconnections between Britain’s major cities and industrial centers – whether Bristol, London, Liverpool, and Manchester – that depended upon the goods that were grown and produced by enslaved labourers to function. Yet that discussion remains, with some notable exceptions, focused on major metropolitan centres and port cities where those linkages are more self-evident than in rural spaces or market towns that were often established along arterial canals and rivers. The story of Cambridge, then, builds upon work on the history and legacies of enslavement and empire in provincial England, Scotland, and Wales (not to mention the interior of continental Europe). More local and regional histories could, in turn, provide insights into the global pervasiveness of slave-begotten wealth and, therefore, the preconditions for insurgent resistance to these oppressive systems. Britain’s prominent position as a slave empire and its abolitionism are, in the public mind at least, presented as opposites when, in fact, antislavery activists acknowledged Britain’s longstanding debt to enslavement and the prominence of wealth that was earned from colonial activities. One Cambridge man, as we have seen, agreed with other antislavery activists that England had become “enslaved” to its colonies. Historians have stressed that opposition to enslavement was grounded in concerns for the empire following the American Revolution, and abolition, it appears, was also forged through more local and regional contests around the nature and origins of wealth in Britain.

A full accounting of Britain’s participation in and connections to Atlantic enslavement requires an investigation, too, of the involvement of institutional actors, including universities, in the processes of empire-building. Institutions and institutional actors received donations and proactively promulgated and defended systems of coerced labour, colonisation, and enslavement. Institutional studies, whether universities, museums, charities, or other cultural organisations, have focused on significant donors. That emphasis makes a great deal of sense; nevertheless, that focus is incomplete as Cambridge and other academic institutions highlight the more subtle social, intellectual, and cultural connections and partnerships that were (and remain) the lifeblood of colonial activities. The narrative here ends in the nineteenth century, with emancipation in North America and the Caribbean, yet the multitude of political, intellectual, and economic connections between middling and elite Britons and coerced labour systems provides a potential model for histories that examine both enslavement and the post-emancipation world in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If institutions and nations, particularly former empires, are reticent to examine their past relationships to slavery, then the same is true of the era after emancipation, which saw renewed connections between Britons and the plantation economy in the Caribbean, East Africa, and the Pacific. To address that complicated past, historians and the public must again examine the involvement of institutions in defending, propagating, and opposing systems of coerced labour, racism, and inequality.³

Universities have an important contribution to make in that discussion of systemic racism, coerced labour, and enslavement. As spaces where sometimes-disparate actors from throughout the nation and empire interacted and mediated, universities were combustible melting pots for individuals from multiple social, political, and economic backgrounds. These institutions, therefore, reflected and resisted the currents in wider British society, providing a focal lens on the interconnections between Britain and its empire. The history of the university undermines artificial historiographical boundaries between “direct” and “indirect” connections to enslavement. Contemporaries would have recognised no explicit division between the women and men who invested in and propagated the Atlantic slave economy, and metropolitan Britons who bought and sold goods that enslaved Africans had grown, picked, trucked, bartered, and made for European production and consumption. If such distinctions are removed, then one’s vision is turned to the vibrant spectrum of experiences and interactions that many Britons and Europeans had to the slave system, from exchange alley to dining rooms to museum collections to court rooms to coffeehouse debates to political groups. Historians have reconceptualised the British Empire as a slave imperium, that is an empire that was predicated on the profits from enslavement and then used civilising language and antislavery action as spearheads to inspire further imperial conquests in West Africa. This book has built upon that political economic viewpoint with a renewed emphasis on the social, cultural, and intellectual relations that Britons had to the slaving enterprise. That holistic perspective is necessary to form a more complete picture of the history and legacies of a global empire that shaped, and continues to shape, the modern world and the role of Britons, whether great or small, in making and unmaking that world.