Stephen Hawking, Slave Trader | Power Line

This story is so dumb it makes my head hurt: “Cambridge causes bitter row by linking Stephen Hawking to slavery.”

Cambridge University has become embroiled in a row over claims that scientists including the late Professor Stephen Hawking benefited from slavery.

The university’s Fitzwilliam Museum is holding an exhibition titled Rise Up, which covers abolition movements, rebellions and modern-day “racist injustices”.
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A catalogue that accompanies the exhibition also states that Hawking and others benefited from slavery-derived funds given to Cambridge two centuries before the physicist was born.

Nowhere but at a university will you encounter such stupidity. What, exactly, are they talking about?

Hawking, Darwin, physicist Arthur Eddington, and “father of the computer” Charles Babbage held Lucasian and Plumian professorships respectively.

The accompanying book for the exhibition states that funding for these positions was derived in part from the gift in 1768 of £3,500 from a mathematician and university vice-chancellor named Robert Smith.

This was from stock bound up in “South Sea Annuities”, stock the Fitzwilliam has claimed was linked to investments in the slave trade.

Which, in any event, likely isn’t true:

The claims have been disputed by leading historians, including Lord Roberts of Belgravia, Sir Noel Malcolm and Cambridge professors David Abulafia, Lawrence Goldman and Robert Tombs.

They argue that their own research has revealed South Sea Annuities to be unrelated to investments in the slave trade.

Whatever. If you go back a ways–usually, not very far; China, for example, officially abolished slavery in 1910–every society on Earth has engaged in slavery and slave trading. My Viking ancestors, for instance, raided England and Ireland for slaves which they mostly used themselves. Their real slave trading took place to the East, where there were two distinct trade routes down the Volga and the Dnieper to Constantinople and other points South. The Vikings either captured or purchased large numbers of Slavs, whom they then sold, usually to satisfy the demand from Islamic areas in the Near East, North Africa and Spain.

Large stashes of Islamic coins have been unearthed in Scandinavia, and the slave trade probably enriched what are now the Scandinavian countries more than anything else in the 11th century. Profits from the slave trade (along with other forms of plunder) facilitated the transformation of Scandinavia from a primitive backwater into an integrated and prosperous part of Western Europe. No doubt that region’s current prosperity can be traced, to some degree, to one of history’s largest slave trading operations.

So what? The only sane response is, get over it. Only benighted institutions like universities strive to perpetuate grievances over this sad but universal aspect of human history.