“There’s often the sort of nostalgia about empire, which is not new, it turns up every decade or so.” Nico Bell-Romero was a new postdoc when he was tasked with undertaking historical research into the University’s links to slavery, under its Legacies of Enslavement inquiry. As part of this, he was given a year-long, one day a week contract to research Caius’ links to slavery – with that report concluding: “Caius alumni, fellows, and the College had significant connections to slavery and slaveholders and have profited off investments and benefactions connected to enslavement and coerced labour.”

The conclusion was, Bell-Romero remarked, “quite unexceptional” – similar links can be found in most Oxbridge colleges, and indeed at many other universities across the West. Despite this, it drew criticism from Caius dons, who labelled Bell-Romero a “woke activist” seeking to “rewrite history”.

I speak to Bell-Romero four years on from the media storm, fresh from the publication of his book The University of Cambridge in the Age of Atlantic Slavery, which documents the findings of the research he did for the inquiry. Bell-Romero’s brief was about ideas: covering the involvement of students and dons in imperial companies and plantations, and the intellectual work performed by the University to help uphold the institution of slavery. His colleague, Sabine Cadeau, covered the financial side of slavery connections.

“Caius dons labelled Bell-Romero a ‘woke activist’ seeking to ‘rewrite history’”

“What are universities about? They’re about the development of ideas,” Bell-Romero asserts. His book seeks to illustrate the depth of British connections to the Atlantic slave trade – going far beyond a focus on major financial centres with immediate ties to slave ships. He uncovered a sample of 850 students who came from families actively involved in the slave economy, his work documenting how wealthy plantation-owning families benefited from university education.

The University’s status as a centre of knowledge-production ties into the economic penetration of the slave trade in Cambridge. “People are often involved in a particular imperial company, the South Sea company, Royal African company, East Indian Company, but at the same time doing intellectual work for those organisations.”

The picture is complex: “Every college had its own little story,” he noted, with a diverse collection of characters at play in his book: from dons, to students, to “the urban and rural communities of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire.” By focusing on a provincial part of the country, Bell-Romero sought to illuminate the depth of British connections to slavery, and challenge the separation between metropole and empire that has historically dominated teaching of the topic. “British history is sort of […] we think about Britain, and then we think about its empire, but a lot of scholarship has been about trying to rethink and blur the lines between the two”.

“When these issues get raised, there are voices that have to say ‘but what about abolition?’” Bell-Romero does indeed talk about abolitionism in his book, yet is keen to point out that focusing exclusively on Cambridge’s role in ending the slave trade is rather disingenuous. “Cambridge abolitionism was far more complicated than the conventional wisdom, usually promulgated in histories, and public forums, or university-educated abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce.” An intellectually diverse institution, different voices within Cambridge had different things to say about slavery – from pro-slavery advocates like Trinity don Stephen Fuller, to moderates such as Granville Sharp, whose ‘Spanish Regulations’ sought to “soften and gradually reduce the slavery in the West Indies.”

The overall picture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Bell-Romero found, was considerable ‘conservatism’ on the issue of slavery. However, in spite of the accusations of his detractors, Bell-Romero saw little of a political agenda in his work: “I just approached it as a historical project […] I’m not an expert on 20th, 21st century multiculturalism or institutions.”

Eschewing discussion of policy responses to his work at first, after I pressed him on the subject, Bell-Romero eventually conceded: “If I was going to approach that problem, it would be from the sort of CARICOM [Caribbean Community] perspective [on reparatory justice].”

CARICOM’s ‘Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice’ emphasises dismantling knowledge hierarchies through supporting the involvement of postcolonial nations in scientific and cultural spaces, alongside economic measures like debt cancellation. Bell-Romero highlighted work being done by the University of Glasgow in “actually engaging intellectually and building intellectual connections and partnerships to the University of the West Indies.”

“You can’t escape politics, this idea of objectivity is ridiculous,” he affirms. While his own interests were principally historical, Bell-Romero understood the global political significance of the increasing prevalence of research into slavery and colonialism. Now, he has started a post at Tulane University in New Orleans, where the links to slavery are spatially closer – and African American oral histories are at the forefront.

With controversy at Caius remaining Bell-Romero’s “most direct connection or confrontation” to date, he tries “not to spend too much time on social media.” Instead, the historian’s interests remain in shedding more historical light on “the global significance of institutional racism to slavery and colonialism”.