Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores founder’s slavery links

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Its founder’s grandfather was a merchant and financier who helped establish the South Sea Company, which had the rights to traffic African people to the Spanish colonial Americas. Photograph: Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy

An exhibition by the Fitzwilliam Museum will explore Cambridge’s connections to enslavement and exploitation for the first time, both in the university and the city.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance features works made in west Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and interrogates the ways Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the University of Cambridge’s collections.