If ‘wokeness’ is over, can someone please tell the Fitzwilliam Museum?

Optimists believe that the tide of ‘wokeness’ is now ebbing. If so, the message has not yet reached Cambridge, whose wonderful university museum has its classical façade covered in sententious phrases in neon, and which has recently opened a new exhibition in agit-prop style: Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition. Such activism is fully in step with the Museums Association, the curators’ club that instructs its members to turn their institutions into activist cells.

If all this makes its founding benefactor Viscount Fitzwilliam turn in his grave, all the better: he is stigmatised as a profiteer from the slave trade, even before one reaches the cloakroom. The same accusation was made in the museum’s earlier exercise, Black Atlantic, which Rise Up emulates and in places simply reproduces. The museum he splendidly endowed now condemns him for owning investments in the South Sea Company, although that organisation had ceased involvement in human trafficking years before Fitzwilliam was born. The exhibition programme denounces him for donating South Sea annuities to build the museum, blithely unaware that these annuities had no connection whatever with the slave trade.

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But accuracy, balance, complexity, context, even basic coherence are of small account compared with the need to teach a grim lesson. In brief, that slavery was terrible; that the British were largely to blame; that when they eventually repented and abolished slavery, it was because it was ceasing to be profitable, so they replaced it with alternative forms of exploitation; that, in any case, abolition was primarily due to resistance by the slaves themselves, especially women; and finally, that not much has changed today (by which they are not alluding to modern forms of servitude in the Arab world or China, but to supposed ‘intergenerational and present-day harms’ caused by the legacy of slavery in Britain).