King's College London

Tracing the history of King’s in all its complexity.

The history of King’s College London is multi-layered. Since its inception in 1828, King’s has been at the centre of networks of political, social, and economic power. These connections now support King’s mission as an inclusive civic institution, acting for the service of society, but King’s history as an institution at the heart of worldwide imperial systems of power that inscribed racial, economic, and social hierarchies is an uncomfortable one, creating a challenging legacy, that cannot be ignored.

The King’s Past project is an initiative that seeks to investigate and publicise this past in new ways. Through detailed historical investigation of thirteen key moments integral to the King’s story, this project seeks to reveal the contradictions in an institution that has benefited from the exploitation of enslaved people and from colonial oppression and yet has also offered a route for people from marginalised populations to access opportunity and power. An institution that has transformed and sometimes undermined hierarchies at the same time as reinforcing them. Through detailed scholarly research, King’s Past will provide broader and deeper understandings of this complex history that will ask new questions of King’s today and in the future.

Researchers will explore the financial and political foundations of the institutions that have come together to form the present-day King’s College London. They will move beyond a focus purely on empire and slavery funding to map networks between all kinds of donors and sponsors throughout the last 200 years. This will reveal not only the diverse sources of funding that have benefited the institution but crucially the range of motivations that underpinned the decision to donate. The research will ask what did donors hope to achieve and what influence did money bring? Donations built and equipped the college buildings and environment that students move through today. The project will ask how as an institution can we accommodate this built legacy?

But King’s is more than its buildings – it was and is its staff and students. King’s relationships with the armed forces and other key agents of Britain’s expanding empire drove the college’s early development and institutional identity and continue to be important today, particularly in this period of rising geopolitical tension. King’s alumni peopled the civil service and built the infrastructure that reinforced British power abroad. As clerics and missionaries, they not only influenced the development of Anglican doctrine within Britain but informed religious practice and imperial power across the Anglo-world. Like those of many other institutions, King’s scholars developed theories of racial identity and difference that at once positioned the British as indelibly superior to those they governed, while at the same time promising paternalistic tutelage towards national self-realisation. Yet King’s has also educated many colonial-born students who played leading roles in opposing colonialism and/or racism within Britain and the empire, and research undertaken at King’s has transformed scientific and medical knowledge across the globe.

In understanding how these varied contributions have shaped Britain’s imperial history, the King’s Past project will help us to gain a more nuanced appreciation of the ways in which these long associations have shaped and continued to shape the college and society today. King’s has always been a place of difference and debate. The university’s nineteenth-century Ladies Department nurtured many of the first women in Britain to hold academic posts, yet gendered inequalities in institutional cultures and practices persist. As the empire came to an end, the university was at the forefront of anti-colonialism and anti-apartheid thought and had opened its doors to a more socially, economically, and racially diverse student body but how in one of the world’s most expensive cities can the King’s of today ensure students still have the educational access that can make a difference to their futures?

Answering these questions will help direct the university’s plans in the future as it grapples with its ethical responsibilities to train students, fund research and shape knowledge production.