Historian quits Cambridge over slavery claim

LONDON: A British royal historian who said slavery was not genocide has quit his honourary position at Cambridge University and been dropped by his published HarperCollins.

The comments from Professor David Starkey came during a period of soul searching in Britain over its colonial past.

The Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum after the death of George Floyd in US police custody in May saw the statue of a major slave trader dumped in an English harbour as protests hit cities across the UK.

Starkey is an expert on Britain´s Tudor period -- a time in the 1500s when the slave trade was growing as European colonies across the Caribbean and the Americas expanded.