The recent disclosures regarding the connection between industry and slavery are thought-provoking, but the story doesn’t stop there (Like the Guardian, Manchester is reckoning with its historical links to slavery, 3 April). At this time of chocolate egg consumption, we shouldn’t overlook the link between chocolate and slavery. It is estimated that between 1500 and 1900, over 10 million people were transported across the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations that were a vital ingredient in popularising the chocolate industry.
Even today, according to reports, exploitative child labour still exists on cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. As we break into our Easter eggs, we should spare a thought not only for the past but also for the present.
Tony Boobier
Bearsted, Kent
• The Cotton Capital articles were a lightbulb moment for me. I live in a house in north Wales that was described in the 1890s as a “common boarding house”. Yet this ordinary home has links with slavery, as do many of my local houses. The property was built and the land owned by the local landed gentry, who made their money through sugar plantations and the labour of enslaved people in St Kitts. The effects of slavery are all pervasive, visible not only in stately homes but in the ordinary estate workers’ housing seen in many rural areas. Thank you for highlighting how slavery has shaped my environment.
Julie Grier
Rhuddlan, Denbighshire
• I read Michael Taylor’s account of the slave trade and the Guardian’s less than heroic connection with sadness, but also gratitude that there remains in this country a newspaper that, although not perfect, is – uniquely, I think – prepared to accept that it has got some things wrong but clearly wishes to be a force for good (The limits of liberalism in the kingdom of cotton, 29 March).
It seems to me that the only ones who emerge from this dark aspect of our past with any honour are the the people of Lancashire, Cheshire and my county, Derbyshire, who voluntarily underwent the cotton famine. Are there any statues or memorials to those people, or are such things restricted by our establishment to slave owners?
Robert Hercliffe
Lee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire
• Chris Sinha (Letters, 2 April) is right to draw attention to the fact that Britain destroyed India’s world-beating textile industry in order to replace it with its own cotton mills resourced by the produce of enslaved workers.
The method they used to achieve this was frighteningly direct. According to author and former UN undersecretary general Shashi Tharoor, writing in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, they simply broke the thumbs and the looms of the handloom weavers, effectively destroying the industry and ensuring the starvation of the workers and their families.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
• I thought that I knew all about the links between the cotton trade and slavery, but I had not really accepted the implications. In the 19th century, my family owned a small candlewick manufacturing business in Stockport. Their success led directly to the family’s middle-class situation today. Now I understand the real roots of their profits, I have a dilemma. How can I engage in meaningful restitutive action?
Greg Marsden
Grimsby, Lincolnshire
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