Like it or not, we all bear some responsibility for slavery

The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840 – an oil on canvas by Benjamin Robert Haydon. It depicts the first meeting of the World Anti-Slavery Convention at Exeter Hall in London, in June 1840. Photograph: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

“My ancestors gained nothing from slavery,” writes John Cookson (Letters, 15 March). Sadly, he is wrong. Everyone in Britain and the rest of the developed world has benefited from at least 200 years of cheap tobacco, coffee, chocolate and, above all, tea and sugar, produced by slaves or indentured labourers (or, today, low-paid workers) in conditions even worse than those his forebears experienced in Manchester and Salford in the 1840s. In addition, they were probably paid to make clothes out of raw cotton grown by slaves in the southern United States.

The direct responsibility for slavery certainly lies with the slavers and plantation owners, including the British royal family and most of the aristocracy and merchant classes who invested in the hateful trade. But the moral responsibility has to be borne much more widely and should be in our minds whenever we buy “cheap” goods today.
Prof Sir Roderick Floud
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire