If you know how a trick is done, if you have peered through the smoke and looked past the mirrors, if you have figured out how the illusion is accomplished, surely you can no longer be fooled by it? Surely?
The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood. Like all the best illusions it draws your eye in one direction, away from the details the illusionist does not want you to see. It is carefully designed to frame and delineate our understanding of the past by focusing our attention away from certain linkages and connections.
The illusion in question works like this: it marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance.
It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them.
This smoke-and-mirrors trick sits at the centre of British history. It draws your eye in one direction, away from the details the illusionist does not want you to see.
The trick was constructed over centuries by politicians, lobbyists and journalists who sought to create a highly romanticised version of our national story. They were assisted in this task by generations of historians who were equally determined to construct British history around the biographies of “great men” whose achievements, they believed, proved the nation’s supposed exceptionalism. The illusion is effective because we are all subconsciously schooled in it. It has long shaped the history delivered to us at school and, as we are not taught of the existence of the redacted and missing chapters, we have no reason to go in search of them. This approach to the past is so powerful that it is capable – as I recently discovered – of triggering a form of cognitive dissonance.
I had – presumptuously, it turns out – thought myself impervious to this trick because, over the years, I have given literally hundreds of lectures and talks about it. In those lectures, or in the question-and-answer sessions that follow them, I have appealed to audiences to recognise how the illusion operates.
None of that prevented a sliding-doors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian. Despite having spent years making appeals for the histories of slavery and the British empire to be recognised as fundamental parts of our national story, I completely failed to recognise the crucial and obvious connections between the founders of the Guardian and the history of slavery. Because when approached about joining the Scott Trust my mind turned – subconsciously and exclusively – to one form of British history: the history of class, 19th-century liberalism and reform, out of which the newspaper emerged. An arena of domestic British history that – from when it was first taught to me at school – was presented as having no connections to histories that took place beyond Britain’s shores. More than any other experience this failure has demonstrated to me the power of this form of historical myopia and our vulnerabilities to it.
The forgotten chapter
One possible reason why I failed to make the obvious connections relates to my family history and how it shapes my thinking. In 1819, the year the Manchester and Salford yeomanry charged their horses into the huge crowd of working people at Peterloo – the event that inspired John Edward Taylor to found the Manchester Guardian – my ancestors, on my mother’s side, were scraping a living from the fields outside the tiny town of Tranent, in the Scottish lowlands. Two decades earlier, in 1797, they had been living in Tranent when another cavalry unit, the Cinque Port Light Dragoons, had attacked another group of protesters. The people of Tranent had been protesting against the conscription of local men into the British militia during Britain’s wars against revolutionary France. The number of people killed in what became known as the Tranent massacre is uncertain. Estimates range from around 12 to 20, a death toll comparable to that at Peterloo. Some people in Scotland regard the massacre at Tranent as that nation’s equivalent to Peterloo.
This working-class history of political protest and the struggle for rights is every bit as personal to me as the history of imperial expansion that, a century after the Tranent massacre, saw my Nigerian ancestors forced into the British empire – literally at gunpoint. And it was the working people killed at Tranent and Peterloo to whom my mind rushed when approached by the Scott Trust. At that moment I fell – utterly and completely – for the exact same trick I have spent years urging others to guard against. The knowledge that the cotton that enabled John Edward Taylor and his fellow investors to found the Guardian was produced by enslaved people in the American south remained sealed away in a separate compartment, overwhelmed by an involuntary and unexamined synaptic rush.
When we do take a moment to think about the horrors of American slavery we rarely make connections to the mills of Manchester.
Knowing how a trick is done did not – it turned out – render me in the least immune to its power, I am embarrassed to say. Indeed, I didn’t recognise any of this until the summer of 2020, when Alex Graham, then the chair of the Scott Trust, asked me to help set up a research project on Taylor and the 11 Manchester merchants who founded the Guardian and their links to slavery. At that moment I instantly saw the connections my mind had, somehow, bypassed three years earlier.
The historians who were later appointed to carry out research into the finances and business dealings of the Guardian’s founders found evidence that nearly all were connected to slavery.
What perhaps partially explains the cognitive dissonance of the sort I am guilty of is that most of the original funders are connected to the most often forgotten chapter in the long history of Britain’s involvement in global slavery.
Anyone who writes about slavery, or anyone who has had the misfortune of witnessing the subject being discussed on social media, will have noticed that there is never any shortage of people who will rush to remind anyone willing to listen that Britain ended the slave trade before any other nation. The fact that this claim is demonstrably untrue never seems to dim the ardour with which it is made.
On firmer historical ground the same people are equally fond of pointing out that slavery continued in the United States for three decades after it had been abolished in the British empire. It is left to historians to muddy those waters and challenge assertions of British moral superiority by reminding us that from the arrival of the first recorded shipment of enslaved Africans to the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, right up until the American Revolution in the 1770s, American slavery was British slavery. Both profits and the taxes flowed to London, Bristol and Liverpool. Washington DC had yet to be founded.
The stridency and urgency with which such arguments are delivered is a reflection of a deep and still widespread desire for finality, a profound craving for a neat end-date under which a line can be drawn on Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Genuine though such desires may be, they clash repeatedly with historical reality. The links that tie the Guardian founders to enslaved people in South America, the United States and the Caribbean are a more accurate reflection of Britain’s long, and messy, complicity in the slave economy.
The ‘second middle passage’
Firstly, there was nothing neat about abolition, in the British empire or elsewhere. The 700,000 people manumitted from slavery in 1838 were not miraculously delivered from misery but thrust instantly into a desperate economic predicament. While the former enslavers were awarded £20m in compensation (one might call them reparations) for their loss of human “property”, those they had enslaved received nothing. Emancipation left them landless, homeless and in some cases destitute, entirely dependent upon the former enslavers, who retained their estates and tightened their grip on political power in the local legislatures of the Caribbean. With little access to land or the capital needed to become independent farmers, the formerly enslaved had no choice but to work for miserably low wages on the plantations where they had been bound and whipped.
The theory was that over an unspecified number of decades or generations, through hard work and delayed gratification, they would somehow be able to prove themselves worthy of freedom and perhaps, eventually, political rights. Even the abolitionists believed the people whose freedom they had helped win were incapable of independence or self-determination. Awkward and unpleasant historical facts like these have long been ignored by those seeking end-dates and moral closure.
Even messier than the troubling reality of emancipation is the uncomfortable history of Britain’s economic involvement in slavery for half a century after the abolition of slavery in its own empire. Throughout the 19th century, both before and after abolition in the 1830s, British banks and merchants heavily invested in the slave economies of the United States and South America. British businesses imported enormous quantities of raw material and commodities produced by the millions of enslaved people who lived in bondage beyond the borders of the British empire. At the centre of that dimly understood history was cotton and the city of Manchester. Long before abolition, the plantation owners of the British Caribbean had largely moved away from the production of cotton.
British cotton processors, the owners of the nation’s mills and factories, had begun to import ever increasing quantities of that vital raw material from the United States, where a vast cotton boom was under way, partly funded by capital that flowed to the United States from the City of London. On the eve of the American civil war the inflow of American cotton into Britain was vast, and around two and a half thousand cotton mills and factories had emerged in Lancashire, many of them in and around Manchester – a city known by the middle decades of the century as Cottonopolis. As was fully understood at the time, much of the cotton that was spun, woven, dyed, processed and traded in Manchester was produced by the almost 2 million enslaved Africans who lived, worked and suffered on cotton plantations in the southern United States.
British banks and merchants heavily invested in the slave economies of the United States and South America. American slavery was British slavery.
On a visit to Manchester in 1859 the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond, gave a lecture at the Manchester Athenaeum (today part of Manchester Art Gallery) in which she told her audience: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 8,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the 125 millions of dollars’ worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”
In 1861 the Economist published a long and detailed article that laid bare just how economically dependent Victorian Britain had become on American cotton produced by the enslaved. “From the first manipulation of the raw material to the last finish bestowed upon it, [cotton] constitutes the employment and furnishes the sustenance of the largest proportion of the population of Lancashire, north Cheshire, and Lanarkshire.” The same article went on to estimate that if the numbers of those involved in ancillary trades connected to the cotton trade, along with their dependent family members, were added to the 430,000 people directly employed in the industry it would be safe to assume “that nearer 4 than 3 million are dependent for their daily bread on this branch of our industry”. When that article was published the population of the United Kingdom, which then included the whole island of Ireland, stood at just under 29 million.
The wealth generated by the millions of Queen Victoria’s subjects who worked in the cotton trade and its subsidiary trades depended upon the constant movement of the great fleet of cargo ships that constantly crossed the Atlantic, unloading millions of bales of raw cotton each year in the ever expanding network of docks that snaked, for mile after mile, along the northern banks of the Mersey. From there the cotton was distributed to the great constellation of mills and factories around Manchester. In this way Liverpool was as complicit in the trade in American cotton as its great rival Manchester.
Back in the 18th century Liverpool had usurped both Bristol and London to become the premier British port in the Atlantic slave trade. Today visitors to Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum learn that buildings, streets and docks across the city are named after the generations of merchants and bankers who grew rich on the profits gleaned from the approximately 5,300 slave trading voyages that set sail from Liverpool’s docks. But here again those who long to draw neat lines under this history tend to presume that when that trade was abolished in 1807 “the sun of Liverpool’s prosperity had set”, as one Victorian historian put it. However, as the same author noted: “The cotton trade was to do a vast deal more for the great port of the Mersey than the trade in human flesh.” This, he explained, was because “the same wind which bore a vessel from the Mersey would waft her across the Atlantic to the rich Sea Islands, or to New Orleans, the great emporium of the Cotton States of America”.
Victorian Britain, its economy, demographics, infrastructure, culture and architecture, were all indelibly altered by the vast inflows of cheap American cotton produced by the enslaved, but so too were the economy and demographics of the United States. By the 1820s, the decade in which the Guardian was founded, the economics of the transatlantic cotton trade meant that enslaved people in the US were far more valuable in the warm, cotton-producing states of the deep south, than they were working on tobacco, sugar or rice plantations in the states in the upper south, such as Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland. The result was the emergence of an internal slave trade within the United States, a “second middle passage” as one historian has called it. Perhaps as many as a million men, women and children were internally displaced through this trade, trafficked from the upper south to the deep south from the 1820s until the civil war. They were marched overland, shipped along the coast or dispatched down the Mississippi River on giant paddle steamers, many to the slave markets of Louisiana, and from there to one of the thousands of cotton plantations. That vast, forced migration was economically motivated by the insatiable demand for cotton in Manchester and Britain more widely. Almost completely forgotten in Britain today it has, nevertheless, left behind a linguistic imprint. The victims of that second middle passage were said, at the time, to have been “sold down the river”, a phrase that remains a metaphor for betrayal and abandonment.
There is a profound craving for a neat end-date under which a line can be drawn on Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade.
Being sold down the river was the fate of the central fictional character in the most successful novel of the entire 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Published in 1852, nine years before the civil war, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was seen by many in Britain as a powerful denouncement of the cruelties of American slavery. The same British public, many of whom were genuinely moved by the abuses the book’s Black characters suffered, were people whose own economic fortunes were intimately connected to keeping Black Americans enslaved and thereby keeping them producing the cotton that stoked the economy of Manchester and other parts of the nation.
It is testimony to the depths at which the most uncomfortable parts of British history have been buried that so vast an industry, that employed so many millions of our ancestors, and that brought about such profound transformations to both Britain and the United States could have been so comprehensively erased. It is testimony also to our continuing ability to frame slavery as an American issue, rather than something Britain was profoundly complicit in, both before and after abolition, that the shared nature of this history has been denied and disavowed for so long. When we do take a moment to think about the horrors of American slavery, we rarely make connections to the mills of Manchester or the economic fortunes of Queen Victoria’s Britain.
Particularly after the summer of 2020 and the toppling of the statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in the centre of Bristol, there has been an increased awareness of and reflection on slavery and the slave trade, particularly among the young. There has been a growing recognition, as well as some grudging acknowledgment, that the cities from which the ships of Atlantic trade were launched – London, Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool – grew rich on its profits. However, later chapters in this history that enriched the merchants of Manchester, including the men who originally funded the Guardian, remain much more dimly understood.
Just as some search for a neat end-date for the story of British slavery, there is a tendency to try to limit it geographically, as something only relevant to former slave-trading port cities. The unacknowledged, and to many unwelcome, additional chapters in the story of British slavery, are only truly emerging now. From those already hostile towards and exasperated by the recovery and recognition of Britain’s role in global slavery, those who were angered by the toppling of Colston or footballers taking the knee, the existence and the emergence of these additional chapters will inevitably spark a backlash.
An unpayable debt
For the Guardian and thousands of British institutions, the fundamental equation is this: if we can inherit wealth and benefit over centuries from compound interest, do we not also equally inherit responsibility?
After all, the tentacles of this history do not stay neatly in the past. Chattel slavery left two fundamental legacies. The first is inequality: there are the organisations and dynasties who have benefited from the wealth generated from slavery, to which we must now add the Guardian; and in contrast, the communities who have suffered and continue to suffer because of the crimes against their ancestors and the economic system built on the back of their enslavement.
The second is the idea of a hierarchy of race, and the stereotypes associated with people of African heritage that were invented and propagated by the enslavers and the lobbies that emerged around them. These ideas outlasted slavery and infected our culture, our language and, to an extent, our subconscious.
Associations with these abhorrent ideas today do not conjure any positive feelings – quite the opposite. But both guilt and pride are solipsistic emotions that have no place in any adult reckoning with the past. It is our addiction to regarding our history as a great repository of pride and other comforting feelings that led historians and others to forge (in all senses of that word) a national story in which slavery, empire and imperial violence were either pushed to the margins or airbrushed out completely.
The Guardian had an origin story that stemmed from a journalist revealing the truth behind the murder of protesters at Peterloo that day in 1819. This story – which has rightly provided inspiration for progressive journalism in the centuries since – remains true. However, a genuine reckoning with the past involves having a different relationship with history. It involves engaging with the parts that do not inspire, nor entertain, nor uphold the values that we celebrate today. Pulling back the curtain to reveal the tricks of history has led us to acknowledge that there is an additional chapter to add: within the financial DNA of the Guardian are the stolen labour and lives of enslaved people in the United States, Jamaica and Brazil.
The founders of the Guardian are connected to the most often forgotten chapter in the long history of Britain’s involvement in global slavery.
What we do with that knowledge involves listening to the descendent communities that the research has led us to. When the curtain fell from my eyes in that moment in 2020, I knew that a link to cotton meant a strong likelihood of a link to the brutal exploitation of human beings. I thought it was unlikely that we would be able to pinpoint specific communities. That we could find the “receipts” that would lead us to seeing the names of some of the people whose lives were consumed to generate the wealth that started the paper. The brilliant academics that we worked with, through historical financial forensic work, led us to the profound experience of seeing documents that listed the names of some of the enslaved people from whom Taylor and his backers drew much of their fortunes. Those same people, mentioned in slave registers and plantation accounts, are also connected to the Guardian. Indeed they always were. Being able now to read such names and encounter such documents is an experience that does, and should, change any individual, family or organisation that confronts this reality.
There is no blueprint for how it will, or should, change the Guardian. The idea of restorative justice by institutions in terms of historical slavery is an emerging field; there is no book to take off the shelf, or set of accepted norms. Alongside thousands of British institutions, the Guardian was funded by those whose sources of wealth came at the expense of the murderous exploitation of thousands of human beings. That reality cannot be negotiated with, or explained away. That means that the organisation now has an unpayable debt. By the very nature of the scale and horror of the crime, any response will never be enough.
But that doesn’t mean that we throw up our hands and do nothing. Acknowledging this history is the first step, and engaging with those with whom we share it, is the next. Being part of a growing network of British institutions such as the University of Glasgow and the Church of England, as part of a continuing movement of restorative justice, is the beginning of a new chapter in our history. That reckoning – which is more grown-up, and more honest – needs to be part of who we are, and part of who we become.
• A special Cotton Capital magazine will be published on Saturday 1 April. To order copies from the Guardian bookshop visit guardianbookshop.com/cotton-capital
