The Guardian has long been considered a champion of progressive values, rooted in a northern English radical tradition. So it will come as a shock to many that much of the wealth of the Manchester Guardian’s founder, John Edward Taylor, and that of most of his backers was connected to transatlantic slavery. A two-year-long investigation has shown that Taylor traded in slave-picked US cotton and that one of his funders enslaved people. Now, recognising this historical injustice, the Scott Trust – which owns the Guardian – has offered an apology for our involvement in this crime against humanity and pledges itself to a decade-long programme of restorative justice. This is a moral commitment to the “understanding that the past cannot be erased, and must not be ignored”, as the historian Olivette Otele writes.
That history begins by seeing the Guardian shorn of idealist illusions. Like many Georgians, the paper dressed in an air of respectability and saw itself as a mouthpiece for much-needed political reform. This image conceals the economic interests of its founders, which were hiding in plain sight. In April 1821, a month before the first Manchester Guardian was published, Taylor said that his newspaper would “supply that information on [cotton manufacture], the deficiency of which is often so obviously apparent”. In this guise, the Guardian had progressive values, but it was also a lobbyist for slave-produced cotton, which at that time constituted two-thirds of Britain’s cotton imports.
Making windows into people’s souls is not easy from two centuries away. But it is hard not to see the editorial positions that the Guardian took in its early decades as shaped by commercial interests. In the name of economic liberalism, the Guardian backed free trade and free labour. The former justified the offshoring of slavery, and its inhumane institutions, to America and Brazil, where events were seen through a cotton merchant’s eyes. The latter allowed, against a backdrop of slave rebellions in the West Indies, the contention that subjugation was inefficient. The paper argued for the destruction and displacement of British mercantilism by industrial capitalism.
Having abolished the slave trade in 1807, Britain saw itself as a light in the world. This was cognitive dissonance. By then, British ships had transported more than 3 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Another 700,000 people in the West Indies remained in chains. While the Royal Navy blockaded the coasts of west Africa, many more ships were transporting slave-produced goods from North and South America to British ports. The paper’s equivocal positions on the American civil war – stressing the aggression of Abraham Lincoln’s Union against the Confederate south – reflected both cotton interests and the paper’s disdain for more radical abolitionist prescriptions. The wealth extracted from American slaves flowed mainly to a few cities such as Manchester. By the 1830s, Cottonopolis was born, helping to enrich further the founder and backers of the Guardian.
Britain was built on slavery and colonialism. These have moulded our culture and institutions, and hence shaped our politics. The Guardian has begun a reckoning with its history. Others – individuals, institutions and states – should follow. Restorative justice would help to make sense of the complexity of a colonial past. It should focus on education and civic participation so that current and future generations can address climate change, health inequalities and systemic racism. Without understanding our past, it becomes harder to grasp what the present means and what the future holds. “We have to guard not only against … old prejudices but also against the new which are being constantly created,” wrote Eric Williams, the historian and first prime minister of Trinidad. “No age is exempt.”
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