The Guardian Weekly

Facing up to shameful history, angry women and referees’ trials

There is an illusion at the centre of British history that conceals the role of slavery in building the nation. Here’s how I fell for it

By David Olusoga.

This week marked an important moment in the history of the Guardian with the launch of Cotton Capital, a series revealing the links between the 19th-century Manchester founders of the paper, the transatlantic cotton industry and the enslaved labour upon which the trade was built. The links have been established in academic research commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian. As David Olusoga – a historian and Scott Trust board member – explains, they also reflect the illusory nature of British history in general, which has long preferred to focus on celebrating abolition rather than to its messy complicity in the slave economy.

In addressing our past, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, writes that the organisation is “facing up to, and apologising for, the fact that our founder [John Edward Taylor] and those who funded him drew their wealth from a practice that was a crime against humanity”. In the coming months, we will continue to explore this history and its lasting impact.

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. 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.

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.

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 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 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 slidingdoors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the Scott Trust, one of two boards that oversees the running 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.

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.

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.

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 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 profound craving for a neat end-date under which a line can be drawn on Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Such desires 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.

First, 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 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.

Even messier 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, 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.

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 cotton boom was under way. On the eve of the American civil war, the

THE ‘ SECOND MIDDLE PASSAGE’

inflow of American cotton into Britain was vast, and around 2,500 cotton mills and factories had emerged in Lancashire, many of them in and around Manchester – known by the middle decades of the century as Cottonopolis. 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.

The wealth generated by the millions who worked in the cotton trade and its subsidiary trades depended upon the great fleet of cargo ships that constantly crossed the Atlantic, unloading raw cotton in the ever expanding network of docks along the northern banks of the Mersey. From there the cotton was distributed to mills and factories around Manchester. In this way Liverpool was as complicit as its great rival Manchester.

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 US, 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. 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.

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.

There are organisations that have benefited from slavery, to which we must now add the Guardian

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 that 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. 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 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 we worked with, through historical financial forensic work, led us to the profound experience of seeing documents listing 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.

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 •

The reality cannot be negotiated with. That means the organisation has an unpayable debt

Inside

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