We must face up to the fact that we’re all implicated in the legacy of slavery - Trevor Burnard

As is well known, however, Gladstone’s radicalism was underwritten by the origins of his fortune, which came from his father, John Gladstone, the owner of 2,000 enslaved people in Demerara, now Guyana. What is less well known are the links that Taylor and the eleven men who joined him in putting up the funding for the start of the Manchester Guardian had with slavery in the USA, in Brazil and in the Caribbean.

Most of these links were indirect and were connected to Taylor and his friend’s occupations as cotton merchants. Manchester was the centre of cotton production in Britain, an activity that accounted for 11 percent of Britain’s GDP in the 1840s and nearly one-third of all Britain’s factories. Indeed, Manchester and cotton were so synonymous that the rapidly growing city was nicknamed `Cottonopolis’.

Almost all cotton before the 1860s was grown by enslaved labourers of African descent, living in terrible conditions and subject to harsh discipline. One of the links with slavery that the founders of the Guardian had, however, was direct: Sir George Philips, a founder, was an enslaver of 108 people as co-owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica.

The Guardian has recently acknowledged how its founders were not just liberal reformers but were, as cotton merchants, implicated in multiple ways with slavery in the Americas and thus partly responsible for the sufferings of millions of American enslaved people. Ole Jacob Sunde, chair of the Scott Trust, said: “The Scott Trust is deeply sorry for the role John Edward Taylor and his backers played in the slavery economy, which was a crime against humanity. We recognise that apologising and sharing these facts transparently is only the first step in addressing the Guardian’s historical links to transatlantic slavery.”

It is now embarked upon a major programme of restorative justice, in Manchester and the world. As part of its ambitious plans to acknowledge and remedy the part of its history associated with slavery, it has partnered with the Wilberforce Institute, where I am director, at the University of Hull, to do more research on the historical contexts of the Guardian’s legacies of slavery.

It was through both colonial slavery in the Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius before 1833 and also through the cotton industry’s reliance on slavery in the USA that the fruits of slavery were transferred to metropolitan Britain. The founders of the Guardian, as Manchester cotton merchants, may have been more connected to American slavery than most of the population but just about everyone in Britain, even abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Thomas Fowell Buxton, who were working extremely hard to rid Britain of its involvement in the sin of slavery, profited from the labour of enslaved people.

They did so through the cotton clothes they wore and the sugar they used in their recipes for cakes and puddings. As Sir Roderick Floud, a distinguished economic historian, wrote on 20 March 2023 in response to a recent letter in the Guardian by John Cookson, arguing that his working class ancestors working in the mills of Manchester and Salford should not have to contribute to reparations for slavery because their ancestors neither owned enslaved people or profited from slavery: “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.”

What the Guardian is doing in its commendable programme of restorative justice is following Floud’s argument. It is true that those people who directly benefited from slavery should make more of a contribution than others to reparations for the harm done to enslaved people. That is the reasoning behind the very generous and inspirational gift by Laura Trevelyan and the Trevelyan family – a family as devoted to liberal ideas as William Gladstone and C.P. Scott and with a distinguished record of public service – to give to the people of Grenada money as recognition of the large sums their Trevelyan ancestors were awarded by the British government as compensation for owning over 1,000 enslaved people in 1833.

Professor Trevor Burnard is director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull.