The Guardian, slavery, Chartism & ‘white slavery’
The Guardian has published the results of an on-going research project into the Manchester cotton trade and slavery that reveal that the paper’s founder John Edward Taylor founded the paper, in the wake of Peterloo in 1819 on money from the cotton trade which rested on slavery
As the paper’s Editor Katharine Viner underlines the issue has been hiding in plain sight. And its been hiding for a long time.
Engels in his 1844 Condition of the Working Classes in England, written while he was living and working in Manchester, is critical of the bourgeois attitudes of the Guardian but doesn’t make a specific link to the slave trade. He would have been aware of the link between slavery and the cotton trade but not perhaps of the paper’s funding.
A one-dimensional approach has continued until recently. Mike Leigh’s excellent film Peterloo does not focus on the links between the cotton trade and slavery although despite scenes in the film most of those in St Petersfield on Monday August 16th 1819 were not mill workers.
However historians from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Reddiker’s The Many Headed Hydra have been very clear on links.
The Chartist movement of which Manchester was a centre supported the abolition of slavery and joined with the abolitionists in demanding compensation for slaves rather than slave owners. The Guardian, not surprisingly, thought it should be the other way round.
There was a debate about the relationship between chattel slavery and wage slavery. Both of course were forms of exploitation from which owners profited. In the latter case however workers were free to organise and demand better conditions in trade unions. Black slaves trying the same thing were likely to end up dead, which is not minimise the importance of numerous slave revolts.
The whole thing is a reminder that history is a living project not something to be preserved in aspic and glorified as the likes of Boris Johnson have repeatedly said it should be.
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