The Guardian newspaper in Britain has joined other US and UK entities in researching its historical links to slavery. The result has been available over the last fortnight in a superb series of eight, long, well-researched features by outstanding contributors.
The series offers, too, eight new portraits by leading black artists of radical anti-slavery figures and thinkers, including our own Dr Eric Williams. Poems and short fiction by Caribbean writers including Lisa Allen-Agostini and Anthony Joseph, who will appear in the imminent NGC Bocas Lit Fest (April 28-30), are also part of this special project called Cotton Capital.
Quite apart from the imagination and investment required for such a project, we must commend the paper’s respect for the intelligence of its readers and admire its preparedness to lead the way in the media, uncovering and discussing a critical and protracted period of British history of which few Britons are aware. The focus is Manchester where the paper was founded and which had strong links with the cotton trade but the legacy of slavery in the city and elsewhere in Britain and its former colonies is within the project’s scope too. The killing of George Floyd unleashed an international response to the continued violence against people descended from slaves in the US, principally, but the trade was transatlantic and involved the vast British Empire which spread over Asia, Africa, half of the Americas and Australia. No surprises then that the ripple became a wave.
[caption id="attachment_1011101" align="alignnone" width="754"] The UK guardian series on slavery offers poems and short fiction by Caribbean writers including Lisa Allen-Agostini. -[/caption]
In the Caribbean, we know that in pre-Independence years, as devout British subjects with British dominion passports, we travelled freely throughout the Empire and fought in WWI and WWII under British command. When the war was over and Britain had to recover we were invited to be part of its reconstruction and the present Caribbean-originated British population derives from that exodus of the 1940s-60s mainly. Well, most British people had no idea because they were taught a sanitised history and their ignorance led to the Windrush debacle a few years ago which ruined the lives of Caribbean people and their descendants who were deemed to be illegal immigrants. There is a consequence, therefore, of withholding the truth or of partial truths. A much more palatable historical account was the role of Britain in the abolition of slavery. To quote Eric Williams, “The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.” Filling in some of the glaring gaps and linking modern, ordinary Britain with its secret past, must come as a shock for many, after all Bristol and Liverpool as critical ports in the triangular trade have been acknowledged but not Manchester, and certainly not the lasting legacy of that experience.
Cotton Capital illuminates how Manchester’s rise to be the
