Slavery and Manchester
By 1860, nearly 90 percent of the raw cotton imported to Britain had first been produced by enslaved labourers. Merchants would ship raw cotton from ports in Caribbean and USA to Liverpool, then onto Manchester via the Irwell or Ashton Canal.
In 1830 the Liverpool-Manchester railway, funded by slave owners, was opened to speed up movement from imported cotton from Liverpool to Manchester and manufactured commodities from Manchester to the port of Liverpool.
In Ancoats, Long Mill, Sedgwick Mill (McConnel and Kennedy) and Old Mill (Murrays), all on Union Street, were central to this process. Raw cotton (especially Sea Island cotton) was spun into fine yarn and cloth by men, women and children working dangerously long hours to be sold on both internal and global markets.
The escaped slave and African-American Civil Rights leaders Frederick Douglass lived in St Ann’s Square, Manchester between 1847-48. He was one of a number of freed or escaped slaves and abolitionists who addressed large crowds in Manchester on the evils of slavery.
In 1859 the Massachusetts-born abolionist Sarah Parker Redmond, daughter of a ‘freed person of colour’ from Curaçao, addressed the Manchester Atheneum. She remarked:
‘When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those eighty thousand cotton plantations on which was grown the one hundred and twenty-five millions of dollars’ worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of the money ever reached the hands of the labourers….Mancunians should raise their voice until the shackles of the American slave melt like dew before the morning sun.’
Projects like Global Threads are researching the ways in which slavery shaped the city of Manchester. They remind us that the wealth that built Ancoats’ mills, warehouses, roads, canals, railways, public institutions was extracted from workers, both unfree and free.
FOMV 