The British monarchy supported the Africa Company from the beginning in its exploitation of the continent, Charles II granted it the exclusive rights of the black slave trade, and many of them were marked with the letters DOY, "property of the Duke of York". England was the most slave-owning nation in all of Europe.
But the responsibility lay not solely with the kings and their court, but also with the businessmen and merchant class of Liverpool and Manchester, Cotonopolis, the world capital of the cotton trade coming from the plantations of the southern United States. Without slaves, the industrial revolution would have been very different, and the United Kingdom would not have prospered as it did. Neither did its working classes.
In Edward Square in the center of Manchester there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln, with an inscription lamenting "the hardships suffered by the English workers and throughout Europe" due to the naval blockade that he had imposed to stifle the South economically, and praises a "sublime Christian heroism not surpassed in any other age and in any other country." While many of the city's merchants had prioritized their economic interests and sided with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, a coalition of abolitionists, laborers, and liberals sided with the American president in his crusade to abolish the slavery. An episode of interracial solidarity to be proud of.
Almost 90% of the cotton grown in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana was sold in Manchester, processed and made into cloth in five thousand Lancashire textile mills and put food on the tables of the working classes. But it was a trade that also encouraged slavery. "The British are very selective about their historical memory and suffer from a kind of amnesia when it suits them," said historian Eric Williams, who became prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. It is as if slavery had been abolished thanks to them, when for a long time they did everything possible to make it last, and both rich and poor benefited.”
Racism is present not only in history but also in British literature and cinema, from the novels of Jane Eyre to the musical Mary Poppins. “One of the essential characteristics of a nation,” wrote the 19th-century French orientalist Ernest Renan, “is that all its individuals have much in common, and at the same time forget much together, select and filter memories at their convenience, and they create a narrative that denies legitimacy to those who contradict it.” In 1951, 60% of the English were unable to name a single colony out of the many that existed in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, and they saw it painted pink every day on the globes of the time. When the United States entered World War II, various ministers asked Washington not to send black soldiers to this country "so as not to hurt sensitivities." Episodes such as the torture of the Mau Mau in Kenya, the brutality in India or the Batang Kali massacre in Malaysia have been ignored.
The British, with their sense of self-righteousness, are convinced that they were nowhere near as "bad" as the Americans on the issue of slavery, and they abolished it before anyone else, which is not true. It is a perception that The Guardian newspaper tries to change with a series that it has published on the responsibility of the monarchy, business and the country in general. Also his own, because it was founded in Manchester in 1821 and the fortune of one of its owners, John Edward Taylor, came from cotton, and he had a plantation in Jamaica. Although progressive in inspiration and an advocate of expanding education to the poor and parliamentary representation, his editorials at the time supported the government's decision to compensate employers with twenty million pounds at the time (a fortune) for losses suffered following the abolition.
The British, like everyone, have a romantic view of their history. "We won the 1966 World Cup," they say, even though they weren't born. But slavery was something for others. Although in the Manchester of the industrial revolution four million people lived on cotton.
