The British monarchy supported the Africa Company from the beginning in its exploitation of the continent, Charles II granted it the exclusive rights to trade in black slaves, 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 did not lie solely with the kings and the court, but also with the businessmen and mercantile 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 Britain would not have prospered as it did. Nor their working classes.
In Edward Square in central Manchester there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln with an inscription reading "the hardships suffered by the laborers of England and throughout Europe" because of the naval blockade he had imposed to suffocate the South economically, and praises a "sublime Christian heroism not surpassed in any other era and in any other country". While many merchants in the city had prioritized their economic interests and supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War, a coalition of abolitionists, laborers, and liberals sided with the American president in his crusade for abolish 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 fabric in five thousand textile mills in Lancashire and put food on the tables of the working classes. But it was a trade that also encouraged slavery. "The British are very selective with their historical memory and suffer from a kind of amnesia when it suits them - said the 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 keep it, and both rich and poor benefited from it”.
Racism is present not only in history but also in British literature and film, from the novels of Jane Eyre to the musical Mary Poppins. "One of the essential characteristics of a nation - wrote the French orientalist of the 19th century Ernest Renan - is that all its individuals have many things in common, and at the same time they forget many things together, they select and filter the memories as they see fit , and create a narrative that denies legitimacy to those who contradict it". In 1951, 60% of English people could not name any of the many colonies in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, and they saw them painted in pink every day on the globes of the time. When the United States entered the Second World War, several ministers asked Washington not to highlight black soldiers in this country to "not hurt sensibilities". Episodes such as the Mau Mau torture in Kenya, the brutality in India or the Batang Kali massacre in Malaysia have been ignored.
The British, with their sense of moral superiority, are convinced that they were nowhere near as "bad" as the Americans when it came to slavery, and that they abolished it first, which is not true. It is a perception that The Guardian newspaper is trying to change with a series 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 had a plantation in Jamaica. Although progressive in spirit and advocating the extension of education to the poor and parliamentary representation, its editors at the time sided with the Government's decision to compensate employers with twenty million pounds from the time (a fortune) for the losses suffered as a result of the abolition.
The British, like everyone else, have a romantic view of their history. "We won the World Cup in 1966", they say, even if they hadn't been born. But slavery was not his thing. Even if in the Manchester of the industrial revolution four million people lived from cotton.
