‘We owe Africa billions’: what you told us about Cotton Capital and the legacy of slavery

I’m Maya Wolfe-Robinson, editor of the Cotton Capital project, standing in for Aamna this week. Look out for some other guest writers while she takes a well-deserved break.

When I first read the research into the Guardian’s founders more than 18 months ago, I suddenly saw Manchester through new eyes. I’d been a north of England correspondent for a couple of years at that point, but I confess I hadn’t given too much thought to the city’s connections to the cotton industry and transatlantic slavery.

Suddenly it was all I could see, and all I wanted to talk about. (Yes, I am very fun at parties). The extent of the transatlantic trade wasn’t new to me – but for some reason, I hadn’t associated those histories with Manchester, where I live, or the Guardian, where I’ve worked for 13 years. I knew about Eric Williams – my mother had recounted childhood stories of going to meetings in rural villages, led by people with flambeaux torches, when he ran to become Trinidad and Tobago’s chief minister in the 1950s. But I hadn’t appreciated the impact of his work for historical researchers studying slavery in Britain, or his research into Manchester.

Alongside colleagues on the project that became Cotton Capital (but had many working titles in the interim), I set about reading as much as I could. We hoped that Guardian readers would share this enthusiasm to learn more about its history – not a rewriting of our foundational story but a deeper and more complex understanding of it. The aim was to place the paper’s founders in the global context of what historian Sven Beckert describes as the “empire of cotton” – but it’s fair to say we were also nervous about how readers would respond.

After all, as the UK’s home secretary proved this week, when confronted with the facts of transatlantic slavery, some people prefer to fast-forward to the bit when it was all over. As Suella Braverman said this week at the National Conservatism conference in London, “the defining feature” of Britain’s relationship with slavery “is not that we practised it, but that we led the way in abolishing it. We should be proud of who we are.” It was an unintentionally perfect echo of a famous quip by Eric Williams himself, who joked in the 1960s that “the British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it”.

If Braverman wants to do some reading, we might also recommend David Olusoga’s introductory article for Cotton Capital, where he argues that the “solipsistic emotions” of pride and shame should have “no place in any adult reckoning with the past”. And Cotton Capital readers will know that Britain was not, in fact, the first country to abolish slavery – and that abolition in the British empire did not bring about an end to a reliance on enslaved labour. Above all, they – you – understand that this history matters, regardless of the feelings it does or doesn’t inspire, but because history shapes who we are today.

For the past few weeks, we have been asking you, the readers of this newsletter, to send in your own thoughts about this history and its legacies. The thoughtful, heartfelt and fascinating response has been overwhelming and deeply appreciated. I’ve loved reading your stories from around the world and how the series has touched you. We’ve highlighted some below, but first, a few other articles to get stuck into, including some from the archive.

From the beginning of this project, we hoped that our research into the Guardian’s past might inspire other institutions to look unsparingly at their own histories. But we also asked readers to send us stories about their own historical inquiries – and about what, if anything, they had learned about slavery.

Joy Burns in Connecticut, United States, wrote to say she learned from family her ancestors included enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, coastal North Carolina and Barbados. Although Joy studied American history at college, transatlantic slavery “was a mere footnote”.

“It was the documentary Traces of the Trade that rocked my world. It detailed how my ancestors came to find their bare feet on the cobblestones of the Charleston slave market. (I feel lightheaded every time I go there.)”

Burns embarked on a 30-year journey of learning. “Touching primary documents in archives, a church register in the church office of the Anglican church in St George, Barbados, sitting in the basement archives of the Schomburg Center in Harlem, the archives at Yale and the New Haven Museum, the microfiche room at the public library in Charleston, and a cousin’s living room in Savannah, Georgia,” she writes. “I’m in this for the rest of my life.”

In contrast, George Dickenson wrote to say he learned about slavery at school. “All secondary schools in Barbados in the 70s were taught about it – by teachers who were taught it by their predecessors at universities.”

Many of you replied when we asked if the British government should formally apologise for slavery (in short, yes) and shared thoughts on reparations. It was a pleasure to hear from Marika Sherwood, who highlighted the long history of European interference across Africa after the slave trade finished. Sherwood is a Hungarian-born writer and historian whose work on Manchester’s links to slavery, the city’s 1945 Pan-African Congress and Black presence in Britain was an inspirational resource for us while researching the project.

“Britain owes much more than an apology. Hidden histories have to be uncovered. Britain grew rich from the profits of the nefarious trade and the slave-worked plantations. But that is only the beginning of the story,” Sherwood wrote. “After the trade and slavery were ended by Europeans, they met to divide Africa ‘fairly’ among themselves.”

“This corruption, and the separation/mingling of peoples, is what Africa is dealing with today. So we owe Africa billions of pounds. And we also owe reparations to all descendants of all the slaves who were freed on ‘our’ Caribbean islands, who received not a penny while £20m was distributed to their owners.”

Mary Burdett wrote to say that she had been listening to the podcast series. “I am 83 now but loved history at school in Birmingham in the late 50s. When my husband passed away, I started to follow my interest in the slave trade because William Wilberforce had been my hero. Through Professor Olusoga, I realised that was a bit simplistic. So my first holiday alone in 2013 was to Hull to read about the trade,” she said.

“So far I have visited Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester. I walk around the museums just saying sorry for what happened to them. I am an old, lone voice, but it is all I think I can do.”