Even messier than the troubling reality of emancipation is the uncomfortable history of Britain’s economic involvement in slavery for half a century after the abolition of slavery in its own empire. Throughout the 19th century, both before and after abolition in the 1830s, British banks and merchants heavily invested in the slave economies of the United States and South America. British businesses imported enormous quantities of raw material and commodities produced by the millions of enslaved people who lived in bondage beyond the borders of the British empire. At the centre of that dimly understood history was cotton and the city of Manchester. Long before abolition, the plantation owners of the British Caribbean had largely moved away from the production of cotton.
British cotton processors, the owners of the nation’s mills and factories, had begun to import ever increasing quantities of that vital raw material from the United States, where a vast cotton boom was under way, partly funded by capital that flowed to the United States from the City of London. On the eve of the American civil war the inflow of American cotton into Britain was vast, and around two and a half thousand cotton mills and factories had emerged in Lancashire, many of them in and around Manchester – a city known by the middle decades of the century as Cottonopolis. As was fully understood at the time, much of the cotton that was spun, woven, dyed, processed and traded in Manchester was produced by the almost 2 million enslaved Africans who lived, worked and suffered on cotton plantations in the southern United States.
On a visit to Manchester in 1859 the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond, gave a lecture at the Manchester Athenaeum (today part of Manchester Art Gallery) in which she told her audience: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 8,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the 125 millions of dollars’ worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”
In 1861 the Economist published a long and detailed article that laid bare just how economically dependent Victorian Britain had become on American cotton produced by the enslaved. “From the first manipulation of the raw material to the last finish bestowed upon it, [cotton] constitutes the employment and furnishes the sustenance of the largest proportion of the population of Lancashire, north Cheshire, and Lanarkshire.” The same article went on to estimate that if the numbers of those involved in ancillary trades connected to the cotton trade, along with their dependent family members, were added to the 430,000 people directly employed in the industry it would be safe to assume “that nearer 4 than 3 million are dependent for their daily bread on this branch of our industry”. When that article was published the population of the United Kingdom, which then included the whole island of Ireland, stood at just under 29 million.