Two things can be true at the same time,
that's one of the complexities of history.
And the Guardian has a traditional origin story,
which is that the newspaper was founded by John Edward Taylor
after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.
Now that story remains true,
but in parallel to that story is the fact that Taylor
and many of the fellow investors in the Guardian were Manchester cotton brokers
and that their fortunes were derived from the processing of slave-produced cotton.
And the Guardian, like thousands of institutions in Britain,
has direct financial connections to the world of slavery.
That reality can't be negotiated with, it can't be explained away.
This history can never be solved, can never be remedied,
but it can be ...
Something good can come from it, but it needs to be a dialogue,
and we will find it difficult, we'll make mistakes,
we'll find ourselves in very difficult conversations,
but this should be difficult because this history is terrible.
And this history is something that is as much part of the story of the Guardian
as anything else that we might celebrate or might want to remember.
So over the past few decades, and especially since 2020,
the summer of the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter,
there has been something of a reckoning in British history.
The way most organisations,
the way Britain as a whole for the most part,
has thought about slavery is to not think about it,
to brush it under the carpets, to keep it in the margins.
It is now being dragged from the historical shadows, it's being placed where it should be,
at the centre of our thinking about our past
and about our nation.
I think more people than ever understand that Britain was
a premier slave-trading nation.
That Britain carried into slavery literally millions of people,
between 3 and 3.4 million people.
And that also Britain was a significant slave owning nation
on the islands of the Caribbean and before that in North America.
Now at the centre of that is the story of cotton,
and at the centre of that history is Manchester,
because both before and critically after the abolition of slavery in the British empire,
vast amounts of cotton was flowing into Liverpool,
flowing to the towns around Manchester and into Manchester itself,
and Britain was growing enormously wealthy from that trade.
My name is Cassandra.
I am the post-doctoral research assistant on this project,
which is looking at the founder of the Manchester Guardian, John Edward Taylor,
and the funders and their links with transatlantic slavery.
I'm from the Caribbean, one of the first things that I think about
when I go to places like Manchester or places in London
that have like huge edifices and structures and monuments,
the first thing I think about is where did the money come from?
That's who I think about, I think about the Caribbean,
I think about the stories of the enslaved that we don't hear, we don't know about.
This type of research is quite important because
it sheds light on these various aspects, you know,
that are historically just whitewashed.
From when we first learned history at school,
there is a trick in the way it's delivered to us.
Which is that we tend to think that real British history
takes place on these islands
and that the connections between what happened here
and what happened in distant colonies and plantations and frontiers,
is somehow marginal.
That it exists but it's not really proper British history
and that trick I think shapes enormously
how we think about ourselves and how we think about the past.
Over many years, I've given literally hundreds of lectures
and in many of them I've talked about this trick of history,
I've asked people to remake those broken connections
to see the global aspect of British history.
The classic example is the Industrial Revolution,
we think of it as a British phenomena.
When I was taught the Industrial Revolution I learned about the water frame
and the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny,
but all three of those inventions
are connected to one part of the Industrial Revolution,
the cotton industry.
When we think about America and slavery
we think about the violence, the lynching, the Ku Klux Klan,
all of that terrible imagery, what we don't think about
are the mills of Manchester and of Lancashire.
But they are just as connected, just as integral
to the story of slavery and cotton
as the slave markets of New Orleans.
I have to admit when I was asked to sit on the Scott Trust
and be part of the story of the Guardian,
my mind instantly went to Peterloo.
Now I know intimately
that cotton and the Industrial Revolution are part of the same story
and yet my mind went to one compartment
and it didn't make those connections.
I fell for exactly the trick I urge other people
to recognise and avoid falling into.
We have to recognise that this knowledge should change us,
it should change any organisation that confronts or is willing to confront its history.
So one of the funders of the Manchester Guardian
was Sir George Philips and he was part of a prominent family
that had both direct and indirect links with slavery.
He was partner in a firm, Boddington, Philips and Sharpe
in 1821 when the Manchester Guardian was formed.
That firm owned Success estate which which had about 122 enslaved persons on it.
So it's very likely that the £100 that was used
to help form the Manchester Guardian was derived from slavery.
That's when we found out where some of John Edward Taylor's money was coming from,
which is from the Sea Islands.
They're all places where Gullah Geechee communities currently exist,
so this for me was quite a huge thing, because it therefore links
the founder of the Manchester Guardian
to the Gullah Geechee people and their ancestors.
There is no blueprint.
There is no book to take off the shelf to tell us how to do this,
it's a case of being part of the conversation,
to work out how societies, how organisations, how individuals
confront this history and do something about it.
We're going to do our best as an organisation
to engage in forms of restorative justice,
but it can by its very nature, given the scale
and the horror of the crime, it will never be enough.
That means that we have an unpayable debt.
But we do want to be part of a moment and a movement
of organisations trying to engage with this history
and believing in the restorative justice movement.
We want to be part of a process and we want that process to be ongoing,
and our response to it needs to be part of who we are and who we become.