A public history project has shed light on how the exploitation of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean was directly linked to the struggles of cotton workers and reform movements in 19th-century Manchester. The research, conducted by Global Threads, explores how transatlantic slavery hung over pivotal historical events such as the 1819 Peterloo massacre, where peaceful demonstrators were attacked by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry at St Peter's Field.
While separated by thousands of miles, local laborers and enslaved workers faced systems driven by the same economic forces, a connection highlighted by Black abolitionist Robert Wedderburn at the time. The Global Threads study examines the lives of key figures from the era, including Hugh Hornby Birley, the yeomanry commander who led the fatal charge at Peterloo, and Sir George Philips, a liberal politician who helped fund the Manchester Guardian.
Research found that Birley's family fortune was closely tied to transatlantic enslavement through connections with Liverpool-based slave-trading voyages and Caribbean sugar estates. Meanwhile, Philips was personally invested in the exploitation of enslaved people as the owner of a Jamaican plantation. Both men were members of the Portico Library, a historic hub for Manchester's business elite that sat near the site of the Peterloo massacre.
On August 16, 1819, tens of thousands of people gathered in central Manchester to demand political representation. At the time, only a small fraction of British men could vote, and working-class citizens struggled to afford basic necessities while landowners profited from restrictive grain laws. The demonstration ended in violence when the Tory militia charged the crowd, an event that Wedderburn immediately condemned from London as an act of murder.
Wedderburn, a Jamaican-born Unitarian preacher and radical activist, had long argued that English laborers and African workers were oppressed by the same apparatus. His own family background was rooted in the plantation economy, as his father and uncle owned multiple Jamaican estates supplied by ships carrying textiles woven in Manchester. Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the Birley family later supported the slave-producing US confederacy to protect their cotton interests and invested in infrastructure designed to transport slave-grown goods.