Facing up to the fact that Britain was built on subjugation and empire will help navigate the future
The Guardian has long been considered a champion of progressive values, rooted in a northern English radical tradition. So it will come as a shock to many that much of the wealth of the Manchester Guardian’s founder, John Edward Taylor, and that of most of his backers was connected to transatlantic slavery. A two-year-long investigation has shown that Taylor traded in slave-picked US cotton and that one of his funders enslaved people. Now, recognising this historical injustice, the Scott Trust – which owns the Guardian – has offered an apology for our involvement in this crime against humanity and pledges itself to a decade-long programme of restorative justice. This is a moral commitment to the “understanding that the past cannot be erased, and must not be ignored”, as the historian Olivette Otele writes.
That history begins by seeing the Guardian shorn of idealist illusions. Like many Georgians, the paper dressed in an air of respectability and saw itself as a mouthpiece for much-needed political reform. This image conceals the economic interests of its founders, which were hiding in plain sight. In April 1821, a month before the first Manchester Guardian was published, Taylor said that his newspaper would “supply that information on [cotton manufacture], the deficiency of which is often so obviously apparent”. In this guise, the Guardian had progressive values, but it was also a lobbyist for slave-produced cotton, which at that time constituted two-thirds of Britain’s cotton imports.
