Manchester’s liberal establishment backed the abolition of British slavery – but their wealth depended on the labour of enslaved Africans in the United States
In the 19th century, Manchester was the global centre of cotton manufacturing. Within 50 miles of the city centre – across Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire – there were almost 2,500 mills employing more than 400,000 people. Visitors to the world’s first industrial city were awestruck: when the French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville came to the city in 1835, he wrote of “a thousand noises” rising from Manchester’s “damp, dark labyrinth”, of “the crunching wheels of machines, the shriek of steam from the boilers, [and] the regular beat of looms”.
The city known as “Cottonopolis” clothed the world, but it was dependent on “King Cotton”: in a 1,000-mile belt from the east coast to eastern Texas, millions of enslaved African Americans were forced each day to the hellish work of planting, growing and picking that crop. Propelled by Eli Whitney’s gins (that is, “engines”), which allowed for the rapid separation of the fibre from the seed, the American south had cornered the Atlantic market. By 1860, it was supplying about 80% of the raw cotton that Britain imported.
