Statement and apology from the Scott Trust board
Summary
The extensive academic research summarised above makes clear that John Edward Taylor, our founding editor, and most of the backers who helped fund the Manchester Guardian had links to transatlantic slavery.
The Scott Trust and Guardian apologise unreservedly for their roles in this crime against humanity.
Below, we set out in more detail our response to these findings, and a set of proposals that we hope respond in a meaningful way to the descendants of those affected. We are committed to developing and delivering on these proposals in partnership and consultation with affected communities around the world.
Background
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, millions of Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas. Subsequently, enslaved people were systematically forced to work – often on plantations – and live in inhumane conditions and subjected to poor nutrition, disease and brutality, leading often to premature or violent death. Under this form of chattel slavery, those enslaved had no freedom or rights, and were listed as “property” in plantation accounts and itemised as such in inventories.
Although Britain’s transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans was abolished in 1807, the practice of slavery remained legal within the British empire until 1833, followed by an apprenticeship system until 1838. British businesses, institutions and wealthy families and individuals continued to benefit from slavery in the rest of the world for many decades thereafter. Chattel slavery created intergenerational wealth and political power not only in the American south and the British West Indies but also in many other parts of the world. Its legacy is a major factor in the racial, economic and social inequalities faced today by Black people across the globe.
The industrialisation of cotton relied on the production of raw materials by enslaved workers across the Americas, and Manchester’s 19th-century nickname, Cottonopolis, illustrates the intertwined nature of the city’s identity with its trademark commodity. The wealth created in Manchester, primarily by cotton as well as sugar and other commodities, led to a boom in several other industries.
The city’s dominant industry seems also at times to have unduly influenced the Manchester Guardian’s editorial positions in the first few decades of its existence. Though the Guardian generally opposed slavery in the Caribbean and South America, when slavery was abolished in Britain in 1833 it supported the award of huge sums of compensation to enslavers. “We are convinced,” ran one editorial in June 1833, “that no plan for the abolition of slavery could have been worthy to be proposed by the government, or adopted by the legislature, of Great Britain, which was not based on the great principles of justice to the planter as well as to the slave.”
In the decades that followed, the paper’s editorial position on the US civil war often ran counter to the cause of emancipation, or favoured the Confederacy. As the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, wrote in 2017, around the time of the American civil war the newspaper “got too close to the Manchester cotton merchants who paid for the advertising that supported the paper”.
As is documented in the research.
Experts from the Wilberforce Institute were invited to continue work on "The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement Report", conducting in-depth research to investigate any links of John Edward Taylor (founder of the Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1821), his associates, and his or their business activities with historical slavery. This followed initial research by the University of Nottingham. The research was conducted first by Dr Sheryllynne Haggerty, a fellow at the Wilberforce Institute, and Dr Cassandra Gooptar, and later by Dr Gooptar and Professor Trevor Burnard, Director of the Institute.
This research was conducted and produced in a way that strived to keep the perspectives of the enslaved and their stories at the forefront. Each step of the way, there was genuine effort to understand the sombre and heavy weight of what this research means as well as its part in helping to present a holistic narrative of Britain’s legacy of slavery. The research promoted an uncensored understanding of Britain’s legacies of slavery and colonialism and increased engagement with the Caribbean.
The report comes in three parts, and can be viewed via the links below:
Part One: The Taylor Report (University of Nottingham)
Part Two: The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement Report
Part Three: Sea Islands & Jamaica: Tracing the Enslaved People
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