Key facts
- A study by Global Threads explores links between 19th-century Manchester workers and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean.
- The Peterloo Massacre in 1819 involved peaceful protesters being killed by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry.
- Hugh Hornby Birley, the yeomanry commander at Peterloo, had family fortunes linked to transatlantic enslavement.
- Sir George Philips, a funder of the Manchester Guardian, owned the Success plantation in Jamaica.
- Robert Wedderburn, a Black abolitionist, argued that English laborers and enslaved Africans were exploited by the same forces.
- The Birley family benefited financially from the estate of Daniel Backhouse, an enslaver involved in trafficking over 27,000 Africans.
A study by the public history project Global Threads has revealed connections between the exploitation of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the struggles of cotton workers in 19th-century Manchester, England.
The research highlights how figures involved in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, where peaceful protesters were killed by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, were deeply intertwined with the transatlantic slave trade.
Hugh Hornby Birley, the yeomanry commander who led the fatal charge, had a family fortune that was intimately linked with enslavement. His family financially benefited from the estate of Daniel Backhouse, an enslaver who funded and profited from 103 voyages between 1773 and 1807, trafficking more than 27,000 Africans. Some of these voyages exported people to St Lucia, where Backhouse's company funded and profited from the Rabot sugar estate.
Sir George Philips, another figure examined in the project, helped fund the Manchester Guardian as a liberal response to Peterloo. However, he was personally invested in the exploitation of enslaved Africans as the owner of the Success plantation in Hanover, Jamaica. The Dreadnought ship, which trafficked enslaved workers to plantations owned by Wedderburn's uncle, also trafficked workers to Philips' Success plantation.
Robert Wedderburn, a Black abolitionist based in London, argued at the time that Africans and English laborers were being denied by the same forces. He described Peterloo as "an act of murder" and drew parallels between the elite profiting from Manchester workers' labor while denying them rights, and the elite imposing slavery on Africans.
Global Threads stated that the leaders of Manchester's elite, like Birley and Philips, owed their positions to activities drawing on colonialism and slavery. They actively described the system they created as transatlantic, with colonial-style coercion akin to putting down uprisings of enslaved people. The project emphasizes that slavery "hung like a spectre over the Mancunian struggles for justice and equality."
Conditions for British working-class individuals, who were largely disenfranchised, were difficult, but better than those endured by enslaved Africans who were classed as property. The protest at St Peter's Field saw the yeomanry, a militia of Tory businessmen, charge the crowd.