ON A SUNNY JUNE EVENING LAST YEAR, members of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society filed slowly into the Friends’ Meeting House, just off St Peter’s Square. When the neat white building tucked behind Manchester Central Library was built in the 1820s, it became the base for the Quakers who led the abolitionist movement in the city. Now, in the same hall almost 200 years later, the second-oldest learned society in the world gathered to examine its own links to transatlantic slavery.
Images of mills flashed up on a projector screen as the academic Alan Rice described how cotton powered Manchester’s transformation into a booming industrial metropolis. “If you’re in the business of cotton in the 18th and 19th century, you’re connected very deeply to the slavery business,” Rice, who runs the Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire, told the audience. His next slide featured portraits of three of Manchester’s most prominent 19th-century industrialists: Samuel Greg, George Hibbert and Sir George Philips. Greg and Hibbert campaigned to preserve slavery and all three “owned” enslaved people (Philips, whose contemporaries dubbed him “King Cotton”, was among the first funders of the Guardian). They were also members of the Lit and Phil – like many prominent Manchester men of this era, who gathered at the society for lectures on science and the arts. A number of the city’s leading abolitionists, such as the physician John Ferriar and the clockmaker Peter Clare, were also members.
The kind of historical investigation conducted by Rice and his team of researchers has become increasingly common among British institutions seeking to excavate and analyse their pasts. Many were prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, but others were set in motion earlier. In 2018, the University of Glasgow published the results of a year-long investigation into the “significant financial support” it had received from people whose wealth derived from slavery, and announced a £20m ($24.6m) reparations package. Glasgow’s council commissioned its own report into the city’s ties to transatlantic slavery the following year.
In Edinburgh, academics recommended the city apologise for the role it played in sustaining chattel slavery. In Bristol, the city council voted for a parliamentary inquiry into slavery reparations. The Bank of England, the insurer Lloyd’s, the royal palaces, the National Trust, Kew Gardens, the Church of England and the University of Cambridge have all launched inquiries into their slavery connections.
But, in Manchester, few other institutions have been so unsparing as the Lit and Phil. The University of Manchester conducted research that found that some of its early supporters – including
