The Guardian and slavery

A history we must confront 

- Katharine Viner

I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain's top historians, who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.

It is a deeply uneasy feeling to know that one of my predecessors, the Guardian's founding editor, John Edward Taylor, derived much of his wealth from Manchester's cotton industry, an industry that relied on firms such as Taylor's trading with cotton plantations in the Americas that had enslaved millions of Black people forcibly transported from Africa. The great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass made the connection plain: "The price of human flesh on the Mississippi was regulated by the price of cotton in Manchester."

The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 after the Peterloo massacre, with an inspiring mission arguing for the right of working people to have parliamentary representation and for the expansion of education to the poor. It was in favour of the abolition of slavery.