Connections unwound

The Guardian commissioned an academic review of its founders and their connections to the slave trade. This is what it found

- Cassandra Gooptar

THE PROCESS OF UNCOVERING WHERE exactly the founder of the Manchester Guardian, John Edward Taylor, and his associates were importing cotton from was a lengthy and difficult one.

At the start, in autumn 2020, I was given the names of the 11 original funders of the Manchester Guardian, and how much each of them had contributed. This was available in a large, yellow parchment, the "Manchester Guardian agreement", written in 1821 and housed at the Guardian archives in the John Rylands library in Manchester.

The first step I took was to trace Taylor's lineage back to the 1700s using Ancestry UK and antiquarian sources, to gain a clearer picture of his economic and social background. Unsurprisingly, there was little mention of Taylor's cotton business or his source of income prior to starting the newspaper. At this point, I realised the enormousness of the task that lay ahead.

Alongside this genealogical search, I looked into the National Archives catalogue, historical newspaper archives and secondary resources and found Taylor's will, obituary, business transactions, partnerships, editorials, libel action lawsuit and reformist activities. Once the names of Taylor's business and his partners were obtained, I crosschecked them against online trade directories for the years 18211829. The London Gazette, one of the UK's most significant journals of record, also provided essential information on Taylor's partners, the nature of his business and the year of its dissolution.