Photo: nypl/Wilberforce Institute
A Kiwi historian is helping with the detective work linking The Guardian to 19th Century trans-Atlantic slavery.
On the face of it, it would seem incongruous to associate the liberal Guardian with brutally forced unpaid chatteled labour.
But in 1821 the newly founded then-Manchester Guardian, and much of the North West of England, spun on money from cotton, supplied by slavery to the textile industry, fueling the industrial revolution.
Kathryn speaks with Professor Trevor Burnard, director of the University of Hull's Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation.
His and fellow academics' investigation into the Guardian's founders' financial links with slavery has helped the British newspaper's mea culpa following this embarrassing outing.
The Guardian has put in place a twenty million dollar decade-long programme of restorative justice for descendants of slaves and a journalism series exploring the history of transatlantic slavery and its legacies.
But as Trevor argues, guilt has a long and wide-reaching arm.
Beyond those who parted with cold hard cash earned on the back of slavery, anyone who wore cotton or stirred sugar into their tea benefited from it, including the abolitionists of the time.
