The Guardian confronts and apologizes for its role in the slave trade

[David Lockmiller]

New York Times – July 8, 2023

It is the kind of historical artifact that would be easy to miss: an old and fragile little book unearthed in the archives of the Derbyshire Record Office, in the East Midlands of England. The book, a commercial ledger from 1822, holds the names of enslavers who ran cotton plantations on islands along the coast of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

And on one of the browning pages, in elegant, handwritten script, someone has inked the name of the company buying that cotton: Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co. The Taylor in question was none other than John Edward Taylor, founder of The Manchester Guardian, now known simply as The Guardian, the most prominent progressive newspaper in Britain for more than two centuries.

For decades, Britons have focused with understandable pride on the pioneering role the country played in stamping out slavery, most notably when Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Almost entirely missing from conversations and curriculums, however, are the spectacular sums that poured into Britain through slavery for roughly 200 years.