The British newspaper The Guardian, a longtime advocate of progressive politics, has faced a painful truth. The history of the more than two hundred year old newspaper is closely intertwined with slavery.
On the website, and also on the front page of the paper newspaper, that was the biggest news on Tuesday, which was elaborated in a series of historical articles, comments and a video. “It will come as a shock to many that a large part of the wealth of the founder of the ManchesterGuardian (as the newspaper was initially called, ed.) and most of its co-financiers, was connected to transatlantic slavery,” says the commentary.
The Scott Trust, the wealthy foundation that owns The Guardian has apologized. In addition, the foundation promised to invest ten million pounds (11.4 million euros) in, among other things, projects for communities of descendants of enslaved people in Jamaica and in the United States. That is “a moral obligation, linked to the realization that the past cannot be erased and must not be ignored.”
That these were different times is no excuse for crimes against humanity
Katharine Vinner editor-in-chief of The Guardian
“The fact that those were different times,” writes editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, “is no excuse for crimes against humanity.” The knowledge of “the terrible own past” cannot be without consequences for the way in which The Guardian as an organization functions, she says. The newspaper will have to “work harder to recruit people of color, retain them and also hire them into leadership positions.” More journalists will also be hired to write about the lives and experiences of people of color.
No surprise
It was the Black Lives Matter movement that The Guardian led in 2020 to question its own past and to have a scientific study carried out into it. The outcomes thereofwhich have now been published, should not have come as a surprise, the newspaper realizes.
Manchester flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century thanks to the cotton trade, which relied on slave labor on plantations in the Caribbean and the United States. It earned the city the nickname Cottonopolis. That the founder of The Guardian, the businessman John Edward Taylor, had close ties to the slavery economy, was obvious. But in books about the newspaper it was not discussed. “It was in front of us, but it remained hidden,” the newspaper admits.
Historian Olusoga admits that he has fallen into the trap he often tries to prevent others from: losing sight of the bigger picture of history.
The progressive image that The Guardian already had when it was founded in 1821, in its own words a clear view of history stood in the way. The impetus for Taylor to start the newspaper was the so-called Peterloo Massacre, a massacre that the British cavalry inflicted in 1819 among peaceful demonstrators fighting for parliamentary reform. Eighteen people were killed and hundreds injured.
The newspaper was given the mission by Taylor to advocate representation of workers in parliament, better education for poor people and also … the abolition of slavery. While Taylor, and most of the newspaper’s eleven co-financiers, at the same time profited from the cotton industry, which was completely dependent on the system that enslaved millions of people.
Romanticized story
“Sometimes two things can be true at once,” says leading historian David Olusoga, an expert on colonialism and a board member of the Scott Trust: The Guardian stood and stands for progressive values and is built on money that was earned through exploitation and slavery. He acknowledges that he itself fell into the trap what he often tries to prevent others from: losing sight of the bigger picture of history.
Read also: Rutte’s speech, with explanation, at the cabinet’s apologies for slavery
The industrial revolution is often seen as a phenomenon that occurred entirely on British soil, while it is often concealed where the money that financed that development came from. This diverts attention from the horrors of the slavery economy. “That trick has been used over the centuries by politicians, lobbyists and journalists who wanted to tell a highly romanticized version of our national story.”
When asked five years ago to name a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, Olusoga fell for the trick he had warned against “in literally hundreds of lectures,” he writes humbly. “I completely failed to make the crucial and obvious connection between the founders of The Guardian and the history of slavery.”
He was thinking only of one aspect of British history, that of the 19th-century class struggle that gave rise to the paper. “An arena of British domestic history which, I had learned at school, had nothing to do with history in other parts of the world.” In his own failure, Olusoga sees “how powerful this form of historical myopia is and how vulnerable we are to it.”
As far as is known, no Dutch newspaper has yet investigated links with slavery.