Prime Minister Burnham Urged to Address Full Scale of Slavery History

In May 1767, a chilling advertisement appeared in the Manchester Mercury seeking buyers for a 12-year-old Black boy, with inquiries directed to Market Street—the current site of a Uniqlo store. After fifteen years of researching the fragmented records of Manchester’s history, the discovery of that brief, dehumanizing notice serves as a grim testament to the city’s past. I n May 1767, a notice was placed in the Manchester Mercury for “Any Gentleman, or Lady, wanting to purchase a Black Boy, 12 years of age” to inquire on Market Street, at the site of today’s Uniqlo clothes shop. After 15 years of painstaking work through the scattered fragments that recorded and pointed to Manchester’s enslaving history, I still don’t think I have come to terms with my moment of discovery, a few months ago, of those few words captured in black and white. A child, on our busiest shopping street, the sale of a human being. These seem natural touch points that a leader might use to draw inspiration from progressive moments in our history, on the surface. Many readers, perhaps, will think this is splitting hairs. We are rightly proud of our progressive history and working-class identity, and as for Mancunians.

The full extent of Manchester’s entanglement with enslavement remains largely unappreciated and requires a more profound unraveling. Recently, Prime Minister Andy Burnham offered what stands as the most optimistic response from a UK leader regarding calls for reparations and the recognition of Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

While his acknowledgment that Manchester’s textile industry was built on the labor of enslaved people is welcome, his reliance on traditional narratives of moral progress is being challenged. By centering Thomas Clarkson’s 1787 anti-slavery speech at Manchester Cathedral and later expressions of solidarity, Burnham risks obscuring the broader reality of the city’s history. The region’s former mayor chose to lead and close his piece by referring to Thomas Clarkson’s 1787 anti-slavery speech at Manchester Cathedral and the letter of solidarity from a group of Mancunians, collectively described as “workingmen”, during the Lancashire Cotton Famine, while clearly acknowledging that “Manchester’s cotton industry was built on the labour of enslaved people”. With just the light off your mobile phone. The Cotton Famine story – that thousands of out-of-work operatives met on New Year’s Eve 1862 and voted to support the union blockade of vital cotton supplies to Lancashire on humanitarian, anti-slavery grounds – in part.

Historians argue that understanding this era requires looking beyond isolated windows of success that occurred over three centuries of brutality. The distinction is significant: while it is often stated that Britain was the first to end the slave trade, it is more accurate to note that the process spanned 250 years. But consider for a moment the difference between these statements: “We were the first country to end the slave trade” v “It took us 250 years to end the slave trade.”.

Similarly, the narrative of Mancunian cotton workers supporting the Union blockade during the American Civil War must be balanced against the reality that the regional economy relied on enslavement for generations. Public displays of humanitarian solidarity only surfaced after the cotton supply had been embargoed for years, long after the institution had secured the city’s economic foundations. The reality of Manchester’s relationship with enslavement is something that we as a city are yet to fully appreciate and are only slowly beginning to unravel. Where the only public marker of the fundamental reliance of the emergence of the world’s first industrial city on enslavement is the statue of a white man: Abraham Lincoln, this is echoed in our memorial landscape. On the eve of civil war, the activist Sarah Parker Remond bravely declared from the stage of the city’s Athenaeum that she was “convinced that, as a rule, the heart of Old England beat truly to the anti-slavery cause, but in Manchester and Liverpool she had found something that approximated more to the pro-slavery spirit of America”, but less than four years earlier.

The 1863 Lincoln letter frequently cited in these discussions arrived 56 years after the abolition of the British slave trade and 25 years after colonial emancipation—an era during which Manchester’s economic dependence on enslaved labor actually intensified. In 2007 UK government and lottery funding was deployed in a nationwide programme to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade.

This pattern of focusing on white abolitionists mirrors the criticism of the 2007 national commemorations, which many historians described as a “Wilberfest” that disproportionately celebrated individual progress rather than addressing the structural history of enslavement. The “Cotton Famine” narrative, while factually correct, often serves as a comforting version of history that obscures the reality of how the city’s institutions grew in tandem with the “Cotton King” expansion. However, the statement leaves space for greater depth of engagement and reflection to inform a national and local understanding of the true scale and reality of this history, from the point of view of Britain’s collective memory and understanding. One of the biggest reflections from communities and historians after that programme was the concern that in many areas it resembled a national “Wilberfest” – with a disproportionate focus and celebration of white aboliti. This was the most widespread collective effort to date to conduct local projects around these themes and resulted in hundreds of exhibits and events. And by far the most comfortable aspect of it is abolition and the eventual success of those campaigns, we naturally want to tell ourselves a positive story about our national history.

Activists remind us that voices like Frederick Douglass once provided a clear critique of the colonial-capitalist system that Manchester elites helped finance and shape. Furthermore, the 1838 emancipation was effectively purchased by the government through a £20 million loan, which was paid as compensation to enslavers rather than the enslaved, with funds often reinvested into imperial development. It offers hope and new space for dialogue and development. Who five weeks before his 1846 arrival in town succinctly and perfectly analysed the colonial-capitalist system, which the Manchester Men stood at the head of shaping and, these facts were not lost on Frederick Douglass.

As the nation looks toward the bicentenaries of abolition in 2033 and emancipation in 2038, there is a call for the Prime Minister to engage with a more holistic view of history. This involves investing in descendant-led research and community-focused programs to confront the complex, often uncomfortable reality of the past.

Burnham is invited to join historians in Manchester next year to explore these broader contexts, with an open invitation to include G20 leaders and the King in the effort to reconcile with this shared history. Too, if he’d like, he can even bring all the G20 leaders and the king.