The Portico’s Global Threads: The Transatlantic Slave Trade

New research by Manchester’s Global Threads team, published by The Portico Library, traces the library’s foundation in 1802 as an exclusive library to profits and individuals linked to the city’s underacknowledged history connected to the transatlantic slave trade. Researchers Jeevan Kaur Sanghera and Ella Sinclair have discovered never-before-seen connections between the institution and histories of enslavement, exploitation, and the resistance of enslaved people in the Caribbean, embedding the story of this nineteenth-century institution in contemporary discussions for reparative justice.

The research team have traced direct links between the Portico’s prominent members to transatlantic slavery and colonial economies across the globe – from Haiti, to Jamaica, Grenada, St. Lucia, the United States, and beyond. This is a transatlantic history of the Portico Library – and Manchester – stretching its limits beyond the boundaries of the city, connecting its history to the enslaved people and communities directly impacted by Britain’s transatlantic slave trade and colonial pursuits.

With the Portico Reunited project aim of “reading the past to build the future”, the library aims to put these new research findings and transatlantic connections at the service of visitors, community members, and artists for reflection, response, and discussion about how they can help shape the future direction and programming of the institution. Bringing these human experiences to the forefront the research provides crucial context for ongoing reparative justice agendas.

We’d like to acknowledge the emotional labour that has gone into this research and these case studies are not easy to read. Please be aware of this and be mindful of holding the space for yourself and others when reading them. We have pulled together some supporting organisations and a grounding exercise that is available to download as content support on the learning webpage.

The case studies are all free to download as PDFs. The Press Release is available to download here.

Introduction

Matt Stallard, Project Introduction - The Portico’s Global Threads. Download here.

Case Studies

Ella Sinclair, “Thirsty for Knowledge” - The Portico’s Transatlantic Newsroom and Library. Download here.

For the first time in 220 years, Ella Sinclair read the very same newspapers that the Portico’s proprietors did in their purpose-built, members-only newsroom re-discovering the daily diet of national and international news that fed their self-described “thirst for knowledge”. Alongside prices and business news from ports and markets across the globe, the newsroom gave daily updates during its first year on Parliamentary debates about the abolition of Britain’s slave trade, with over a quarter of the Portico’s Manchester proprietors signing a pro-slave trade petition in response.

Jeevan Kaur Sanghera, The Heywoods and the Portico Library - An Intersection of Commerce, Culture, and the Transatlantic Slavery Economy. Download here.

The majority of the Portico’s funders traced their wealth to systems of colonialism and enslavement, particularly through slave trading and cotton supplies, researchers also found that Manchester’s most important bankers, the Heywoods family, collected the subscriptions from members, underwrote the whole library’s finances as insurers, and owned the most shares of any investors. Slave trader Nathaniel Heywood literally laid the foundation stone and his uncle Benjamin Arthur Heywood, the largest shareholder, invested in 47 voyages.

Jeevan Kaur Sanghera, In Pursuit of a Heywood Voyage - From Manchester to Liverpool to Calabar and a Grenadian Uprising. Download here.

Using cutting-edge research methods, Jeevan Sanghera was able to trace one of the Heywood’s 133 slave trading voyages, supplied with Manchester textiles by another Portico founder, Samuel Mather, to Old Calabar (Nigeria) and the transportation of 251 enslaved people to the Caribbean island of Grenada. Remarkably, Sanghera traced a number of those trafficked people to the plantation communities they were finally transported to, which became key sites in the 1795 Fédon Rebellion against slavery and British rule.

Jeevan Kaur Sanghera, The Cotton King. Empire, Enslavement, and the Making of Modern Manchester. Download here.

Ella Sinclair, The Portico Library in the Age of Revolution - Haiti, France, and Manchester. Download here.

Ella Sinclair found deep personal connection to transatlantic events in the figure of French aristocrat and cotton mill-owner Paul Chappe. Records show the brutal branding of trafficked African labourers enslaved by Chappe’s father, who was killed during the Haitian Revolution against slavery. Paul Chappe later reinvested funds paid to him in compensation by the Haitian government into Lancashire industrial development.

Ella Sinclair, Interwoven Histories.The Portico, Hugh Hornby Birley, and slavery in the Caribbean. Download here.

The Global Threads Team, Peterloo – A Transatlantic Moment

As the only building still standing from 1819 in the vicinity of Peter’s Fields, the role of many of the Portico’s prominent members in the Peterloo Massacre has been long recognised, but the team’s research has brought the causes of the protest and the response of the Manchester elite into its fuller transatlantic light.

Part One – The Threat to the Portico. Download here.

Leading the charge of the anti-democracy militia that killed 18 and injured hundreds, Portico board member Hugh Hornby Birley’s position as a leading cotton manufacturer, widely despised by workers, came thanks to business investment from his family’s enslavement of people held on the Rabot Estate in St Lucia and generational connections to slave trading and importation of slave-grown cotton

Part Two – From Manchester, to Montego Bay, to Peterloo. Download here.

Supplied by Portico founders the Heywoods’ family, and carrying £305 of Manchester-made goods, the slave trading ship Dreadnought arrived in Montego Bay in November 1773 with 170 captive African men, women, and children, 4 of whom were purchased by enslaver James Scarlet and 20 by a John Wedderburn.

Scarlet’s plantations to which those people were transported included a sugar estate named Success in Hanover parish, Jamaica, which was later owned by Portico member Sir George Philips. Philips was part of the Liberal political reaction against the horrors of Peterloo as one of the founders of the Manchester Guardian newspaper. John Wedderburn, meanwhile, was the uncle of Robert Wedderburn, the Jamaican-born son of an African mother, who became one of Britain’s leading anti-slavery and pro-democracy campaigners.

Part Three - Robert Wedderburn, “A Lover of Liberty”. Download here.

Robert Wedderburn, was imprisoned for his radical political views a before Peterloo, asked a London crowd a week before the massacre: “Has a slave an inherent right to slay his Master, who refuses him his liberty?”. In response to Peterloo, he encouraged his followers to arm themselves and declared that “the Revolution had already started in blood there and that it must now also end in blood here”.

Peer Reviewers

Keisha Thompson

Programme Manager (Legacies of Enslavement) - The Guardian

Writer ~ Performer ~ Producer ~ Creative Maths Advocate

University of Manchester Honorary Fellow

Independent Theatre Council Co-Chair 

Olympias Music Foundation Trustee

DARE Art Award Artist 2024/5

Steve Slack

Heritage interpretation consultant 

Michelle D. Ravenscroft AFHEA 

PGR Manchester Metropolitan University: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Manchester Man: History, Culture, Identity, and the Portico Library and Collection

X: @mdravenscroft

LinkedIn: Michelle D. Ravenscroft

Find out more about a collaborative volunteer project with the Portico Library via this blog post