Trade and Empire Exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery

I went to see this exhibition in Manchester, as it offered a view of the North's industrial history, which I had previously not considered; the slave trade. The exhibition was created to mark two hundred years since the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. The exhibition highlighted the importance of the slave trade to the story of the Industrial Revolution and to the accumulation of wealth in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and the North overall, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Every ounce of cotton was imported into Britain from overseas plantations, many of which used slave labour.

The slave plantations in the West Indies provided Manchester with raw cotton during the eighteenth century, alongside the traditional sources of the Middle East and India. From 1790, this shifted to a dependence on the slave plantations of the American south and by 1802 America had become the largest supplier of cotton to the British market.

Slavery continued in North America after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and Manchester remained dependent on slave grown cotton. As late as 1860 America supplied 88% of the cotton imported into Britain. Slavery enabled cotton to be grown cheaply and was a major reason why the price of cotton textiles fell steadily from the 1790s to 1840. Also, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new generations of rich industrialists and other businessmen emerged whose wealth derived from businesses associated with cotton.

The exhibition was really thought-provoking as it linked the rise in the population of the Northern cities, especially Manchester, with its population rise of 17,000 to 180,000 people between 1760 and 1830, to the obvious rise in the cotton industry, which led to the increase of African slaves, estimated at over 12 million. The exhibition also highlighted the working and living conditions of the British workers, which is another facet I was looking at, though the images and written text about the crowded, dirty and dangerous conditions of the Northern cities, was completely overshadowed by the basic lack of human right and the inhumana treatment, which the African slaves had to face.