I was recently speaking to a friend about whether the University of Manchester adequately confronts its relationship to slavery. Instinctively, I replied with an optimistic ‘Yes’. I had thought of the odd article I’d seen on the topic, along with the University’s platforming of historian David Olusoga, of recent Celebrity Traitors fame, and his efforts to bring this history into public awareness. But when I spoke to my cohort about their knowledge, the general understanding was little more than a vague reference to “something about cotton”.
Manchester’s pioneering industrial development in the 19th century was enabled by slavery; 90% of the cotton that earned Manchester the name ‘Cottonopolis’ was picked by enslaved hands in the Americas. Around a third of cotton spun and woven in Manchester was then sold back to Western Africa in return for more people to be enslaved on plantations. The benefactors who built the University of Manchester were entangled in this inhumanity. Without early donations from elite Mancunian families to its predecessor institutions like the Heywoods, made possible through their investment in over one hundred slave ships from Liverpool, our University would not have acquired the global importance it boasts of today. To put this investment into perspective, this would have led to the transportation of around 37,000 African people into a life of brutal enslavement.
This funding continued far after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, with families such as the Gladstones using investments in slavery in Brazil to fund the educational advancement of Owens College, an early institution of our University, far into the latter half of the 19th Century. The name ‘Whitworth’ is at least known amongst most students, from the art gallery, student accommodation, or a stroll past the climbing ivy that patterns Whitworth Hall in autumn. However, the Whitworths’ funding of the Confederate enslavers in the American Civil War, providing them with ‘Whitworth sharpshooter’ guns, is a lesser known fact. Without families such as The Heywoods or The Gladstones or The Whitworths, none of us wold be attending this University as it is today. Yet a majority of the student body does not know these names, nor of how the plight of the enslaved enabled this University to prosper.
This is through no lack of fervour from University academics. In recent years, the University has involved many scholars in new research into this history, as detailed in their Cotton Capital panel last year. The Founders and Funders exhibition in 2023, for instance, revealed this tacit slave trade connection through the use of University-owned artefacts. This thorough unearthing of our university’s legacy goes far beyond many institutions’ lazy signposting of buzzwords and the odd line in a largely unread university-wide email.
Nevertheless, the university appears yet to move beyond the realm of scholarly exploration to more accessible engagement. The awareness of such projects remains confined to those who engage with history on a regular basis, rather than the wider student population. Most students are unlikely to watch an hour-long panel on slavery in their spare time, and the crucial information divulged in the Founders and Funders exhibition has not been continually emphasised by the university in the year and a half since it ended.
When I spoke to leading scholar and University lecturer Dr Natalie Zacek, she assessed that “we’ve made a lot of progress”, and highlighted that dissemination of this knowledge will take time. However, she acknowledged that “there’s definitely more to be done”. More emphasis on UNESCO’s International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition would be an ideal place to start, along with an official push to utilise more popular avenues of communication amongst students to raise awareness, such as the Student Union or social media platforms.
My friend had been right to call me out – “adequate” is far too generous a word. The momentum is there, and many dedicated academics have ensured this history is not doomed to be forgotten. But this must be moved out of academic spheres and into public consciousness. Without any Codrington or Colston-esq statues to pull down, the indirect connection of the University to slavery can easily become obscured. As such, a regular circulation of the names of these early investors – the Heywoods, Gladstones, and Whitworths – is an act the University must begin to undertake.
