Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

Although cotton was drawn into Liverpool from Brazil, Egypt, India and elsewhere, the proportion of that critical commodity which came into Britain from the United States never fell below 73.4 per cent between 1840 and 1858. In the peak year, 97.1 per cent of all the cotton landed on the Mersey came from the US.16 Three decades after abolishing slavery and half a century after abolishing the slave trade Britain was, economically speaking, up to her neck in Southern cotton slavery. Here the barriers between black British history and mainstream history break down. The Africans who grew and picked the cotton that landed in enormous bales on the docks of Liverpool, although they never set foot on British soil, are as much a part of our story as any black migrant. They were as much caught up in British power and the Atlantic economy as the West Indian slaves who just two decades earlier had been freed from bondage on British plantations. When Karl Marx looked at Britain as she was in the early 1860s, he saw the nation dependent upon two systems of slavery. ‘As long as the English cotton manufacturers depended on slave-grown cotton,’ he wrote, ‘it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic’.17