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

by David Olusoga

The Economist wrote that ‘the cotton manufacture, from the first manipulation of the raw material to the last finish bestowed upon it, constitutes the employment and furnishes the sustenance of the largest proportion of the population of Lancashire, North Cheshire, and Lanarkshire . . . if we take into account the subsidiary trading occupations and add the dependent members of their families we may safely assume that nearer four than three million are dependent for their daily bread on this branch of our industry’.11 Four million people was a fifth of the entire population of Britain. The rise of cotton had forged what one American journalist described as ‘a fusion of interests’ between ‘The planters of the United States . . . and the manufacturers of Great Britain’.12 The Cotton Kingdom and Cottonopolis lived in a state of economic co-dependency; disruption in one region risked bringing ruin upon the other.