Skip to main contentSkip to navigation
Print subscriptions
Sign in
Search jobs
Search
The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

Cotton Capital: ongoing series

  • Black man with very long dreads, wearing black T-shirt, cream blazer, and gray khakis poses in front of long chalkboard between two chairs.

    ‘I Gullah Geechee, too’
    The educators keeping a language of enslaved Africans alive

    • A historical map overlayed on modern New York

      Sites of resistance
      Threatened African burial grounds around the world

    • A historic revolt, a forgotten hero, an empty plinth
      Is there a right way to remember slavery?

    • It’s not unpatriotic to tell the whole truth about Britain and the end of slavery

      Ella Sinclair

About Cotton Capital

  • TRAIL image for Cassandra Goopta's COTTON CAPITAL piece

    The cotton thread
    How we uncovered the Guardian founders’ links to slavery

    The Guardian commissioned historians to investigate its founders and their connections to the slave trade. This is what they found
  • Diana Ejaita for Gary Younge

    Lest we remember
    How Britain buried its history of slavery

  • The historians Prof David Olusoga and Dr Cassandra Gooptar reveal how the Manchester Guardian’s 19th-century founders had connections to transatlantic enslavement and how a ‘trick of history’ has obscured our understanding of the links between slavery and Britain’s Industrial Revolution

    7:32

    ‘That reality can’t be negotiated with’
    David Olusoga on the Guardian’s links to slavery - video

  • First edition of the Manchester Guardian, woven in cotton by S Dawes Weaving, a Lancashire firm established in 1902. Prop styling by Hannah Penfold at Propped Up

    How our founders’ links to slavery change the Guardian today

    Katharine Viner
  • Donellia Chives, trustee of Penn Center, in front of the first school for emancipated slaves in the US

    White gold from Black hands
    The Gullah Geechee fight for a legacy after slavery

  • Cotton Capital podcast

documentaries
Documentary link

Buried

Annina van Neel's life is forever changed after encountering a vast burial ground - one of the most significant traces of the transatlantic slave trade in the world

Watch now29.18
Buried Documentary

Slavery and reparative justice

  • A large scale sculpture shows a man and woman looking to the sky and emerging from the water

    ‘Our history is intertwined’: heirs of Jamaican enslavers apologise to descendants of the enslaved

  • A Story of Bones still shows a person looking out to see from the island

    A Story of Bones review – the battle to right Saint Helena’s colonial wrongs

  • Headshot of Trevor Burnard smiling

    Tributes paid to historian lauded for work on Atlantic slavery

  • The lifesize bronze sculpture of the writer Aphra Behn ready to leave the foundry.

    A Netflix film, statue and a newly discovered first edition: joy at celebrations of Aphra Behn

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Legacies of Enslavement programme

  • A stack of the first edition of the Manchester Guardian, overlaid with an etching of slaves on a plantation in South Caroline ginning cotton and a cartoon of John Bull kneeling before "'King Cotton' and with old ledger pages poking out underneath

    Summary and apology
    Read the Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report

  • Graphic illustration of map images and arrows overlaying an orange background

    Legacies of Enslavement programme
    Overview of our work

  • Composite image showing an 1825 Shuttleworth, Taylor invoice book; a Black Lives Matter protest; a woodcut of the Royal Exchange; a group of formerly enslaved men, women and a child, who were now considered Freedmen; the Cotton Capital logo and a Manchester Guardian masthead

    The Guardian and slavery
    What did the research find and what happens next?

  • Names of people coming into focus

    In memoriam
    The enslaved people linked to the Guardian

Latest

  • Illustration: Dakarai Akil/The Guardian/Getty/Timestamp Media

    A historic revolt, a forgotten hero, an empty plinth: is there a right way to remember slavery? – podcast

  • Two Black women stand in front of a house beyond a massive oak tree.

    They’re fighting polluters destroying historically Black towns – starting with their own

  • Photo of six people sitting in a small open boat look ing over their shoulders at a three-masted wooden ship overlaid on an orange graphic of a woodcut from a slave ship

    ‘Hidden in plain sight’: the European city tours of slavery and colonialism

  • Annina Van Neel Hayes laying lilies outside the door of a brick building

    St Helena urged to return remains of 325 formerly enslaved people to Africa

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.
  翻译：