Tag Archives: Birmingham

Empire, Pillars of Capitalism, Writing cities

Slavery and the Industrial Revolution: Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester in Eric Williams

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This is long past due. Part 2 of Eric Williams writing about the direct links between these cities I know and love and the horrors of slavery.

Liverpool

Where much of the story begins really.

The story of this increase in the slave trade is mainly the story of the rise of Liverpool. Liverpool’s first slave trader, a modest vessel of thirty tons, sailed for Africa in 1709…by the end of the century, gained Liverpool the distinction of being the greatest slave trading port in the Old World. (34)

Now for a list of leading slave traders, I like naming names because these are the kind of names you find everywhere — not least statues, plaques: Bryan Blundell, trustee, treasurer, chief patron and most active supporter of the Blue Coat Hospital. Foster Cunliffe, who with his sons owned 4 ships capable of holding 1120 slaves — another supporter of the charity. Thomas Leyland, mayor of Liverpool, one of the most active traders with immense profits, became senior partner in the banking firm of Clarkes and Roscoe.

John Gladstone — partner in Corrie and Company, engaged in the grain trade, also a slave owner. Through foreclosures acquired large plantations in British Guiana and Jamaica, also involved in trade in sugar and other produce. Opened up trade connections with Russia, India and China on the back of it. Prominent public figure as was his son, William Ewart.

Heywood bank founded on slave profits, later the family married and mingled with the Gladstone family, future generations would be bankers.

On the physical form of the city:

It was a common saying that several of the principal streets of Liverpool had been marked out by the chains, and the walls of the houses cemented by the blood, of the African slaves., and one house was nicknamed “Negro Row.” The red brick Customs House was blazoned with Negro heads.

Where Bristol moved to focus on sugar, Liverpool remained with  slaves (though one family there also manufactured sugar — the house of Branckers, but of course they were also involved in the slave trade). It was intimately connected with rest of Lancashire, and with Manchester. Abolitionists might have blamed the rise of Liverpool on the rise of manufacturing drawing larger populations to Lancashire and Manchester, but in fact it was exactly the opposite. Manufacturing arose from the profits of slavery.

There was a whole, horrible industry surrounding slavery. I had never thought of it, but of course someone had to make the chains.

The ironmaster’s interest in the slave trade continued throughout the century. When the question of abolition came before Parliament, the manufacturers of and dealers in iron, copper, brass and lead in Liverpool petitioned against the project, which would affect employment in the town… (84)

Bristol

As stated above:

When Bristol was outstripped in the slave trade by Liverpool, it turned its attention from the triangular trade to the direct sugar trade (61).

Clever losers, Bristol.

There is a brilliant story about Judge Jeffreys ‘the butcher’, an awful man who sentenced many to die. I don’t want there to be a ‘but’ and there isn’t really I suppose. Judge Jeffreys did come to Bristol once to ‘sweep it clean’ by going after those who kidnapped people to send them to the colonies. While he was presiding over the court, he forced the mayor himself into the dock, called him a kidnapper and sentenced him to a fine of a thousand pounds.

But back to sugar, and Bristol’s intimate connections with the West Indies:

…so important did the islands become to Bristol that for the first half of the nineteenth century Bristol was always represented in Parliament by a West Indian–a Baillie, a Protheroe, or a Miles. (62)

Naming names again. There were also the Pinneys in Bristol, owning sugar plantations on Nevis. This connection meant that by 1799 there were 20 sugar refineries in Bristol, and in total more sugar processed than London (although 80 refineries were to be found there). It was also considered of finer quality, and sugar long remained one of the staples of Bristol. (74)

Bristol expanded into other areas, and the city was the main manufacturer of Pacotille — the principal cargo sent to Africa to use to buy slaves. It is a catch-all term I didn’t know before, included glass beads and bottles. Williams writes:

Individually these items were of negligible value; in the aggregate they constituted a trade of great importance, so essential a part of the slave transactions that the word “pacotille” is still commonly used in the West Indies today to denote a cheap and tawdry bauble given as compensation for objects of great value. (81)

A new word, such a good word, capitalism in a word.

Speaking of capitalism, like the ironmongers of Liverpool, manufacturing in Bristol throve. Iron of course, was also used, along with copper items from Bristol’s Holywell works. They made chains, manacles and rings.

Glasgow

This I didn’t know:

Not until the Act of Union of 1707 was Scotland allowed to participate in colonial trade. That permission put Glasgow on the map. Sugar and tobacco underlay the prosperity of the town in the eighteenth century. Colonial commerce stimulated the growth of new industries. (64)

While primarily associated with tobacco, Glasgow was also involved in sugar refining. All for love, too. If you can fall in love wtith slave owners. But Glasgow became one of the leading ports of entry for West Indian sugar after two officers, Colonel William Macdowall and Major James Milliken wooed and married two great sugar heiresses while staying in St Kitts. Mrs Tovie and her daughter forged a bond with Scotland that shaped the city. I confess I am a little intrigued.

Birmingham

Not much to say about Birmingham, I’ve not spend much time there, but there is this:

Guns formed a regular part of every African cargo. Birmingham became the center of the gun trade as Manchester was of the cotton trade. (82)

It had to compete with London for this though.

Manchester

Finally my current city of residence. Our own leading slave traders: Arthur Heywood, both slave trader & the first to import slave-grown cotton from the US, also treasurer of the Manchester Academy, one son a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society and the Billiard Club (apparently the very height of gentlemanliness in Manchester). Again, to return to links between slavery and the rise of capitalism:

It was only the capital accumulation of Liverpool which called the population of Lancashire into existence and stimulated the manufactures of Manchester. That capital accumulation came from the slave trade, whose importance was appreciated more by contemporaries than by later historians.  (63)

It did all come down to cotton. What the building of ships for the transport of slaves did for eighteenth century Liverpool, the manufacture of cotton goods for the purchase of slaves did for eighteenth century Manchester.

Manchester goods for Africa were taken to the coast in the Liverpool slave vessels. Lancashire’s foreign market meant chiefly the West Indian plantations and Africa…It was this tremendous dependence on the triangular trade that made Manchester. (68)

This despite the initial strength of superior Indian cottons and their superior dying processes. Even so:

[A]ccording to estimates given to the Privy Council in 1788, Manchester reported annually to Africa goods worth £200,000, £180,000 of this for Negroes only; the manufacture of these goods represented an investment of £300,000 and gave employment to 180,000 men, women, and children. (70)

The same close connections weren’t as evident as those between ship-builders and slave trading in Liverpool, but at least two cotton manufacturers were also members of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa — Sir William Fazackerly and Samuel Touchet. Another firm, the Hibberts, owned sugar plantations in Jamaica, while also supplying goods to African Company for the slave trade.

Above all Manchester was part of this shift from Mercantilism to Industrial Capitalism:

Between 1785 and 1800, eighty-two steam engines were constructed for cotton mills, fifty-five of these in Lancashire alone.” The first steam loom factory was built in Manchester in 1806. In 1835 there were 116,8oo power looms in all Great Britain, all but six per cent in the cotton industry

In 1785 the exports of British cotton manufactures exceeded one million pounds in value; they were thirty-one million in 1830. The cloth printed in Great Britain increased from 20 million yards in 1796 to 347 million in 1830. The population employed by the industry rose from 350,000 in 1788 to 800,000 in 1806. There were 66 cotton mills in Manchester and Salford in 1820, 96 in 1832. Cotton was “raising men like mushrooms.” Oldham in 1760 was a village of 400 inhabitants; in 1801 it had 20,000. In 1753 Bolton had a single, rough, ill-paved street; in 1801 the population was 17,000. Manchester’s population increased sixfold between 1773 and 1824.. Cotton weavers and manufacturer, unrepresented in the Manchester procession of trades in 1763 on the occasion of the coronation of George II, were the most prominent feature of the coronation of George IV in 1820. In a larger sense it was the coronation of King Cotton. (128)

Manchester in fact was a leader in the fight for free trade once strict controls ceased to make it profits:

If Manchester still thrived on “shirts for black men,” the British West Indies had no monopoly on blacks, and the larger slave populations of the United States and Brazil offered attractive markets….of what use, then, asked Manchester in wrath, was the system of monopoly to the British manufacturer? (133)

 

I am still fascinated by this shift but write more in part 1. Still, to recap it all, and what that mean for these growing urban centres:

Williams gives the example of the career of Mark Phillips. In 1832 elected to represent Manchester in Reformed Parliament. Connected to West Indian interests, but still decided to stand behind abolition. Industrialists lined up also, gives example of Samuel Garbett, ironmaster of Birmingham.  John Bright of Cotton. Richard Cobden in wool. Liverpool too, turned against slave trade and sugar. Not, to be sure, against slavery itself and cotton. Glasgow too turned, ‘The days of Macdowall and the sugar heiresses were over.’ (163)

[Williams, Eric (1989 [1944]) Capitalism and Slavery. London: Andre Deutsch.]

Ancient History, Archaeology, City & Country, Labour

Time’s Anvil: seeds, saints, fascism and labour

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Time's Anvil -- Richard MorrisRichard Morris packed Time’s Anvil full of so much fascinating things, that I wanted a second post to collect them all up (first post is here). First, this hilarious quote from Nikolaus Pevsner on England:

This is a very modest country, satisfied with very little. All morning one can see one’s breath indoors… To look at it positively, I suppose people are closer to nature… (1)

This reminds me of evenings spent huddled next to relative’s radiators exuding a very faint warmth.

On seeds

I did love the aside on seed saving and diversity, a key battle now in view of corporations like Monsanto and a reminder how this has long formed part of our culture. One late Saxon charm for the improvement of land directs that

seed from elsewhere be taken from beggars in exchange for twice as much…

A good strategy of improved stock and distribution, and incorporates the most poor into key agricultural systems in a way that could be respectful, though it hardly mitigates the suffering of such a life.

There is another fascinating quotes from John Letts, ‘Living Under a Medieval Field’ on old planting systems:

every plant in a land race is slightly different from its neighbour, and medieval cereals were consequently very uneven in straw height, ripening time, grain yield and other agronomic traits. This diversity ensured that a portion of the crop almost always set seed irrespective of the many environmental stresses that can destroy a crop such as drought, waterlogging, frost or crop disease.

Such diversity is a key component of permaculture and organic farming systems, and another part of our past that farmers are trying to relearn and bring into practice.

On saints

The early role of the church in shaping the physical and mental maps of the land is also so interesting. There is some discussion of the changing nature of the church, the tendency of early Anglo-Saxon bishops to be treated as saints, and therefore this:

A map of their resting places is a diagram of power. (261)

There are proofs of how this became part of everyday life in places like Wells cathedral — one of my very favourite cathedrals, so I was surprised to learn that long ago the skulls of its Anglo-Saxon bishops sat on display there as relics. Some of them show patches of high polish caused by the touch of multiple hands, others have had perfect circles bored out from their backs, probably for amulets or shrines.

It never occurred to me that people might describe the incorporation of older buildings into newer as a sign of laziness or lack of vision or skill, but apparently so it has been said. Morris here reclaims the idea that incorporating older churches into the design of expanded churches incorporated their holiness and power. Interesting that my own reactions to much of the book underline Morris’s argument that much of what we understand of the past is conditioned by our present. Seems that two hundred years of archeological history are quite an indictment of power structures in society, though there is very little unpacking of how age, gender, race, national origin, class and etc impact our readings of things.

I quite love thinking more about this, though:

In traditional religion, community embraced the living and the dead, each supporting the other in a fellowship that extended across history. When Reform snuffed out that coloured world of saints, lights, signs, gestures and seasons it shrank the boundaries of community, dimmed collective memory and diminished time. (267)

The ties between fascism and planning & conservation

I learned a little more about the Third Reich here as well — apparently Heinrich Himmler

held sway over functions that included the SS, the police, the consolidation of German national identity, and settlement of the East.

The settlement of the East alongside consolidation of identity? That combination at first seemed so odd to me, and then I thought about it and it made a perfect chilling sense. There has always been a terrible dark side to our connection to land and how we live upon it. Himmler and his friend (he had friends…) Hanns Johst toured upper Silesia in 1940, Morris writes:

The two men reflected on how the German settlers would soon change the appearance of the land. Trees and hedges would be planted. Shrubs would grow…All of this was a great work of culture undertaken in awe of nature. They speculated on how these changes would ‘create protection from the wind, increase dew, and stimulate formation of clouds, force rain and thus push a more economically viable climate further toward the East. (329)

It heads to megalomania there, which is unsurprising, but also it appears they imagined a fairly comprehensive plan for living well upon the earth. Crikes.

I discovered Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, also had claims to fame as a Nazi sympathizer. So on the one hand you have the left Atlee government establishing parks and protecting buildings and wildlife for the working classes due, but also alongside concerns about ‘spoiling’ of the countryside and development. Morris quotes Engels’ descriptions of Manchester (which I too have quoted extensively) and poverty, writes:

It was partly in reaction to such squalor and moral degradation that conservation in Britain originated. That is not only why conservatism had its heart in the countryside — where despite a century of urbanism the heart of England’s identity still lay — but why historically it was anti-urban. the National Trust was founded to protect land ‘against development and industrialization.’ (331)

Their efforts allied in this with people of the far right, who saw nature as separate from human beings, and in need of protection from the masses.

Too often quite fascist protection. There are still clear affinities in some of the rhetoric today, and more than ever this is something we have to understand and root out.

I wish there was a little symbol I could use so that when I make a pun I could laugh to myself self-deprecatingly.

On the beauty of labour

Part of the lure of the past and the wilderness can also be seen in the writings of William Morris and Ruskin —

buildings and monuments of earlier ages evoke melancholy, an emotion then held to be purer and deeper than joy and to be a stimulant to imaginative consciousness.

A gothic emotion — I liked the evocation of the gothic and the uncanny. I found it interesting he doesn’t go into, or even mention, William Morris’ deeper beliefs and Socialist foundations, I think this love of medieval building is more about craftmanship and the beauty of certain kinds of labour, but there you are. There is, however, a quoted fragment from D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Things Men Have Made’:

Things we have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still, with the glowing life of forgotten men who made them. (47)

It seems to encapsulate the worth and beauty of things granted them by the labour involved in making them. Morris derides the idea of industrial production as revolution or as something that just broke out, which is an interesting idea to follow:

…another result of the lumpish way in which we cut up time — a tendency which previous chapters have shown can encourage fixation with difference at the expense of affinity, put change before flow and predispose us to simple determinism. (345)

if the industrial revolution had a defining moment it was the point at which large sections of the workforce switched from selling things they made in to selling their labour. (348)

There was another section on Birmingham, and just how much was manufactured there through industrialistion based upon this selling of labour. Johanna Schopenhauer writes in 1803:

that there is not a village in civilized Europe, perhaps not a house, where there cannot be found some industrial product made in that city, if only a button, a needle, or a pencil. (344)

By 1875, workers made over ten thousand billion nails a year.

I can’t quite get my head around the scale of that, but like how again it speaks to widespread connections through materials and labour, though I have read plenty of the desperate poverty and horrible working conditions underlying it.

A few last things, happier things, like the Lunar Society! The Lunatics met in each other’s homes the  Monday evening closest to the full moon: Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestly, Matthew Boulton and James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood. I also wanted to remember to find George Peele’s ‘The Voice From the Well’ and read it, and set a reminder to self to walk the Icknield way… The name so old that not even the Anglo-Saxons remembered where it came from.

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Intersections, Reviews, Struggle & Movement

Why We Can’t Wait — Martin Luther King

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9831183Martin Luther King, Jr (1964) Signet

I can’t believe I hadn’t read this before, but how amazing to readjust what I think I know, my ideas of someone I think I know, writing in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, describing 1963 as the great year of revolution when:

The Negro also had to recognize that one hundred years after emancipation he lived on a lonely island of economic insecurity in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Negroes are still at the bottom of the economic ladder. They live within two concentric circles of segregation. One imprisons them on the bases of color, while the other confines them within a separate culture of poverty (23).

‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ remains so so powerful. What surprised me most–though it shouldn’t have, because what school will teach this about King?–is just how much time he spends not on white supremacy in its violent forms, but on white liberals and their hindrance of the cause. I feel in many ways this book was written for them, but it is much more scathing than I expected, and doesn’t fail to get to the meat of the matter. I have the impression of King as more conciliatory and more liberal at this point, but that isn’t what you take from the book.

There were two and one-half times as many jobless Negroes as whites in 1963, and their median income was half that of the white man. Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice, but tolerated or ignored economic injustice. But the Negro knows that these two evils have a malignant kinship (24).

There is also less on nonviolence than I expected, but it is good:

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and enobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals. Both a practical and a moral answer to the Negro’s cry for justice, nonviolent direct action proved that it could win victories without losing wars, and so became the triumphant tactic of the Negro Revolution of 1963.

Yes he does call it a revolution. When he discusses violence as opposed to nonviolence, it is in such a way that you feel if he didn’t believe violence doomed to fail, he’d consider it much more carefully. He knows that struggle is itself a good in the face of so much oppression: ‘The Revolution of the Negro not only attacked the external cause of his misery, but revealed him to himself. He was somebody. He had a sense of somebodiness. He was impatient to be free’ (30). This was not an understanding that could be won through legal battles in the courts. Instead direct nonviolent action was more suited to the times and to what was possible (though carried out to supplement legal strategies, not to replace them). What I also loved is the insight that this transformation ‘had the marvelous effect of changing the face of the enemy. The enemy the Negro faced became not the individual who had oppressed him but the evil system which permitted that individual to do so’ (38). This is how people move and change and in doing so, change the world.

I loved the many details of the Birmingham campaign, I wish I had read this long ago. While recruiting people for trainings in tactics and nonviolence, Wyatt Walker was mapping out all of downtown Birmingham — each store and its eating facilities, its entrances and exits, number of tables and stools and chairs to determine the number of demonstrators per shop, primary and secondary targets so if one meeting place or route was blocked by the police they had a backup plan. That kind of planning, along with the long preparation of demonstrators to stay strong yet remain nonviolent in the face of violence through trainings and role-playing is what made these campaigns work. My admiration is immense, and it has grown for King who knew so well the nuts and bolts of the campaigns for which I have heard argued he was a figurehead. They started their campaign small–and late for reasons to do with the elections–and ramped it up with 65 nightly meetings. I have to write that again, 65 evening meetings. That’s a hell of a hard pace. Even when you do so much singing.

I also know the prominence of the church should not surprise me, but still, it did. All volunteers had to sign a Commitment Card as part of their training, and all respect to these precepts even as someone not entirely behind nonviolence:

I HEREBY PLEDGE MYSELF–MY PERSON AND BODY–TO THE NONVIOLENT MOVEMENT. THEREFORE I WILL KEEP THE FOLLOWING 10 COMMANDMENTS:
1. MEDITATE daily on the tecahings and life of Jesus
2. REMEMBER always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation–not victory,
3. WALK and TALK in the manner of love, for God is love.
4. PRAY daily to be used by God in order that all men might be free.
5. SACRIFICE personal wishes in order that all men might be free.
6. OBSERVE with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7. SEEK to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8. REFRAIN from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9. STRIVE to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10. FOLLOW the directions of the movement and of the captain on a demonstration.

I love that King noted what a mistake it had been — and not entirely their fault given the circumstance — not to have brought on board the many different local organizations before they started, and his hard work to do so a little belatedly. King’s role as the principal fundraiser for the movement–always a huge concern in social justice worker–is also made clear. I am glad he chose prison over fundraising for bail money, glad that Harry Belafonte is so damn awesome. And glad that he saw that youth and the students were the key to victory.

I was a little confused at the care King takes to defend their actions in defying for the first time an injunction against protest–it would not occur to me to critique anyone for ignoring such a racist and unconstitutional order in Alabama, but clearly, there was much critique from white ‘allies’, prompting a public letter that King responded to in the extraordinary ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ included here. I imagine him sitting in prison finally allowing some of the rage to escape in his description of the suffering a father feels when his children come face to face with prejudice, his descriptions of the daily struggle must have brought the relgious figures censuring him to their knees. Other highlights:

I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth (79).

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light…but groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed (80).

We have waited more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independance, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter (81).

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councils or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season’. Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will (84-85)

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people (86).

Amazing. I was also not expecting–and loved–this:

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society…. It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness….Our history teaches us that wielding the sword against racial superiority is not effective…On the other hand, history also tecahes that submission produces no acceptable result. Nonresistance merely reinforces the myth that one race is inherently inferior to another (120).

A final note, though there is so much more here. It’s almost a throw-away line, but King notes that the African-American movement has become strong enough that it can now have allies, it can make its own commitments that it can deliver and have equality in that it will still be powerful if its allies walk away. This is core to some of the later theorizing, by Stokely and Carmichael and Julius Lester for example, of how to built movement. I like that King said it too. For all their differences, they had so much more in common in terms of hope and vision and audacity than most of them have with leading figures in these sad days.

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