How the Guardian founder’s history was uncovered – and why it’s just the start

Welcome back to the Cotton Capital newsletter. It’s now been two weeks since the project first launched, and we’ve had an incredible response from our readers. Thousands of you have signed up to the newsletter, and I’m so excited by the community we are slowly building here.

Last week, I asked whether you had any experience of researching either an institution or your own family’s links to transatlantic slavery. I had only expected a few readers to have some experience of this, but – to my surprise – dozens of you responded to say you had done so. UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery database appears to have been a crucial tool for carrying out this research. Many wrote of their visceral shock of finding out about their ancestors’ connections to slavery. The discovery led respondents to ask the following question: how does one begin the process to reckon with this history?

It follows an explosion in the number of institutions announcing a review or commission to look into their own historical links to transatlantic slavery in recent years, particularly following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. They include UK cities such as Edinburgh; religious institutions such as the Church of England; venerated charities like the National Trust; and coveted universities such as the University of Cambridge. Most recently, when confronted by the Guardian on the royals’ long history of involvement in transatlantic trade, King Charles for the first time signalled his support for research into the British monarchy’s historical links with transatlantic slavery in an extraordinary public statement.

But how do these studies work? I’ve got a brilliant expert to give us a behind the scenes look at how this research was carried out at the Guardian.

That’s after some Cotton Capital stories you may have missed.

This week, I had the opportunity to speak to the researcher who has been at the heart of the Scott Trust’s Legacies of Enslavement report: Dr Cassandra Gooptar, also known to us as Cassie. An interdisciplinary researcher from Trinidad and Tobago, the main focus of Cassie’s work centres on slavery, colonialism and reparative justice.

Cassie said she saw a lot of short-term research jobs looking at links to slavery being advertised following the Black Lives Matter movement: “I literally saw in real time, where these universities and institutions were finally listening and putting their money where their mouth is”. In September 2020, she started her job researching the Guardian’s historical links to slavery with the University of Hull. It was initially a three-month contract.

The research was carried out in three stages. Cassie first looked at Guardian founder John Edward Taylor and carried out detailed research on two of the paper’s early financial backers: George Philips and George William Wood.

“It was during the pandemic so a lot of the archives were operating at reduced capacity, or they were not open at all. So there would be a lot of digitisation requests, and they were very helpful. The John Rylands Research Institute and Library in Manchester was the archive that I first went to, because that’s where the relevant Guardian archives are,” Cassie said. The first report found that Taylor had links with the company WG and J Strutt, which imported cotton from the Americas, and that Philips was an enslaver who co-owned the Success plantation in Hanover, Jamaica.

“My boss at the time, and the Guardian, realised that there was a lot more to uncover. So that’s why I got extended for an additional few months to do the second report,” Cassie explained.

It was during the second report that she found the so-called “smoking gun” on Taylor. “I found this unassuming little invoice book in the Derbyshire Record Office” she said. It was the Strutts’ invoice book dated 1822 to 1825. She saw the names of Taylor’s firm along with many others above numbers and initials. “I thought maybe it was ship names. I did a quick Google search and then I realised that all of these people were big Sea Island enslavers,” Cassie said. “This shows that Taylor was importing from these huge enslavers, and that you can trace their plantations and some of the plantations over the course of many decades. It was a really rare find.”

For the third report, Cassie (pictured above) turned her focus to the enslaved. While it isn’t particularly uncommon to find the first names of enslaved people, there often isn’t much detail on who they were. Yet, by looking at runaway slave ads or the apprehended deserters ads, Cassie found an extraordinary level of detail on some people, including a man called Granville, who was enslaved on Philips’s plantation in Jamaica. He was a freedom fighter who was persecuted for his involvement in Jamaica’s Christmas uprising, one of the largest in the British West Indies.

“Those kinds of things were difficult to read, but it was so important to highlight. Just to name the enslaved people is important, but highlighting their stories shows they’re not just statistics, they’re not just numbers. These are actually people, with descendants, who were forced to grow sugar or cotton,” she said.

When beginning this journey, Cassie admits she was nervous that she wouldn’t find anything. “You feel this sense of achievement when you actually do find something, because you know there are links because [Taylor’s associates] were in cotton. It meant a lot to highlight who these men were; not in the abolitionist sense, not in their benevolence, but to tell the other side of the story.”

“Personally and professionally, that was what was important to me; to highlight that untold story. I think this is just the beginning. I hope this spurs on further research from other institutions; whether it’s private, whether its heritage sector, universities, media organisations. I also hope that a lot more people from the Caribbean or people of Caribbean heritage are involved in the research process, not just at the end to engage with them.”

Cassie was keen to stress that she wanted young people from the Caribbean to have the opportunity to engage with this research. “I would like to see the information be translated and made accessible to students. And not just university students – I’m talking about secondary students, so that they learn about their own environments and their own surroundings. I don’t want the information to just be in an ivory tower.”