A research project examining 19th-century Manchester has traced connections between cotton workers at the Peterloo massacre and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, showing how slavery shaped labour struggles in Britain.
The Global Threads public history project studied the 1819 Peterloo massacre, when Manchester and Salford Yeomanry shot and trampled peaceful protesters at St Peter's Field. The killings led to working-class voting rights and the founding of the Manchester Guardian newspaper.
The project found that Manchester cotton workers and enslaved Caribbean Africans, though separated by thousands of miles and vastly different circumstances, faced exploitation by the same economic forces. Robert Wedderburn, a Black abolitionist based in London, articulated this connection at the time.
The research frames slavery as hanging "like a spectre" over Mancunian struggles for equality, suggesting the labour systems were interconnected rather than separate historical events.