Introduction to the Emerging Scholars Programme

A Pro-Slavery Cabal

The team began at the start: by going to the records of the very first committee meetings of the Manchester Exchange company in 1804 and onwards across its first decade, where we could see immediately that this was a transformational moment.

Where the previous Exchange in Manchester had been built and run by the lord of the manor and was open to the public, Beth Carson’s work describes the birth of the new Exchange as something modern and substantially different – the foundation of a corporation by a group of shareholders and their appointed committee of directors.

In this we see the flexing and building of the new power of the commercial and manufacturing class in Manchester, taking it into their own hands to come together and create a space for business, networking, and information sharing.

They used the tools and practices of commerce and capitalism – incorporation of a company and investment through shareholding to raise the capital to build the first modern Exchange building.

Carson’s analysis of the founding directors found a pro-slavery cabal at the heart of the institution:

In 1806, the same year the Exchange building first opened its doors, at least ten members of its governing committee signed a petition opposing the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill, which sought to ban the trade of enslaved people from West Africa to the British Empire . . . This finding challenges the dominant abolitionist narrative often associated with Manchester, which celebrates the thousands of Mancunians who signed anti-slavery petitions. While these efforts were undoubtedly significant, the petition signed by half of the Exchange’s first committee reveals the city’s divided reality. The leaders who shaped Manchester’s economic and civic landscape were working against abolitionist goals, instead prioritizing their financial interests and the continued trafficking and exploitation of enslaved Africans.

While the facts of Manchester’s industrial rise being built on slave trading and trade with the Atlantic colonies have long been noted by historians, if not widely acknowledged and understood, this discovery helps us to understand just how fundamental the transatlantic slavery economy was to the creation and perpetuation of industrial Manchester.

The pro-slavery cabal of Exchange leaders were not just passively part of importing slave produced cotton and exporting “Manchester Goods” to West Africa to be exchanged for trafficked captives. They were actively lobbying and organising collectively to maintain the lucrative trade, in the face of anti-slave trade petitions signed by thousands of Mancunians.

Land, Colonisation, & Industry

In 1809, many of Manchester’s leading merchants would gather to attend the opening of the first Exchange building, described by Destinie Reynolds as “a large, grandiose” structure that spanned “the corner of Market Street all the way up to St. Ann’s Square”. One of the core discussions prevalent in the early board meetings of the new Exchange committee was the negotiation and finalisation of the purchase of this plot from aristocrat and major Manchester landowner Lord Ducie, otherwise known as Francis Moreton Reynolds.

Destinie Reynolds’s study outlines how the very site that this grand new Exchange was built upon shows how the historic, pre-modern power and wealth held in land was deeply intertwined over generations with the emerging new world of colonialism, capitalism, and industry, finding that:

His grandfather, Thomas Reynolds (24 April 1745 – 12 August 1773), was the director of the South Sea Company between 1715 – 1722 . . .  The company was given the right to traffic and sell 4,800 enslaved people annually to ensure super profits for the company and its shareholders.

Through inheritance and business activities the Reynolds family came into ownership of the large Strangeways Estate, which covered a considerable area of land in and around what is now central Manchester. This ownership translated into continued profits over generations through the leasing of land to cotton merchants and manufacturers and particularly by working in concert with the founding directors to provide (and profit from) the sale of a substantial and valuable site to build the first Exchange upon.

As well as benefiting from generational profits and business activities linked to enslavement and slave-produced goods, Lord Ducie spent much of his personal naval and governmental career deeply involved in the enforcement of British colonial rule and the British slavery system. In response to Sandy’s Uprising in Tobago in 1770, he received thanks from the Tobago Council “for the readiness he showed in coming voluntarily to the relief of this infant colony, at a time when it was not only feared to be in the greatest distress from internal unrest”, having ordered the vessel he commanded to sail directly to the island to support the suppression of the rebellion of enslaved people.

Furthermore, Destinie Reynolds outlines how Lord Ducie used his wealth and standing to secure a profitable role as Provost Marshal of Barbados in his later career, directly responsible for the enforcement of draconian and brutal laws policing and limiting enslaved persons’ freedom and activities, as well as regulating slave trading sales and auctions on behalf of the colonial British authorities.

Access to Produce and Political Power

One question we repeatedly asked ourselves as a team was: “Why would these investors and aristocratic landowner concentrate so much of their valuable time, money, and influence in the building of this institution?” This is a question we have begun to answer thanks to the Emerging Scholars’ findings.

First and foremost, they wanted to make business easier, more efficient, more profitable, and open new opportunities for expansion. Most centrally, that was the manufacturing and marketing of textiles made predominantly and increasingly using slave-produced cotton. Beth Carson also found further transatlantic connections from one of the founders, William Myers, recorded as importing 70 casks of slave-produced rice from South Carolina in 1807, while Aimee Eggington has written about the Greg family’s large and profitable sugar estate in Dominica – just two examples that hint at the much more extensive activities of the founders and their business networks.

As well as creating a place for the sharing of information and the cutting of deals, the exclusive, members-only space of the Exchange helped create political platforms for Manchester’s burgeoning commercial class. A key early example of this was discovered in the Exchange’s vital role in shaping one of 19th century-Manchester’s most prominent and successful political campaigns:

Free trade would later become the, cornerstone of the ascendant political philosophy of Manchester Liberalism championed by John Bright and Richard Cobden. Their successful Anti-Corn Law League promoted free trade to reduce government intervention in international commerce and lower food prices for the working classes.

We see here however, how free trade’s roots as a core Manchester ideology are traced to the Exchange and its early committee who developed the platform to push for unregulated access to plantation economies, particularly in the United States, exposing the deep entanglement with the transatlantic slavery economy across Mancunian political and economic life.

We can see through these examples drawn from our Emerging Scholars’ original research how the Exchange became one of the most important sites in the history of the modern world. Founded by a pro-slavery cabal to enhance the trade in slave-produced goods, the deals and decisions made in the Exchange directly led to the forced displacement and labour of millions and transformation of continents into the service of slavery-driven profit.

Not only that, the centralised power and direction that a small group of Manchester businessmen were able to foster through the institution allowed them to build a strong elite culture and political alignment to wrestle the world around them further into the service of their interests.

Cottonopolis, Today’s Exchange, and the Shift from West to East

Despite the lobbying of the Exchange’s key founders, the abolition of the British slave trade became law in 1807, bringing Manchester’s extensive direct involvement and profiting from the trafficking of captive Africans to an end. In a depressing irony of history, however, Manchester was becoming year-on-year even more deeply dependent upon enslavement for its development and the prosperity of its commercial class.

Cottonopolis, the world’s first industrial city, was inseparably and symbiotically born out of the partnership between the Royal Exchange’s members, shareholders, directors and the spread of the slavery empire in North America. By the eve of the United States Civil War, 80% of Manchester and Lancashire’s raw cotton was imported from what became the pro-slavery Confederacy.

When the Civil War began and blockades generated the vast economic impacts of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, with hundreds of thousands of workers unemployed and starving, the Royal Exchange was embarking upon an unprecedented project of growth and investment to construct the building that we know today.

On the face of it, this seems counterintuitive. However, the work of the Emerging Scholars team allows us to understand how the profits and networks of British colonialism and enslavement centred on the institution were able to move seamlessly and creatively into fashioning a new and even more glorious epoch of Manchester’s industrial pre-eminence.

Through a ground-breaking forensic accounting analysis, Aashe Singh has demonstrated how this shift was affected and how the Royal Exchange and its leaders were central to this globally-transformational process:[KP4]

In 1866, the Board of Directors secured the means of financing their new building with an Act of Parliament . . . the Board called on all the Exchange Proprietors to buy the company’s new shares, and sought out rich lenders in their mercantile network.

Between 1865 and 1874, they succeeded in raising a sum of roughly £271,867 (£262,550,000 in 2024) by selling a total value of £135,867 (£131,200,000) of their new shares and borrowing £136,000 (£131,350,000) on mortgages . . . Of all the funds borrowed, nearly 24% were lent by the partnership of Thomas Stewart Gladstone, Murray Gladstone, George Clerk Arbuthnot and Henry Walker . . . They offered £33,000 (£31,870,000) on mortgage: providing for nearly 12% of the total funds raised for the building of the Second Exchange.

The driving force behind this colossal refinancing and expansion of the Royal Exchange and the creation of today’s building, centred around “the biggest trading room in the world” was Murray Gladstone. He was Chair of the board of directors from 1865 to 1875  and a scion and inheritor of the Gladstone family, the single largest owners and investors in British slavery in its final years, and largest claimants of government compensation in 1838 following the abolition of British slavery.

As Moleka Newman outlines in her investigation into Murray Gladstone’s wealth and activities:

Born in 1816, Murray was the fifth son of Robert Gladstone, a prominent Liverpool merchant. Robert, alongside his perhaps more infamous brother John . . . by 1820 . . . “held £250,000 worth of investments in the West Indies”, which equates to over £24 million in 2023. Robert died in 1835, leaving the £9225 16s 5d (£1 million today) he was awarded to be divided equally between his children fostering a “multi-generational dynasty” and enabling new colonial ventures.

Alongside the Gladstones’ vast investment, Murray’s close partner George Clerk Arbuthnot also played a crucial role in the bankrolling of the today’s Royal Exchange. As Singh outlines, the Arbuthnots were likewise deeply embedded in the plantation slavery system:

George Clerk Arbuthnot’s father, Sir William Arbuthnot . . . began his career as an assistant to his maternal uncle John Urquhart on the latter’s cotton plantations on Carriacou island, Grenada.11 After John’s death in 1785, he became the manager of his uncle’s plantations and earned a salary of £100 a year till 1794 . . .  Sir William Arbuthnot died in 1829, bequeathing £3000 (£333,500 in 2024) to his son George Clerk Arbuthnot who was then 26 years old.

As British slavery was brought to an end through the pan-Caribbean resistance of enslaved people and organising of British anti-slavery activists, the Arbuthnots were crucial players in the repurposing of commercial activities, investments, and profits into new forms of exploitative labour arrangement, reaching across the British Empire:

George Clerk Arbuthnot worked together with his younger brother James Edward Arbuthnot, acting as the agent for his company Hunter, Arbuthnot & Co. . . . One of his most important actions in this capacity was the migration of 36 Indian labourers in 1834 to work under five- to- seven year contracts in Mauritius . . . most were recruited with false promises, if not direct kidnapping . . .Almost immediately, the venture became widely known among the merchants and planters of the British Empire as the first ‘successful’ experiment with Indian indentured labour . . . Consequently, the British planter John Gladstone wrote to G C Arbuthnot in 1836 to discuss the viability of employing Indian indentured labourers on his sugar plantations in British Guiana.

The relationship between Arbuthnot and the Gladstones was central to the maintenance of the British Caribbean plantation system through the forging of an indentured labour system that transported Asian labourers to former British slave colonies.

Moreover, as Moleka Newman outlines, they were also central figures in the shift of Manchester investment and the focus of the Royal Exchange’s members moving towards using British rule in India to generate a vast market for Lancashire-produced textiles through the control of Indian commerce and suppression of local industrial development:

Murray joined Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co in Calcutta in the early 1840s . . . [initially] the company provided indentured labourers for his plantations in Guyana. . . . Murray’s status as a merchant grew so that in 1851 he returned to establish his own branch of the firm, which “acted as a direct conduit for . . . firms in India to deal with textile producers in Manchester”. By 1872, he was the largest shareholder in Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co, making a profit of £6,092 in that year alone (almost £700,000 today)

Newman shows clearly how Murray Gladstone’s position as Chair of the Royal Exchange during its most ambitious period of development was secured through his pivotal role in shaping the previous two decades of Lancashire’s textile predominance as the broker and shaper of its most lucrative colonial marketplace, drawing throughout upon generations of slave-produced wealth.

The building that houses the Royal Exchange Theatre today is the physical manifestation of the wealth that Manchester’s elite cultivated through the institution and a testament of the image that that prestige compelled them to project to the wider world – its vast size and ornate and gilded architecture a deliberate projection to visitors, observers, and the wider world of the importance the Manchester Men wanted to be accorded.

A space fit for the hosting of a wide range of international luminaries, ambassadors, and heads of state, including Queen Victoria, from whom the “Royal” patronage now included in the building’s name was bestowed, who signed the Royal Exchange guest book in 1894 with her cipher “Victoria R I” – The “I” standing for “Imperatrix” – Empress of India.

Bringing the World Back Into the Royal Exchange

A hugely enlightening case study from Emerging Scholar Aimee Eggington shows through just a single family of core Royal Exchange members we can trace multiple and overlapping connections to profits from the transatlantic slavery economy. Similarly to the Gladstones, the Greg family were prominent members of the exchange across multiple generations:[KP5]

Samuel Greg was specifically included in Parson’s The Centenary of the Manchester Royal Exchange, as a notable subscriber of 1819, underscoring his repute amongst Manchester’s businessmen. His sons, Samuel Greg Jr. and Robert Hyde Greg continued this legacy, appearing on subscriber lists in the 1830s. Generations later, in 1877, Henry Greg, Samuel Greg’s great grandson, was immortalised in the painting Interior of the Royal Exchange.

As well as being key players in the history of the Exchange, the Gregs were important patrons of numerous major Manchester cultural and educational institutions. Their wealth and prominence was built upon a transatlantic complex of ownership and business drawing across multiple strands of the colonial and slavery economies – as owners of one of the first and largest major mill complexes in North West England at Quarry Bank and of Hillsborough Estate in Dominica, a sugar estate based upon enslaved labour.

Aimee Eggington’s investigation into the history of Hillsborough was able to draw out numerous stories of resistance and lived experience of the community directly linked to Manchester and the Royal Exchange, particularly those during Dominica’s Second Maroon War:

A court document. . .describes an enslaved man named Peter as having “incited a mutiny” on the Hillsborough estate. This 1814 document and notes made by William Bremner . . . declared that 20 enslaved persons had left the estate in protest of the sudden death of another enslaved man named Frank, who they believed had been killed by the estate’s manager. Peter was ordered to lead Bremner to the freedom seekers, but instead led him on a futile mission, ‘scrambling for part of two days over hills and dales, crags and precipices’ with no intention of reaching the ‘desired spot’ . . . Peter was subsequently executed, in the British campaign to suppress Maroon forces and their allies

Similarly, Destinie Reynold’s investigation into the naval career of Lord Ducie has brought to light his involvement in intervening against a major uprising in Tobago:

On 11 November [1770], Sandy a young African chief who was captured and sold into slavery, stabbed his master, Samuel Hall, multiple times, leaving him for dead. Sandy and his other comrades, also enslaved on Hall’s plantation, were trafficked from the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana) and were of the Akan tribe . . . They fled the plantation starting the uprising, attacking the Courtland Bay barracks and taking all available arms and ammo to sustain their resistance. Sandy and his comrades had grown to a force of 30 to 50, burning plantations in sight, with the aim of causing widespread destruction to the regime.

Aashe Singh’s research has also highlighted how the finance that funded the current Royal Exchange building is also directly connected to one of the largest rebellions against British slavery:

The Demerara Uprising began on the 18th of August on John Gladstone’s plantation ‘Success’. Led by an enslaved man named Jack Gladstone and his father Quamina, up to 13,000 enslaved peoples from ‘Success’ and its surrounding plantations locked up their overseers and gathered ammunition, demanding the Governor grant them freedom.

Having established the crucial and central role of colonisation and the transatlantic slavery economy in the founding of the Exchange and the construction of the previous and current Royal Exchange buildings, the work of the Emerging Scholars to unearth just a handful of the many deep connections between those histories and experiences of enslavement and resistance. While not wishing to diminish the impact and importance of the day-to-day brutality and violence of enslavement, drawing out a few threads highlighting the many connections between the Exchange and struggles for freedom helps us to challenge the often self-congratulatory narratives around the role of Manchester in abolition by recentring the core role the enslaved across the Americas in forcing freedom.

As the connections the Emerging Scholars have discovered show, the Royal Exchange was always a place where the world, and particularly places and people impacted by enslavement and colonisation, was always front and centre of discussions, political organising, and business deals among the small group of elite Manchester Men who built the institution. They directed a global transformation from its vast gilded halls and wood-panelled rooms, as they attempted to shape the wider world in service of their profits and collective vision of a colonial cotton commercial empire, centred on Manchester and Lancashire.

We have for the first time been able to begin to put that wider world BACK into the story of the Royal Exchange. The connections we have begun to uncover start a long, patient, and continuing orient us towards new ways of re-embedding the global stories that were central to institution’s history.

Stories of those whose labour was integral to its building and which provide ample material for community discussion, response, and direction of new research and creative engage and development of these themes with writers and artists in the shaping of a new future in response and dialogue with these shared and previously hidden connections.