Multi-generational Subscribers: The Greg Family and Racial Slavery by Aimee Eggington

“When I walk through the streets of Manchester… I am met on every hand by the cry, “Cotton! Cotton!” I cannot stop to speak of cotton while women and men are being brutalised.”[1]

These powerful words of  African American abolitionist, Sarah Parker Remond, vividly connect Manchester, cotton, and transatlantic slavery. Indeed, the city’s transformation into ‘Cottonopolis’ by the mid-19th-century was built on the brutal exploitation of millions of enslaved individuals who cultivated cotton for the mills of powerful northern industrialists. Many of the same industrialists who profited from cotton were also deeply implicated over generations in much wider colonial trade networks and ownership of enslaved persons.

The Gregs: Pillars of Cotton and Culture