This week sees an important moment in the history of the Guardian with the launch of Cotton Capital, a series revealing the links between the 19th-century Manchester founders of the newspaper, the transatlantic cotton industry and the enslaved labour upon which the trade was built.
The links have been established in academic research commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian. As the historian and Scott Trust board member David Olusoga explains, they also reflect the illusory nature of British history in general, which has long preferred to focus on celebrating abolition rather than to acknowledge its messy complicity in the slave economy.
