One of Britain's most progressive newspapers investigated itself and found it was financed by the slave trade
Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
- The Guardian's founder profited from importing cotton picked by enslaved people, researchers found.
- They also discovered nine original investors in the newspaper profited from the slavery economy.
- The Guardian is more than 200 years old and one of Britain's most progressive newspapers.
The Guardian — Britain's most prominent progressive newspaper — was founded by men who profited off the transatlantic slavery economy, researchers commissioned by the outlet found.
The newspaper's founder, John Edward Taylor, profited from imports of cotton picked by enslaved people, Cassandra Gooptar — an interdisciplinary researcher who specializes in the study of enslavement and colonialism — discovered. She also found that nine of the outlet's original investors had ties to transatlantic slavery in the early 19th Century, according to her report.
The Guardian published its finding in a special report first published in March.
"We were originally told by historians that it was unlikely we'd learn a lot of details about the plantations themselves, aside from a broad sense of the geographic area," Maya Wolfe-Robinson, the editor who oversaw the investigation, told the New York Times.
Gooptar said a crucial part of her research involved pinpointing the identities of more than 300 enslaved people in both the Sea Islands and Jamaica.
"While I am keenly aware that the names of enslaved people in both the Sea Islands and Jamaica were heavily anglicized — yet another means of control by the plantation owners — these names represent some of the only existing records of their humanity," Gooptar wrote for The Guardian.
The Guardian's Cotton Capital series stretches beyond Gooptar's research, including an "In Memoriam" piece listing the names and ages of several people enslaved on the Sea Islands, as well as a deep-dive into the Black history of Manchester, where the current iteration of The Guardian was originally founded.