By 1750, every trading and manufacturing town in England had connections to plantation slavery, and the profits from slavery and colonialism were a major source of the capital that financed the Industrial Revolution that transformed England into a modern capitalist state. In eighteenth-century Lancaster, merchants developed extensive commercial networks in the West Indies and Americas, importing slave-produced plantation goods, such as mahogany and exotic woods, sugar, spices, coffee and raw cotton, and exporting fine furniture, gunpowder, spun cotton and felt. Until recently, local and regional histories have tended to obscure the ways in which the lives of working people within England were impacted/shaped by what historian Catherine Hall terms ‘the slavery business’.

Through a focus on five commodities produced in Lancaster and the surrounding area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this panel and discussion will bring to light some of the ways in which slavery and colonialism transformed the local economy and the lives of working people. It will include talks by James Fox on felt hats, Alan Rice on cotton, Bella Tyler on slave ships, Gordon Walker and Brontë Crawford on furniture, and Alanah Hill on sugar.

Imogen Tyler is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University

Bella Tyler is an undergraduate history student at Bristol University

Bronte Crawford is an MA student at Lancaster University

Gordon Walker is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Lancaster University

James Fox is a textile artist and a PhD candidate at Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts

Alanah Hill is a PhD candidate researching the Satterthwaite Letterbooks.

Alan Rice is Professor and Co-Director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire and co-chair of Lancaster Black History Group.

The Lancaster Slavery Business Connected Histories of Commodities and Commerce