Slavery and Wales

SLAVERY AND WALES KEY STAGE 3 Great Britain’s overseas empire expanded considerably in the eighteenth century. The empire brought great wealth and prosperity to parts of Britain, Wales included. This came at a heavy human cost, however, as the slave trade flourished within this empire. African slaves were ‘bought’ with copper and brass goods, and were then shipped to America, the West Indies and the Caribbean to work in appalling conditions on plantations owned by European businessmen. They worked to produce sugar, rum and cotton, goods which were then shipped back to Britain. The slaves were the property of the plantation owners. They were not paid. This helped these plantations become huge moneymaking enterprises. Wales was close to the two largest slave ports in Europe, Liverpool and Bristol, but it was the nature of the Welsh economy which tied it into the slave trade. Wales became a leading producer of brass and copper, the currency which obtained the slaves in Africa, often in the form of ‘manillas’, or brass armlets. The slave economy was thus a major source of money for such Welsh businesses. One copper works near Swansea even had a building named the ‘Manilla House’, in which this slave currency was cast. Moreover, the slave plantations were an important market for the woollen industry of mid-Wales. It was Welsh woollens which clothed the backs of many New World slaves. Welshmen also owned plantations and slaves themselves. The enormous wealth of the Pennant family of Penrhyn in north Wales, for example, came mainly from their sugar plantations in Jamaica. The hideous nature of the business supplying this money is suggested by one survey of their Jamaica estates in which only two out of eighty-seven men had lived beyond the age of sixty; the physical demands of the work meant that slave life was nasty and short. An infamous Welsh participant in the slave trade was Sir Thomas Picton of Pembrokeshire. He was a soldier killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 who is remembered with a memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral. Earlier in life, however, he had been a cruel and domineering governor of the island of Trinidad. He maintained order among the 10,000 slaves on the small island through a brutal regime which employed public executions, flogging and branding. Picton’s methods saw him face trial in London in 1806 for allowing the torture of a thirteen- year-old Trinidadian girl to obtain a confession regarding a robbery. Although found guilty, many in the establishment thought that he was merely doing his job in controlling an unruly part of the empire. Picton accumulated huge wealth from his interests in the island, allowing him to buy an impressive mansion in Carmarthenshire. The connections between Wales and the slave trade also saw a trickle of black and mixed-race immigration into the country. Most of these were taken on as domestic servants when it was fashionable among the gentry to have black serving boys and girls. !"#$%&'"#%()$*+,-"./01"" " " 02." Much rarer was the case of Nathaniel Wells, the black son of a Cardiff sugar merchant. Wells inherited his father’s considerable wealth, and became a fixture among the landed gentry of Monmouthshire, and Britain’s first black sheriff. Wells, however, also owned slaves on his plantation in St Kitts. Growing concern with the suffering caused by men like Picton, saw the movement to abolish the slave trade gain momentum. The Atlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807 and slavery was outlawed in the empire in 1833. Welshmen like Iolo Morgannwg and the preacher John Elias were involved in this campaign, but in addition to their positive contributions, we must also remember the darker side of Wales’s involvement with this wretched aspect of modern history. !"#$%&'"#%()$*+,-"./01"" " " .2.".

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