Agreed. It is horrendous. A truly shameful past. I stumbled across this Wikipedia entry for the
Zong Massacre when researching Coleston. It just beggars belief. I’m certainly no academic and can’t remember much if anything about history at school, but I don’t remember this sort of stuff being taught to us at all. We need to own it. The only way to move forward is to fully grasp the horrors of nationalism and exceptionalism and to bring racism into proper historical focus.
PS Apparently Manchester behaved with rather more dignity than Liverpool and refused to touch slave-picked cotton in 1861 (
Guardian).