This post is going to be different to the content I have been producing recently, but it is important to hold myself and my ignorance accountable, and make it my priority to educate myself. Before I begin, as a white person studying and working within textiles, I recognise that I benefit from the same structures that have historically marginalised others. The privilege of being able to learn this history, rather than live its consequences, isn’t lost on me. It’s a reminder that accountability starts with acknowledging where I stand.

The start of this blog post is at Manchester Art Gallery. I was in my third room and came across The Warp/The Weft/The Wake by Holly Graham, a London-based artist in residence (an incredibly talented artist from whom I am extremely grateful to have learned so much). As someone who’s been studying textiles and living in this city for two years, I thought I already understood Manchester’s fabric story: the mills, the cotton, the industry. But this exhibition revealed a side I hadn’t fully considered: the trade between cheap cloth and goods, and the hidden human costs woven into those materials. I began to feel extremely ignorant. In this area, I boast my knowledge and years of study, and yet I have received only half of the story. And an extremely whitewashed version at that.

With my upcoming research project (my degree’s version of a dissertation), and with this being an area that I felt compelled to learn more about, I knew I had to dig deeper. What I did know was that the cotton used in the mills was grown on the backs of exploited enslaved African people. But that’s where it stopped. So I took photos of the books left as reference in the exhibit, and started to read.

I turned to google and Manchester Science and Industry museum’s website first. And even a quick browse opened my eyes, and I wondered why on earth my tutors and previous teachers had never spoken about this? My entire education, almost 7 years of fashion and textile studies and yet I didn’t know some fundamental aspects of not only textiles, but the Industrial Revolution as a whole.

Cotton textiles were in high demand on the Western coast of Africa, where European slave traders bought Indian cotton goods and traded them for enslaved people. This demand played a key role in the early development of Manchester’s textile industry. Even as Indian textiles remained part of global trade, British slave traders began relying on Manchester-made cotton goods, imitations of Indian designs, to fuel their exchanges. Loaded onto ships in Liverpool, these fabrics were carried to the west coast of Africa and traded for captured African people. In 1788, Manchester’s textile exports to Africa were worth about £200,000, or roughly £24 million in today’s money, a figure that reveals just how deeply the city’s prosperity was tied to this system. The abolition of the British Slave trade in 1807 wasn’t the end of the merchants’ involvement, however. These merchants and manufacturers continued supplying goods to Spanish and Portuguese slave traders for decades more.

After decades of exploitation and the financial growth on the back of enslaved people’s labour, 2000 Mancunians signed a petition in support of the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill in 1806. It is a confronting experience, learning about how the city I live in was involved so heavily in the rise and abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade. Information I believe to be highly valuable, and will continue to research further. In the time I took to read and write this blog post, I haven’t fully read the books left at the exhibit; however, I am interested in doing an updated piece with my learnings from those.

This post only scrapes the surface of what else there is to learn, but with my research project fast approaching I felt it was apt to at least try and find out more in my free time. It’s uncomfortable to recognise how my own education and practice, in an industry still reliant on cheap labour, continues to be built on these same foundations of exploitation. It makes me question what it means to study or create within textiles today, knowing that this history is not just in the past but continues in different forms. It’s easy to treat this as history, but the threads of exploitation haven’t disappeared; they’ve just shifted geographies. The fast fashion supply chains of today mirror those same power imbalances, where the Global South continues to bear the burden of cheap production for Western consumption.

I feel in a very privileged position, to have this level of education, and such a wide range of opportunities waiting for me at the other end. As my education continues, both internally and externally from my degree, I begin to question exactly what position I would like to hold in this industry when that other end comes, and what personal impact I would like to have. My next step is to trace how these colonial textile trades have shaped not only industrial Manchester but also the visual and material culture we associate with ‘British design.’ I want to understand how art, fashion, and museums can acknowledge this history without reproducing it.

If anyone reading this has resources or research suggestions, especially work by Black or postcolonial scholars in textile history, I’d love to hear them. Part of this learning is unlearning, and that’s something I want to do collaboratively. I’m grateful to exhibitions like The Warp/The Weft/The Wake for confronting these silences. They remind me that learning isn’t just about acquiring knowledge, it’s about being willing to unpick the threads of what we think we know.

References: https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/manchester-cotton-and-slavery , https://www.visitmanchester.com/ideas-and-inspiration/blog/post/manchester-cotton-and-transatlantic-slavery/ , https://manchesterartgallery.org/event/holly-graham/