On 18 August 1518 the King of Spain, Charles I, issued a charter authorising the transportation of slaves direct from Africa to the Americas. Previously they had been taken by way of Spain or Portugal.

This quincentenary is of a tragic event that caused untold suffering and still today leaves a legacy of poverty, racism, inequality and elite wealth across four continents. But it also quite literally changed the world and still geopolitically, socially, economically and culturally continues to shape it even today – and yet the anniversary has been almost completely ignored.

“There has been a general failure by most historians and others to fully appreciate the huge significance of August 1518 in the story of the transatlantic slave trade,” Professor David Richardson, University of Hull’s Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation.. Read more here.

An article by Dr Lawrence Brown claims the origins and spread of HIV can be seen as a legacy of Belgian colonisation in the Congo. "​We now know that HIV-1 emerged from Leopoldville in the 1920s and spread first among African people. The colonization of the Congolese by King Leopold II and the Belgians helps explain how the virus became a global pandemic".

It also comments how the disproportionate effects of HIV on sub-Saharan African people is "... precisely because European colonization exacted tremendous violence, extracted critical resources, disrupted social structures, and weakened the health of indigenous populations. European nations broke their promise to protect and promote the welfare of the indigenous African people. Instead the Belgians dehumanized and debased African societies producing the social determinants of death that gave rise to deadly infectious diseases. HIV-1 was ignited in Leopoldville, but the resulting HIV global pandemic is also the apparition of a grotesque and horrific legacy—the European infection of mass historical trauma and the devastation of Congolese health wrought by King Leopold II, the Force Publique, and Belgian colonisation."

​Read the full article here.

Edward Colston died nearly 300 years ago but remains a controversial figure in his home city of Bristol. A generous benefactor to the city, Colston has been unquestioningly venerated for many years, but with little or no mention of the fact that the fortune he donated from was generated by his trading in slaves: a major factor in Bristol's growth as a city. Bristol Council is about to recognise this aspect of his past, but this article on the BBC website asks if it going far enough. The group 'Countering Colston' has long been campaigning for this reconsideration of Colston who has dozens of streets, buildings, institutions and memorials named after him.

Bristol poet laureate Miles Chambers sums up the legacy of enslavement in Bristol: "Some people don't get that black people still feel the full impact of slavery today. We can look at the descendants of the slaves and economically they are still worse off; psychologically they are still worse off; mentally they still feel collectively as inferior; more African-Caribbean males are disproportionately in prison and in the judicial system; they do worse at schools; economically are paid less and are working less.

"The pattern continues and even though many people say slavery is over, because of those legacies we still feel enslaved. A name change or statue move is not going to rectify racism or eradicate the slave mentality that still exists, but it will help to say to black people: 'You are equal to us, you are British, you are valuable and you mean as much to us as any other citizen.'"

Read the full article here.

This Guardian article from 2015 outlines a walking tour of key sites of Manchester's radical history. This of course includes 'Peterloo' in 1819 where sword-wielding cavalry charged into a defenceless crowd who had gathered to call for parliamentary reform, leaving 15 dead and more than 600 injured. Several of the speakers were also involved in the fight to abolish slavery, one of a number of parallels in Manchester's history. “It was the largest crowd ever gathered at that point in British history,” says radical historian Michael Herbert. “The sight of the British army attacking its own people was unusual, almost unprecedented. It was a really shocking event with reverberations that went on throughout the nineteenth century.”

Those reverberations can still be felt and echoes of Peterloo can be heard today. As Herbert has said more recently, the event: "was about political reform as a response to hunger, unemployment and poverty, which has inescapable parallels with food bank Britain in 2017." Peterloo has been described elsewhere as "a war on the emerging working class movement".

With Peterloo's 200th Anniversary coming up on 16 August 2019, this walking tour would be a good way to familiarise yourself with Manchester's history of political protest and campaigning for economic and social justice. An extra stop to find out more about Peterloo and other significant events would be the People's History Museum (on the map on Bridge Street to the West of point D). 

Today is the 198th anniversary of one of the most significant events of British history with regard to the legacy of industrial oppression passed down to the present day that MJR was formed to address. The Peterloo massacre took place on August 17, 1819 when a cavalry charge was ordered into 60,000 people who had gathered peacefully at St Peter's fields, Manchester, to protest for greater parliamentary representation. 18 died and 700 were seriously injured. Historian Michael Herbert has said the event: "was about political reform as a response to hunger, unemployment and poverty, which has inescapable parallels with food bank Britain in 2017."

John Edward Taylor, the founder of the Guardian, was present that day. Read his eye-witness account here.