Global Threads research project reveals how slavery hung ‘like a spectre’ over the Peterloo massacre and other Mancunian struggles for equality

They were the killings that changed Britain, paving the way for working-class people’s right to vote, as well as leading to the founding of the Manchester Guardian. In the Peterloo massacre of 1819, peaceful protesters were shot and trampled to death by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry at St Peter’s Field in the city.

A study by Global Threads, a public history project, has examined how the exploitation of Africans enslaved in the Caribbean was linked with the struggles of cotton workers at Peterloo. Though these workers were divided by thousands of miles and led different lives, they were exploited by the same forces - as Robert Wedderburn, a Black abolitionist in London, said at the time.