The bonds of family

Slavery, commerce and culture in the British Atlantic world

Katie Donington

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526129505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

Moving between Britain and Jamaica this book reconstructs the world of commerce, consumption and cultivation sustained through an extended engagement with the business of slavery. Transatlantic slavery was both shaping of and shaped by the dynamic networks of family that established Britain's Caribbean empire. Tracing the activities of a single extended family – the Hibberts – this book explores how slavery impacted on the social, cultural, economic and political landscape of Britain. It is a history of trade, colonisation, enrichment and the tangled web of relations that gave meaning to the transatlantic world. The Hibberts's trans-generational story imbricates the personal and the political, the private and the public, the local and the global. It is both the intimate narrative of a family and an analytical frame through which to explore Britain's history and legacies of slavery.

Part I

Family business: commerce, commodities and credit

Chapter One

Manchester

Family tree 2 The Hibberts in Manchester

In the course of the present reign, the manufacture of cotton occupied an attention in Britain very far superior to what it had ever employed before in any country … The means which have brought this grand department of national industry to its present zenith, are no doubt the same as have conducted our manufacturers and merchants to such success in every other department – sound and comprehensive ability, invention, sagacity, enterprise, skill, and the capitals which were fostered under free and equitable laws … But all the genius of an Arkwright, and all the liberality and talents of Manchester, with the highest degree of industry and skill, can make no cotton manufacture without cotton wool. Whence comes cotton wool to Britain? It comes chiefly from the labour of Negroes.

Robert Bissett, The history of the negro slave trade, in its connection with the commerce and prosperity of the West Indies, and the wealth and power of the British empire, vol. II (London: W. McDowall, 1805), pp. 339–42

According to Jerom Murch, the Hibberts’ story began in Marple, Cheshire during the reign of Edward IV in the fifteenth century. Laying claim to a most respectable historical stock, Murch noted that Nicholas Hibbert of Marple was recorded in Burke’s Landed gentry and that his descendants ‘branched off in various directions, settling chiefly in Lancashire and Cheshire, and devoting themselves much to commerce and manufactures’.¹ The Hibberts were not of aristocratic birth, but were part of the dissenting merchant classes of northern England. Their ascent into the commercial elite came through their initial involvement in the cloth industry. The growing importance of Manchester in the eighteenth century stemmed from the expansion of empire and the rise of slavery, which in turn secured the area’s role in the cotton economy. Sven Beckert has described Manchester as the ‘centre of a world spinning empire – the empire of cotton’.² The cloth trade and its associated businesses provided jobs and prosperity for the local population. Finished cotton pieces were in demand in Liverpool for use in the Guinea trade as one of a number of desirable commodities used to barter for enslaved people on the coast of West Africa. Raw cotton produced by enslaved workers in both the Americas and the Caribbean was then shipped back to the port at Liverpool for processing in Lancashire. The centrality of Manchester to the slavery business was outlined by Eric Williams, who argued that ‘Manchester received a double stimulus from the colonial trade. If it supplied goods needed on the slave coast and on the plantations, its manufacturers depended in turn on the supply of raw material.’³ Williams went on to identify some of the key local figures, including the ‘leading Manchester firm’ of the Hibbert family. Starting out as linen drapers in the seventeenth century, by the early eighteenth century the Hibberts were manufacturing cloth and supplying finished pieces for use in the slave trade. The story of their increasing entanglement with transatlantic commerce is instructive in understanding Manchester’s regional role as slavery’s hinterland in the north.

Describing the city around 1700 Celia Fiennes wrote that ‘Manchester looks exceedingly well … Very substantial buildings; the houses are not very lofty, but mostly of brick and stone … The Market place is large; it takes up two streets’ length when the market is kept for their linen cloth [and] cotton tickings which is the manufacture of the town … This is a thriving place.’⁴ As Fiennes observed, the cloth trade dominated both the physical space and the economy of the town. By the 1730s it boasted civic institutions including a college, hospital, free school and a library. The merchants of Manchester had played no small part in the expansion of the area’s fortunes. Among those successful merchants was a distinct network of dissenting religious families working in the cloth and cotton trade. Non-conformists were still suffering under discriminatory legislation; barred from political and educational institutions which might have fostered ambitions towards power, individuals from the dissenting community found different ways of securing prestige. Commerce represented an alternative path to wealth, status and influence. Utilising networks of shared religious identity meant that wealth circulated within the confines of the community. The dissenting merchants of Manchester fostered these links using the twin virtues of respectability and trust to ensure the integrity of their social and economic relationships. The Hibberts were members of the Cross Street Chapel congregation. Noted by John Seed as an ‘unusually large and opulent’ non-conformist place of worship, the chapel attracted the elite of Manchester’s merchants and manufacturers.⁵ Their business interests intertwined, creating a network bound together by shared commercial, religious and familial relationships.

Women and children played a vital role in expanding the mercantile enterprise. Central to the circulation of wealth, the preservation of reputation and the extension of commercial networks was the role of marriage. Endogamous marriage offered a way in which urban mercantile families could unite their interests with those of similar standing, creating ‘a city patriciate, bound by interlocking ties of kinship’.⁶ Within the confines of this tight-knit world the Hibberts forged links with the key Manchester families identified by Williams as having significant connections to slavery. Understanding the interconnections between and within these families can only be done through a meticulous unpicking of their marriages, particularly those of the women. These relationships lasted over the course of several generations, with the practice of cousin marriage ensuring that the bonds were further tightened. The production of children strengthened the family enterprise by providing the next generation of personnel, as well as future marital opportunities. Boys were prepared for commercial life through specific forms of schooling and apprenticeships designed to cultivate both the practical skills and genteel masculine attributes necessary to operate in the upper echelons of the mercantile classes.

The extended Hibbert family stretched across Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and the surrounding rural areas. Cotton, commerce and kinship were the interlocking ties that connected the networks of people and commodities that flowed back and forth. In unravelling these tangled multi-generational relationships it is possible to trace the impact of the wealth generated by an early and lasting engagement with transatlantic slavery. The nature of the relationship between slavery and industrialisation has been long disputed. However, as Robert Bissett stated emphatically in 1805, the cotton economy relied ‘chiefly’ on ‘the labour of Negroes’.⁷ From early beginnings in the rural cottage industry, to the large-scale factories and mills, the industrialisation of cotton relied on the production of raw materials by enslaved workers across the New World. Cotton’s global threads interwove the histories and peoples of Manchester, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, creating a legacy that stretches to the present day.

Family origins

The Hibberts’ story has been described as ‘literally one of rags to riches via the slave trade’.⁸ Whilst it might be true that the family’s origins were considerably less illustrious prior to their engagement with slavery, during the late seventeenth century the family was able to make a modest living and gradually improve their lot. Whether deliberate or a simple act of misremembering, the family annals contained a number of discrepancies that were suggestive of a more genteel ancestry. According to a manuscript in the possession of Letitia Hibbert (née Nembhard), the wife of Robert junior, her husband’s great-grandfather was ‘Robert Hibbert of Booth Hall near Blackley’ who had ‘married a Middleton Lady of the name of Ashton, great Aunt to the late Sir Ralph Ashton’.⁹ Claiming the Ashtons of Middleton, a northern family who traced their roots back to the Norman conquerors, as a line of descent might have allowed the Hibberts to bolster their status through a connection to one of the oldest of the great northern families. It seems far more likely that Robert the eldest was married to Esther Pendleton of Blackley in 1679.¹⁰ The addition ‘of Booth Hall’ to Robert the eldest’s name similarly conferred a degree of respectability on this early forebear. The Hibberts were indeed connected to Booth Hall, but only through a marriage that occurred after Robert the eldest’s death.¹¹

A commercial correspondent of the Hibberts, the Jamaica planter Simon Taylor, noted in 1800 that prior to the expansion of their interests into Jamaica in the 1730s ‘the Family were all weavers’.¹² This early connection to the cloth trade might well have provided them with some of the connections and knowledge necessary to work their way up through the mercantile ranks. There are very few details to provide a window into Robert the eldest and Esther’s lives, an indication that their status was considerably lower than that of their family in the years to come. A description of the shifting patterns of life and labour in the linen...