Much of Manchester’s wealth as a city was funded by the slave trade, yet thousands of workers in the city expressed their solidarity with those enslaved by the British.
1790s The wave of radical agitation against the slave trade that swept Britain started in Manchester, with the first large scale use of petitioning as a political weapon.
1792, some 20,000 people in Manchester, which had a population of under 75,000 at the time, signed a petition supporting the abolition of slavery.
Source:
Socialist Worker online