Like it or not, we have all benefited from the slave trade | Letters

Thank you for the excellent research into the rightwing backlash against the Church of England’s proposals for reparations (Lobbying, lawyers and a media blitz: the fight to kill the Church of England’s £100m slavery compensation fund, 13 October). May I offer observations in two areas?

We are all beneficiaries of the slave trade, like it or not. The work that the Guardian is doing on the actions of its founders will enhance the historical record, but it is unlikely to change the broader picture identified by Eric Hobsbawm and others.

Cheap cotton picked by enslaved people fired the Industrial Revolution. Everything else flowed from it. The need for machinery demanded coal and iron. These begat steam engines, the railways, the factory system.

The benefits were not, and are not, evenly shared. My friend’s grandmother, who worked in a cotton mill at the age of 13, and so many like her suffered along with her brothers and sisters transported against their will from Africa.

Yet industrialisation transformed our lives. Take the example of cotton: the historian Roger Osborne offers a very telling statistic in his book Iron, Steam & Money: “In 1790, 4 per cent of clothing in Europe was made of cotton … by 1890, it had grown to 73 per cent while the European population had roughly doubled to 400 million.”

Industrialisation was not without its critics, not least John Ruskin. But its legacy is a world of disparity in wealth between and within nations, let alone the shadow of global warming. The evil of the slave trade lies at the heart of it. Individuals and families may have been responsible, but they are dead. It is with each of us in the postindustrial western world that discussion of reparations must start.

Let me turn now to the Church of England. While working for a C of E diocese, I struggled with hostile parishes refusing to pay their parish share. I can only imagine the current outcry.

May I suggest that it isn’t about reparations? These are people clinging to a disappearing world. Too few people are attending church to pay its way. As a bishop once said to me, these people have deep pockets, but very short arms. I suspect that pockets are no longer that deep.

Would it be wrong to repeat the oft-misquoted Bible passage from the letter to Timothy? The love of money is the root of all evil.
Phil Hamlyn Williams
Old Dalby, Leicestershire