Question Author
25 March 2007 marked 200 years to the day that a Parliamentary Act was passed to abolish the slave trade in the British colonies. Throughout 2007, in order to mark the Bicentenary, we assisted Mancunians to commemorate it and to raise awareness of the continuing incidence of slavery in the present day.
The Council worked with Greater Manchester Churches Together and others, to share information about commemorative events and educational activities and projects.
For almost twenty years before the 1807 Act, the people of Manchester had been showing their opposition to slavery. Despite the majority of jobs in the city being dependent upon cotton produced by slave labour, in 1788 over ten thousand people, almost one in five of the population, signed a petition against slavery. A second petition in 1792 was signed by twenty thousand people