Looking at historic textiles (for Sicilian patterns), I discovered--why didn't I know this?--that fabric was the main currency that European slave traders used to purchase people in West Africa. Specifically, for English enslavers, textiles from India.
(Other trade currency included alcohol, military goods, cowrie shells, etc.)
And Liverpool was the third-largest slavery port in England, and also the commercial hub for textiles from India.
Learning that, another piece fit into a puzzle I'd been wondering about: What was Heathcliff was doing in Liverpool in the mid-1770s, and why is he of Indian ancestry?
I'd been surprised when I read Wuthering Heights (1847) for the first time a couple summers ago that Heathcliff is not a white Englishman, like Laurence Olivier.
Emily Bronte describes him as "dark-skinned" and "a little Lascar". Lascars were sailors from India or Southeast Asia in the British navy.
Sympathetic family servant, Nelly, encourages young Heathcliff: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen", and she tells him that even if he were black (i.e., African--he's not), a smile would make him more handsome.
At least the filmmakers made-up Ralph Fiennes to fit the description in the 1992 Wuthering Heights, here with Juliette Binoche:
So, what did I think slavers paid with?
I guess... some form of coin?
No.*
I don't know... probably trade goods then?
Yes.
But among those trade goods, I wouldn't have guessed cotton and wool fabric. And yet those were the most popular goods.
Below, from Textiles in the Slave Trade (with more pictures of fabrics)
Once England industrialized in the late 1700s, they started to produce their own textiles instead of importing them from India.
Lancashire county became the leading cotton textile producer, with Manchester as the industrial hub, linked eventually by railway to the port of Liverpool, 35 miles west.
(And GB outlawed slavery in 1805.)
I think British people learn this in school? I had only the vaguest sense of how it all fit together.
Growing up in the US North (midwestern Wisconsin), I do remember learning about the triangle trade in grade school, but remember it as being about rum... which it also was. Maybe we didn't study textiles because it wasn't directly a Northern concern.
Okay, so this clarifies another piece I've been fuzzy about:
why some English merchants and manufacturers supported the Confederacy in the US Civil War (almost a hundred years after Heathcliff was born):
because they wanted the South's cotton.
And why did I even know about that?
Another book: Gone with the Wind.
Remember? Rhett Butler is a blockade runner---smuggling goods to British ships outside the Union blockade.
And what was he smuggling?
Cotton.
Rhett explains to Scarlett that "the Confederate government allowed him to ship cotton to Liverpool, sell it, deposit the money in English banks, and then use the credit to buy war supplies [and luxury goods] to ship back through the blockade." [--"The Real Rhett Butler"]
And so, during the US Civil War, India again supplied England with cotton.
_____________
The stories make more and deeper sense when I learn the broader history.
"Britain makes little to no sense without its racial history.--from this spring's special series in the Guardian (Manchester) :
It is there in our literature, from Rhoda Swartz, the 'rich wolly-haired mulatto' heiress from St Kitts in Vanity Fair, to Bertha Mason, the 'discoloured' creole wife of Edward Rochester, with her 'blackened' face from Jamaica, who is hidden in the attic in Jane Eyre.
. . .
"Slavery was so intimately woven into the economic fabric of the northern [English] economy that any attempt to unpick it would cause the entire edifice to unravel."
Cotton Capital: How slavery changed the Guardian, Britain and the world
So, next up for me: Small Island, by Andrea Levy, which the Guardian recommends as "an exploration of the lived experience of empire during the second world war". We have two copies at work.
Okay, not coins exactly, but a brass bracelet called a manilla was used as currency in West Africa and in the Transatlantic slave trade.
From the British Museum:
