Cataraqui, present-day Kingston, was the site of a 1673 meeting between Count Frontenac, Governor-General of New France, and Chiefs of the Iroquois Nation. Indigenous-European contact laid the groundwork for the cotton trade. The growth of cotton and its expansion in the Caribbean and the U.S. depended on stolen and expropriated Indigenous land.

Plan of the British ship Brookes, which had the capacity to forcibly transport an estimated 454 to 609 Africans across the Atlantic. Merchants modified and commissioned such ships for this purpose. Conditions below deck were inhumane and many did not survive the voyage.

While Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol have well-documented connections to the cotton industry, research shows that prominent slave owners also come from Southampton. Thomas Combes and John Morant owned plantations as far afield as Sumatra in present-day Indonesia, and the West Indies. 

Barfoot’s lithograph illustrates the first stage of cotton production. Here we see enslaved workers harvesting cotton. Historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson notes that Barfoot’s composition is rare. Similar plantation plantings seldom depicted Black people.

James Pattison Cockburn’s watercolour situates Kingston within the supply chain. Wealthy Kingstonians patronized local dressmakers and well-stocked shops to purchase fashionable garments for the social calendar. Such garments would have comprised cotton produced through enslaved labour.

Here we see a young girl among the adult workers during the tenth stage of cotton production. The use of child labour was widespread in cotton mills. Children were paid low wages to crawl beneath working machinery to collect scraps and repair broken threads, which was extremely dangerous, often harmful work.