Levant Mine, Cornwall. The Levant Mine operated from the late 18th century until its closure in 1930, extracting tin and copper from beneath the seabed. Credit – Peter Thompson – Heritage Images/Getty Images
IIn May 2024, British Secretary of State for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch claimed that Britain had been enriched by national “ingenuity and industry” rather than colonialism and transatlantic slavery.
Her statement contradicted mounting historical evidence to the contrary, most notably the acclaimed database Legacies of British Slavery. In fact, Britain’s transatlantic slavery sector developed an entire infrastructure that shaped many British institutions and communities: transportation, ports, docks, customs houses, warehouses, counting houses and all their employees. It included the ownership and management of plantations, financial services and much more. Not to mention the reinvestment of slavery profits into British industry.
Widely regarded as part of a British national narrative of ‘ingenuity and industry’, copper mining in Cornwall illustrates the economic impact of the slavery system on British rural life and physical landscapes during the Industrial Revolution. From the 18th century onwards, the Industrial Revolution marked a shift from an agricultural economy to one dominated by machine-based industry during a period of technological change in which copper played a defining role, beginning in Cornwall.
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Cornwall, surrounded by sea on three sides, is the most south-westerly county in England. Today, holidaymakers love the mild climate, dramatic coastlines and secret coves. Once a maritime hub for shipping, global trade and communications, the county exudes a mystical atmosphere thanks to its history of smuggling and piracy.
From the 1780s onwards, copper mines in Cornwall were intensively exploited. Copper has special properties. It conducts heat easily, is malleable, and can be combined with alloys to make brass (with zinc) and bronze (with tin, which the region also had in abundance). Visit any antiques fair in Britain today and you will find an abundance of old copper jugs, pans, kettles and coal bins.
The copper extracted by Cornish miners was widely used across the Atlantic. Once extracted from Cornwall, the Cornish copper was largely smelted in Wales. But not only boilers and coal bins were made from this shiny orange metal.
By the late 1820s, global demand was so great that more than half of Britain’s copper and brass was exported. British workers made products specifically designed for trade along the West African coast. One such object was a two-foot-long copper rod designed to wrap around arms and legs. According to a Swedish traveler of the time, these pliable rods were then known as ‘Negros’. Another example was ‘manillas’, or bracelets, made in metalworks in the Welsh city of Swansea. Both decorative items were then in high demand along Africa’s Gold Coast, and were used as currency by European slavers to pay local slavers for captured African people.
Over the next decade, copper exports to West Africa amounted to 20 tons annually, both by the Royal African Company and private slave traders.
Large quantities of Cornish copper were also used on sugar plantations in the West Indies, as rods for crushing sugar cane, for cooking kettles, copper coolers and kitchen utensils. In 1732, just one estate in St. Kitts in the Caribbean, colonized by the British, required £1000 worth of copper equipment and by the mid-18th century a single plantation employing 300 people required five tons of copper ships produced by London. coppersmiths.
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Copper was also used for British ships, making wooden ship hulls last longer. In 1779 the Royal Navy encased its entire fleet in copper and two years later the hulls of three-quarters of Britain’s slave ships were wrapped in copper plates. This sped up sailing times by as much as twelve days, reducing the risk of provision shortages, mutiny and disease. From the callous perspectives of slavers and their investors, enveloping slavery’s profits led to a reduction in deaths on the Middle Passage.
In 1824 Gwennap Parish, in South Cornwall, produced more than a third of the world’s copper. As a result, it was once called the richest square mile in the world. The nearby town of Redruth was the beating heart of the copper trade, where smelters bid for copper ore. Further east was Truro, where wealthy copper investors and shareholders blended into polite society.
For many employees the story was different. The village of Gwennap is dominated by the Church of St. Wenappa, which once served 10,000 parishioners from the surrounding mining community. These mining families lived in relative poverty and worked in dangerous conditions, laying explosives to extract copper ore from the rocks. Accidents and deaths were common. Families struggled with environmental degradation caused by mining.
What had paved the way for this copper boom were advances in steam power. James Watt’s famous steam engine from 1776 was initially designed to pump water from deep copper mines. This new steam technology came to power the country’s cotton mills in the second half of the Industrial Revolution from this period well into the 19th century. British industrialists imported raw cotton picked by enslaved people in the southern United States. British factory workers produced finished cotton cloth in the factories of East Lancashire. Wages sustained the households of both copper and cotton workers, while profits strengthened the British economy.
To suggest, as Badenoch has done, that colonialism and slavery were not central to the history of British wealth and power overlooks the impact that colonial trade and slavery had on British labor history. For decades, British historians have similarly rejected the claim that profits from slavery partially fueled the Industrial Revolution, an argument made by Eric Williams in his 1944 book Capitalism and slavery. New evidence from sources such as the Legacy of British Slavery database means economic historians tend to agree.
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Even today, a stroll through these ancient Cornish sites provides plenty of food for thought. Standing on the green edges of a disused Gwennap pit you can see flocks of yellow-winged finches enjoying a lush, green environment once cleared of vegetation, the air filled with toxic fumes as workers mined the copper that would become the country’s wealth building and lining the pockets of the richest families. When the world market was flooded with copper and the market collapsed in the mid-19th century, copper mining disappeared from Cornwall. But all around, the remains of these mines still dominate the landscape, with old cairns, engine houses and abandoned brick chimneys rising above the greenery.
On the coast, pink daisies line the road to an old inn with a wobbly thatched roof on the edge of the sea. Behind it lies a pier that juts out from the western tip of England and points towards the American continent far beyond, where so much of the valuable mineral entered the ancient circuits of empire and slavery.
Country walks are an opportunity for quiet reflection.
As you walk through central South Cornwall you can see how heated conversations about this sensitive history regularly arise. In Britain, it is common for historians of empire to be told that they are belittling the country’s history by linking the British countryside to the transatlantic slavery system. Yet we cannot acknowledge—let alone address—the uncomfortable parts of this history unless we know in more detail what really happened.
Most countries have a history they would rather forget, and Britain is no exception. But by tracing national and local histories that explain and explore the legacies of slavery and colonialism, we can better understand Britain and its place in the world.
Corinne Fowler is the author of The countryside: ten rural walks through Britain and its hidden history of empire (Scribner, 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Corinne Fowler. Originally published in Britain in 2024 by Allen Lane as Our island stories. Adapted from the book THE COUNTRYSIDE: Ten rural walks through Britain and its hidden history of empire by Corinne Fowler, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed with permission.
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