Show overview
Cotton Capital has been publishing since 2023, and across the 2 years since has built a catalogue of 8 episodes. That works out to roughly 5 hours of audio in total. Releases follow an irregular cadence.
Episodes typically run thirty-five to sixty minutes — most land between 40 min and 49 min — and the run-time is fairly consistent across the catalogue. It is catalogued as a EN-GB-language History show.
There hasn’t been a new episode in the last ninety days; the most recent episode landed 7 months ago. The busiest year was 2023, with 7 episodes published. Published by The Guardian.
From the publisher
Cotton Capital is a podcast series that explores how transatlantic slavery shaped the Guardian, Manchester, Britain and the world. Stemming from an investigation into the Guardian founder's own links to slavery, this ongoing series explores that history and its enduring legacies today. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts
Latest Episodes
Bonus episode: Searching for the spirit of Pan-Africanism
In this bonus episode, the Guardian journalist Chris Osuh explores whether we are living through a Pan-African moment 80 years on from Manchester’s groundbreaking 1945 Pan-African Congress ‘A sense of freedom’: 80 years on from the Pan-African Congress in Manchester
Episode 6: Reparations
In the final episode of the series, Cotton Capital editor and Guardian journalist Maya Wolfe-Robinson looks at the subject of reparations. What do reparations mean for the communities and descendants of transatlantic enslavement – and what is the Guardian planning to do in its own programme of measures?
Episode 5: Resistance
Guardian journalist and Cotton Capital special correspondent Lanre Bakare examines Black Mancunian history, beginning with the 1945 Pan-African Congress that took place in the city and shaped independence movements across Africa
Episode 4: The Brazilian connection
During the transatlantic slave trade, more enslaved African people were taken to Brazil than any other country. Today, more than half of Brazil’s population identify as Black and there are more Black people in Brazil than any other country except Nigeria. But the country is still grappling with deep structural racism
Episode three: The Sea Islands
Journalist DeNeen L Brown travels to the Sea Islands in the US and meets the Gullah Geechee people – direct descendants of enslaved Africans who picked the distinctive Sea Island cotton prized by traders in Manchester
Episode 2: The meaning of Success
Our second episode follows journalist Maya Wolfe-Robinson as she travels to Jamaica in search of the site of the former sugar plantation Success, once co-owned by the Guardian funder Sir George Philips
Episode 1: The bee and the ship
The first episode of the new Guardian podcast series Cotton Capital explores the revelations that the Guardian’s founding editor, John Edward Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry
Coming soon: Cotton Capital – a new podcast from the Guardian
This new six-part series explores how transatlantic slavery shaped the Guardian, Manchester, Britain and the world. Stemming from an investigation into the Guardian founders’ own links to slavery, this ongoing series explores that history and its enduring legacies today. Search ‘Cotton Capital’ wherever you get your podcasts