2023 RECE Conference

Manchester’s location between the Pennine Hills and the Mersey Ports is the focal point of ancient pathways used by people across the history of the land. Human occupation of Manchester dates back until at least the Bronze age. It has been home to Celtic tribes and is the site of a first-century AD fort from which Roman occupiers sought to control mineral and trade interests on ancient waterways and newly created roads. In the post-Roman era, the confluence of the rivers Irwell and Irk–lined with watermills and fisheries– became the new center of Manchester. Through the subsequent invasions of the Saxons and Normans, Manchester developed as a market town for livestock and wool arriving along the old drovers’ roads over the Pennine Hills and Cheshire Plains onto the waterways via Liverpool to the world beyond. This geography put Manchester at the heart of the industrial revolution, its developing textile processing technology and voracious demand for cotton and labor contributing to the acceleration of global colonialism, exploitative trade practices, transatlantic chattel slavery, worker exploitation, a rise in child labor, and the simultaneous growth of wealth and poverty. 

These injustices in turn gave birth to great resistance movements in Manchester, including the rise of the Manchester radical abolitionist movement and fair-trade cooperatives. Manchester is the site of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, where an armed cavalry attacked citizens fighting for voting reform, inspiring many more to join the cause. The first Trades Union Congress was held in Manchester in 1868. Friedrich Engels, who spent much of his life in Manchester, made it central to his text, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and wrote parts of the Communist Manifesto along with Karl Marx, a frequent visitor to Manchester, at Manchester’s Chetham Library. The British women’s suffrage movement was born in Manchester under the leadership of Mancunians Emmaline Pankhurst and Lydia Becker, fighting under the motto “Deeds not words.” More recently, huge numbers of protesters rallied in 1988 in Manchester to fight the blatant homophobia of Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 policy. Manchester was the site of vibrant queer spaces that continue to function today as places to push boundaries and contest identities. Contemporary activists in Manchester are engaged in fighting policing legislation that severely limits rights to protest and in anti-racist activism. Direct action environmental activism has been powerful in Manchester, including fights against the building of high-speed roads, train lines, and a new runway at Manchester Airport, all projects that threaten ancient woodlands. Today, Manchester is a racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse international city, home to 2.5 million people, including speakers of more than 200 languages.  

Manchester, in other words, sits at crossroads that radiate along global pathways, traveling across centuries and into the present and future. The contradictions and conflicts that frame Manchester’s history are no less our own struggles. Heather McGhee, in The Sum of Us, writes: “Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet, where your financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born” (2021, p. 227). There are few RECE participants whose lives and family histories and presents have not been touched in some way by events that have been shaped in Manchester and the wider UK. Recognition of where we have been, where we are, and where we hope to be, involves our grappling with these histories and their contradictions to attend to where we are stuck in ruts, as well as our shaping efforts to harness the dynamism and creativity of the past and present on our path to finding better futures.