The liberal Guardian was born as a mill-owners' paper in Manchester
The Guardian now sits on the mainstream left, yet it launched in 1821 as the voice of Manchester's cotton bosses, sprang up after police shut a radical rival, and later cast doubt on factory-hours reform. A 2023 review found its founder and nine of eleven backers had ties to the Atlantic slave trade.
Cotton merchant John Edward Taylor started The Manchester Guardian on 5 May 1821, coincidentally the day Napoleon died, backed by a group of non-conformist businessmen known as the Little Circle. It appeared after the authorities closed the Manchester Observer, which had championed the Peterloo protesters. Taylor had no sympathy for those radical reformers. A working-class rival, the Manchester and Salford Advertiser, denounced the new paper as a creature of the worst mill-owners, and it did tend to wave away strikes as the work of outside agitators.
Its record on slavery was tangled. The paper opposed slavery, welcomed the 1833 abolition act and backed free trade, but it resisted curbs on commerce with slave-holding nations. During the American Civil War it leaned towards Southern self-determination and faulted Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation for not freeing every enslaved person. When Manchester cotton workers met at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862 to condemn slavery and the Confederacy, the paper complained that the gathering mostly abused the Guardian. Lincoln wrote back praising the workers.
C. P. Scott made it a national title. Editor for 57 years from 1872 and owner from 1907, he pushed it in a more radical direction, backing Gladstone in the 1886 Liberal split and opposing the Second Boer War against popular feeling. He supported votes for women while scorning suffragette window-smashing. In 1936 the Scott Trust was set up to guarantee the paper's editorial and financial independence permanently; it became a limited company in 2008, and profits still go back into journalism rather than to shareholders.
The name lost its Manchester prefix in 1959, and the paper moved to London. Its biggest scoops include the 2011 phone-hacking revelations, which ended up shutting down the News of the World, and the 2013 reporting of Edward Snowden's leaks about the PRISM surveillance programme. Katharine Viner has edited it since 2015, and it has printed in tabloid format since 2018.
Source: The Guardian
