Programme highlights fact that much of 19th-century wealth was built on the back of transatlantic practice
has said the wealthy Spanish region must confront “the past racism” of its slave-trading history, after a documentary revealed how Catalan industrialists and seafarers profited from the transatlantic slave trade when the British abolished the practice in 1807.
By then, independence movements in the Americas had reduced the Spanish empire to little more than Cuba and Puerto Rico, where the demand for sugar led to the spread of plantations and the need for labour – slave labour. At the same time, Catalonia needed capital to industrialise, capital that was often invested in the hugely profitable slave trade.
The sentiment was echoed by Beatriz Silva Gallardo, a Catalan socialist MP who also argues that Catalan nationalists can no longer attempt to claim the moral high ground by suggesting the region played a minimal role in Spain’s colonial and mercantile past. When Cuba abolished slavery in 1886 and in due course won its independence from Spain, many of those who had made their fortunes there, known asmansions in Barcelona and in coastal towns such as Sitges and Vilassar de Mar.
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