How London’s wealth was built on the backs of slaves

More than 3,000 voyages engaged in the trade in enslaved Africans left from London, responsible for transporting at least 800,000 into slavery

Many in the city made their fortunes off the back of slavery and colonial oppression, a fact that is only now being partially acknowledged

Bloomberg Published: 24 Jun, 2020


A statue of a City of London dragon stands on a street lamp outside the Royal Exchange in the City of London. Photo: Bloomberg

If there’s one thing that foretold the City of London’s ambition to become the epicentre of finance it was the founding of the Royal Exchange almost 500 years ago.

The driving force behind the capital’s first purpose-built centre for trading stocks was Sir Thomas Gresham, whose legacy survives in the college, City street and law of economics that bear his name.

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Less celebrated is the role of his prominent backer in the venture, Sir William Garrard: former Lord Mayor and pioneer of English involvement in the slave trade.

The City of London is interwoven with so many layers of history, from Roman to medieval, the civil war and the age of empire, that the lives of the myriad figures who contributed to its status today are often obscured by time.

A sign for the street named after Sir Thomas Gresham sits on a building in the City of London. Photo: Bloomberg

But with outside scrutiny comes the realisation that many made their fortunes off the back of slavery and colonial oppression, a fact that is now being acknowledged by some of the financial district’s most venerable names, shaking the foundations upon which many of these institutions were built.

The Bank of England apologised last week for “some inexcusable connections” to slavery by former governors. Barclays is examining its own history. While “we can’t change what’s gone before us,” the bank is committed to “do more to further foster our culture of inclusiveness, equality and diversity.”

“We understand that we cannot always be proud of our past,” Lloyd’s of London, which began life insuring ships and their cargo in the late 17th century, said in a statement. “In particular, we are sorry for the role played by the Lloyd’s market in the 18th and 19th century slave trade – an appalling and shameful period of English history, as well as our own.”

Those cases were far from isolated.

This was big business, and the rich men of the City were in the thick of itRichard Drayton, history professor

According to Richard Drayton, professor of imperial history at King’s College London,
Britain became the principal slaving nation of the modern world, with the City providing the finance to facilitate trade with the plantation colonies. “This was big business, and the rich men of the City were in the thick of it,” Drayton said in a lecture delivered in the Museum of London last October.

The “triangle trade” involved shipping manufactured goods to western Africa and exchanging them for human beings, who were transported in appalling conditions to the Caribbean and sold as slaves to work in the plantations.

The tobacco, rum and most of all the sugar that were the fruits of their forced labour were then taken back to Europe. “The formation of the City of London was shaped significantly by sugar,” said Nick Draper, one of the lead researchers on University College London’s groundbreaking Legacies of British Slave Ownership project. “Merchants in London would advance credit to planters and guarantee remittances to slave traders so that London merchant houses became the centre of this economic system built on Caribbean slavery.”

That uncomfortable, probing questions are now being asked of the institutions that profited from the trade is down to the Black Lives Matter movement that began in the
US and crossed the Atlantic, prompting a re-examining of the role of prominent figures with sometimes contradictory histories in London but also in the mercantile cities of Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow.

A protester holds a US flag during a Black Lives Matter protest in front of New York City Hall. Photo: DPA

More than 3,000 voyages of ships engaged in the trade in enslaved Africans left from London, responsible for transporting at least 800,000 people into slavery in the Americas, according to Diana Paton, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh. “The slavery economy ran on credit, an important proportion of which was extended by London-based individuals and firms,” she said.

Walk through the warren of ancient streets lined with discrete Victorian facades and modern steel-and-glass towers that make up London’s Square Mile – effectively a city within a city – and it’s possible to find echoes of that legacy.

Pubs with names like the Jamaica Wine House in St Michael’s Alley, or the Sugar Loaf on Cannon Street – while both housed in 19th century buildings constructed after the abolition of slavery – hint at what came before.

Whereas in the Elizabethan age, financiers like Garrard invested in the voyages of glorified privateers, by the 17th century the trade was more developed, if no less barbaric.

A section of the ‘Gilt of Cain’ monument commemorating the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade stands in the City of London. Photo: Bloomberg

Barbados became England’s first sugar producing colony in the 1640s, followed by Jamaica after it was seized from Spain. Cargoes of cane were landed at the sugar wharf beside the Tower of London at what is now Customs House. Cannon Street was the site of sugar refineries that helped fuel the rise of England, and after the union of 1707, Great Britain, to a world power.

In 1672 came the founding of the Royal African Company, an enterprise backed by the monarchy that historian William Pettigrew has said “shipped more enslaved African women, men and children to the Americas than any other single institution” during the transatlantic slave trade.

Its shareholders included 15 lord mayors and 38 City of London council members known as ldermen, according to Drayton. Edward Colston, whose statue was torn down and dumped in Bristol harbour this month, was a deputy governor. Its symbol – as stamped on guineas of the day made with African gold – was an elephant with a riding carriage, or houdah: the Elephant and Castle.

It’s not known if the symbol bears any relation to the London landmark of the same name, such are the layers of juxtaposed history. Take the Lloyd’s building: Located off Leadenhall, it occupies the site of the headquarters of the former East India Company, which employed a private army to appropriate the subcontinent’s wealth. The East India Company’s original marble fireplace was incorporated into the Foreign Office in Whitehall when it opened in 1868.

Pedestrians pass a section of the Lloyd's of London building in the City of London. Photo: Bloomberg


Some evidence of past complicity is barely concealed. In the basement of the Bank of England are the papers of one former governor, Humphry Morice, who was the largest slave trader of his day in the 1720s, according to Anne Ruderman, an assistant professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, who is writing a book on the transatlantic slave trade. “You can see the instructions that Morice wrote to his captains before sending them on slave voyages,” she said by email. “You can see detailed daily trading logs of how many enslaved people his captains purchased and at what prices.”

Still, the Guildhall off Moorgate, the ceremonial and administrative centre of the City since the 15th century, illustrates the difficulty in unpicking and assigning guilt to institutions. Inside is a statue of William Beckford, a two-times lord mayor and owner of thousands of acres of Jamaican plantations worked by slaves. The Guildhall was also the scene of a court case over the killing of more than 100 slaves at sea that spurred the anti-slavery movement, leading to full abolition in 1833.

Even then, Drayton said, slavery continued for decades in other countries in the Americas. “London was the close partner of the expansion of the cotton south in the United States, creating complex mortgage-backed securities which provided a paper veil for a new kind of slave-ownership,” he said.

David Barclay, one of the founders of the eponymous bank, was a “keen and committed advocate for abolition of the slave trade,” even as his bank then in Lombard Street financed plantation mortgages, causing him to suffer a “moral dilemma,” according to the UCL slave ownership project.

A sign hangs above an entrance to a branch of Barclays bank in the City of London. Photo: Bloomberg

The City’s institutions are now confronted with their own moral dilemma. Lloyd’s is among those to have pledged to invest in programmes to attract and develop black and minority ethnic talent. In 2018, 28 per cent of the City’s workforce was of non-white origin. The City of London Corporation, the financial district’s governing body, said it understands “it’s not enough to say that we are against racism but we have to work to eradicate racism in all that we do”.

Sajid Javid, the former chancellor of the exchequer, has spoken about his decision to leave the City for New York early in his career in part because of his ethnicity and class. “The UK has come a long way since then,” he told PBS. “But we still need to make sure we’re not complacent and we keep tackling racial injustice wherever we find it.”


Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, says the wealth generated then is still with us now, helping to perpetuate the racial divide. “It’s not past, it’s very much the present and a continuation, and the banks are one of the key drivers,” he said. “The idea they can just apologise and have some more diversity is frankly insulting.”

It’s really hard to separate slavery from so many things that we know of in modern Britain Dominic Burris-North, tour guide

Dominic Burris-North is one of just two qualified “Blue Badge” guides who provide tours of the City focusing on its historic ties to the slave trade. The reactions, he says, are predominantly shock, horror and dismay. Burris-North has a personal connection to the dilemmas raised: he is the son of a father whose own parents came from Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants invited to the UK after World War II.

“It’s really hard to separate slavery from so many things that we know of in modern Britain, from the royal family to our galleries to the British Museum to the Bank of England to former prime ministers – all of these names, all of these institutions,” he said. “As more people start to understand and hear about these things, eventually there will be a reckoning.”

White privilege: to dismantle it, we must first learn to identify it

George Floyd’s death has led the Western world to examine the privilege it has accumulated through centuries of oppression of black and other non-white people
Undoing the damage is an uncomfortable task that will take generations, but it starts by not looking away

OPINION Chandran Nair Published: 28 Jun, 2020

A woman marches during a demonstration on June 14 in Barcelona. Photo: AFP

When George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in May, it tore open the racial fault lines that have run through the United States for centuries. The impact was felt elsewhere in the Anglosphere, particularly in Britain, stirring renewed debate about the nature and scale of white privilege.

On June 18, the Church of England and the Bank of England admitted to being complicit in hundreds of years of oppression of black populations across the world. It took these institutions centuries to come out of actively practised denial, so on that front, this is a historic moment.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, on the other hand, suggested it was unfair to “photoshop British history” when referring to the removal of statues of slave owners, as if they were somehow worth maintaining. This societal delusion and amnesia are ingrained in many white views of race issues today, aided by centuries of not having that world view challenged.

To have honest conversations about white privilege, there is a need for everyone (white or otherwise) to recognise what it is, acknowledge how widespread it is, and reflect on the damage it has done.

There is no running away from the large-scale impact resulting from European conquest of the world, which was predicated on the belief that White superiority must prevail in the world order.

Firstly, it must be understood that white privilege is a system that allows for white narratives to take hold globally and be actively spread. It is not restricted to the US and the systemic oppression of black people there. It is insidious, and it pervades many systems that govern how the modern world operates.

This globalisation of white privilege has allowed for the notion of superiority to be planted and enforced across the world, enabling other privileges to be born and old ones further enshrined.

We should be conscious of how white privilege intimidates, stifles or abuses others; and conversely, how it is actively cultivated and camouflaged for all its inherent benefits. We should examine where it makes non-whites want to imitate white people and even live like them, or how it offers a “free pass” to white people globally, often through conferred social status. And underpinning all of this, how white privilege maintains and reproduces economic power over all others.

An honest – yet respectful – examination of its ubiquity is the only way to fight contemporary white racism in all its permutations, and come to terms with the historical events that have created and spread white privilege. This goes to the heart of the global debate on race and power.

People at a rally in Missouri to protest the death of George Floyd. Photo: AP
Secondly, white people seeking to recognise their own privilege should do so in a way that does not let emotion cloud their understanding, through denying the existence of white privilege, or by seeking refuge in old arguments that racism is a global issue – and therefore racism perpetuated by white people isn’t worth singling out – to smokescreen the industrial scale of white racism over the last four centuries. Nor should we be resorting to racist insults in return.

The fact is that white privilege is unique because of its scale and global persistence. We need to be attuned to knowing where it lurks and thrives, while also understanding how often it is unrecognisable or deeply coded into long-established systems that many of us have accepted as norms.

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To do this, the first step is to acknowledge historical wrongdoings by coming to an agreed history of oppression and the consequent privileges that white people have accrued, which still persist and continue to be cultivated.

The next step is dealing with the impact of what was done across the world in the name of white supremacy. Facing these truths and undoing the damage is a monumental task that will take generations – an example is the process in South Africa. The US will need to do the same, from a national apology to deciding on reparations, and identifying and honouring all the victims of racist killings.

A poster seen at a protest in California on June 24, 2020. Photo: AFP

So how does white privilege manifest? How should we rethink its persistent and pervasive influence? To assist in this process, I have gathered some examples that demonstrate just how ubiquitous the perpetuation and preservation of white power is.

It is a starting point to encourage productive and honest discussions. Some may elicit discomfort, but it is high time that we do the work of dismantling white privilege and this means facing uncomfortable truths.

GEOPOLITICS

In the arena of geopolitics and multilateralism, the non-white global majority is wholly under-represented, from the United Nations Security Council to the G8.

The heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are an American and a European, respectively. Two of the world’s most important multilateral institutions practise a form of apartheid. White exceptionalism ensures that the West directs the rules of the so-called rules-based world order because it fears changes to its world order.

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At the moment, the dislike of China by the West and its media, which borders on xenophobia, is an example, and India will be next if it grows in power. Obsession with the spread of the West’s version of democracy is an instrument in this process. The Middle East has paid the highest price in recent years. The US in particular has been the driving force of this, and has been at war 225 of the 243 years since its inception, largely to spread and enforce Western democratic ideals.

The use of sanctions against opponents of the West, led by the US and, until recently, invariably supported by Europeans, is an example of trampling on international law and ignoring the deaths of hundreds of thousands, none of whom are white.

Western brands such as Starbucks are idealised as business heroes. Photo: SCMP

BUSINESS

In the business world, the promotion of ideas about globalisation, free markets, role of finance, are all done in accordance with the Western rule book.

A key vehicle for the spread of this ideology has been the leading Western business schools, and their march across regions like Asia has been relentless. They invariably idealise the superheroes of the Western business world, from Amazon to Apple and Starbucks.

The gatekeepers of the rules of governance of international business, despite systematically failing in their roles, are a cartel of four: Deloitte, PwC, Ernst & Young and KPMG, all of which are Western-owned.

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The same dominance is to be seen in the business consulting world through a handful of mainly US firms – McKinsey, BCG, Bain – as they churn out the same old ideas.

For IPOs and M&A, no global deal can be led by any legal firm except the largest ones from the US or Britain.

Leading investment banks worldwide are all Western, and some in the US have egregious histories of funding slave plantation expansion and even providing insurance for slave owners.

When it comes to ratings agencies, S&P Global Ratings, Moody’s, and Fitch Group are all Western, with no accord for a non-Western ratings organisation to join their ranks.

The West closing its doors to Huawei is an example of keeping the tech world in the control of Western powers.

The global ranking of universities and business schools is set by Western establishments. File photo: AFP

EDUCATION AND MINDS

Education is an area where examples abound. The prestige accorded to Western Ivy League universities, including the lavish donations to these institutions, even by Asians is a case in point.

Oxford and Cambridge, even in this day and age, have continued global pre-eminence, especially in former colonies. The global ranking of universities and business schools is dominated by Western establishments, and is perpetuated by Western publications with their eagerly awaited annual ranking.

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Models of Western education across all development stages are practised as the “pinnacle” of education across Asia and Africa.

Selective teachings of history are a particular irony. Fiction, philosophy and other lessons from Western, mostly male, authors have a special place in the literary canon, and are exported and venerated the world over – Dante, Homer, Kant, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and so on – while other literary greats or philosophers from non-white countries are majorly unknown.

The week to June 13 was the first time in British history that a black British author topped the UK book charts.

Books by Western authors such as JRR Tolkein have a special place in the literary canon. File photo: AP

MEDIA

The Western media plays an important role in this scheme of things. From outlets such as the BBC and CNN to The Guardian, Financial Times and The New York Times, Western media shapes the information that global middle classes and elites consume.

English is the lingua franca of the modern world, meaning English-sourced narratives are predominant. This is changing as other nations join the international media fold, resulting in one of the biggest ideological reckonings of our times as media discourse between the West and the Rest ekes it out on a multitude of platforms.

In addition, which books get published and put on global bestseller lists is largely decided by the Western publishing world. Few books on politics, economics, development or environment written in non-English languages are ever translated for a global audience.

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Western publishing agents favour Western authors and certain narratives. Only
select Asian or African writers who pander to the taste of Western audiences and their politics make it in – including stories about the monsoons, romantic views on Africa, white saviours, or awful indictments of the countries they hail from.

In the global media, commentary is dominated by Western writers and aligned to associated ideologies. Current fads include China-bashing, the dangers of a new world order, even climate – but seen through the narrow lens of the Western experience.

Leading global media outlets are blind to white privilege narratives and thus perpetuate it by the decisions they make daily in the narratives they choose to broadcast.

Peking opera is centuries older than Western opera. File photo: Reuters

CULTURE AND ENTERTAINMENT

Culture and entertainment has been one of the most powerful tools in promoting White superiority.

Hollywood leads the charge through movies, ranging from the promotion of Tarzan, John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe to the movies that vilified black people, Geronimo, the Yellow Peril, and portrayed freedom fighters from white colonisers as terrorists.

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Western pop music was another powerful tool with its global spread, making the Beatles and the Rolling Stones global icons – not Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley – while music from non-Western countries is callously labelled “world music”.

Western classical music is revered as a cultural pinnacle, while non-Western classical music is sidelined or not broadcast. Ballet is the ultimate historical dance form, not Kathakali from India or Shen Yun from China. The global prominence of Western opera, and not Peking opera – which is centuries older – paints the same picture.

US rock ‘n’ roll legend Chuck Berry. File photo: AFP

SPORT

Sport is not spared and is rife with racism. Ownership, management and coaching of the NBA, NFL, leading football clubs, and other major sports around the world are dominated by white people.

In certain sports such as basketball, black players act as modern-day gladiators and entertainers in arenas that cater to mainly white businesses and audiences, with sporting successes attributed to race and genetics, not individual hard work and intelligence.

Racism in European football has been co-opted into a liberal cause restricted to the sporting world, without confronting the deeper structural issues within society that enable this manifestation of racism in the first place.

I remember
https://t.co/KIRWpMHd62
— Vanessa Nakate (@vanessa_vash)
June 4, 2020

SAVING THE PLANET

When it comes to saving the planet, so-called global solutions are seen through the lens of the Western political economy and economists, the belief that no sacrifice – including a change in lifestyle – is needed to reconcile free market failings with environmental destruction and the rights of the global majority.

The belief that solutions to climate change and other global environmental challenges can only come from the research centres, leaders, activists and spokespersons from the West is widespread.

Teenage activist Greta Thunberg is now an icon – it is hard to think that a young African or Asian person would be cultivated into a global figure in a similar manner.

Non-Western experts and voices are ignored or silenced, despite climate change disproportionately impacting socioeconomically less-advantaged populations, most of whom live in non-white countries.

US fashion model Halima Aden, a refugee from Kenya, broke boundaries in 2017 as the first hijab-wearing model to grace magazine covers and walk in high-profile runway shows. Photo: Reuters


FASHION

The rarefied world of high fashion is an important influencer. Leading fashion houses are all Western and promote white fashion styles.

A white sense of female beauty has permeated the non-Western world – slim, sexualised and fair (including skin-whitening products and complexes).

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The hijab is perceived as oppressive, while a bikini is viewed as freedom. Then there is the erosion of traditional attire – replacing the Indian sari or the Burmese longyi with a Chanel outfit or Hugo Boss fabrics, both in the home and the workplace.

Cultures of fashion are belittled or appropriated. For example, indigenous clothing is looked down upon until it is co-opted by fashion houses. Gucci created a jumper that mimicked blackface last year. Commes Des Garcons made blonde cornrow wigs for white models this year.

The statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is seen defaced at a rally in London outside the US Embassy on June 7. Photo: AFP

HISTORY

And finally there is the writing and teaching of history. In Western retelling of wars, there are often no non-Western heroes. In World War II, millions from Africa and Asia were denied their basic freedoms and died fighting for the West in a war that was waged to determine which Western country would continue to exploit them.

There is also the brushing aside of the crimes of the West – Churchill and his involvement in the genocide of 4 million Bengalis in 1943 is an example.

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Equally, no US history book regales you with how many native Americans were killed by white settlers, but US historians have precise numbers for atrocities committed by other nations.

There has been no apology for dropping a nuclear bomb on the people of Japan or for the three million killed in the Vietnam war and the carpet bombing of Laos.

Women in Vietnam still have Agent Orange in their breast milk and birth deformities run into the tens of thousands. Or even historical recognition of the crimes against humanity committed in the European conquest of the lands of native Americans, the First Nation Peoples of CANADA, Australia, or the Māori of New Zealand.

Protesters participate in a Black Lives Matter rally in Brisbane on June 6. Photo: EPA-EFE

Citing these examples is not to say that other races, nations or cultures have not engaged in racism, slavery, crimes against humanity or oppression of other civilisations.
Most have and some still do – just as the US does with its prison system today, there is the Indian caste system, racism against black people across  Asia, and the infringement of the rights of girls and women in numerous parts of the non-Western world.

But there is no running away from the large-scale impact resulting from European conquest of the world, which was predicated on the belief that white superiority must prevail in the world order.

It has ultimately shaped a world that – even today – is marked by global white privilege.

Black Lives Matter protests held across Asia

These interventions have also resulted in intra-national fragility and conflicts that persist today – for example, the conflicts in Myanmar, Kashmir, DR Congo and Palestine, to name a few.

We live in a moment when the #BlackLivesMatter movement provides a rare opportunity to expose and rectify practices which have, for far too long, been conveniently ignored in the interests of preserving and protecting white privilege.

Thus, if as a reader you find yourself thinking, “But Western intervention has helped create the globalised world we see today, with opportunities for prosperity in all countries”, or conclude that the points in the list above are simply manifestations of things that white people are “just better at”, then you are falling into the same trap that catches white supremacists.

This is where the hard work must be done: to dismantle the deeply ingrained mindsets that many of us possess. It’s not comfortable, it’s not easy, but now is the time to start.

It starts by not looking away.

Chandran Nair is the founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow. He is the author of The Sustainable State . He lived and worked in southern Africa during the years of the liberation struggle.

From cultural prop to circus freak: the first Chinese woman in US

Afong Moy was brought to the US in 1834 to help sell Chinese goods to an eager American middle class, writes historian Nancy E. Davis

She met president Andrew Jackson and served as a cultural bridge, but ended up in a circus sideshow being mocked for her differences

Martin Witte Published:  3 Sep, 2019

An engraving of Afong Moy. Referred to as “the first Chinese woman to arrive in America”, Moy served as a cultural bridge between China and the United States, including in private and among elites, but was eventually relegated to little more than a sensationalised caricature resulting from racial and ethnic tensions.

The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, by Nancy E. Davis. Published by Oxford University Press. 4 stars.

It requires an inventive streak to write extensively about a person whose known biography only fills a few pages. This is the long shot taken in The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, by historian Nancy E. Davis, who refers to her as “the first Chinese woman to arrive in America”.

Davis’s ambition pays off. She augments scant available material about Moy, who was brought to the United States as a “cultural prop” to help sell Chinese goods, by painting in the negative space around her. While keeping Moy in sight, Davis branches off to detail, among other topics, the foundation of US-China trade and cultural ties, the beginnings of China’s manufacturing industry, and the transformation of 19th-century American society.

Moy arrived in New York in October 1834 at about 16 years of age. She has a documented history in the country spanning 17 years, the middle half of which were spent in relative obscurity in a poorhouse in New Jersey.

An advertisement for an “exhibition” of Afong Moy.

Davis divides Moy’s public life into two acts. First, she was an exotic “presenter” of Chinese-made goods. Later, after an absence from a leering public – fallout from the economic panic of 1837 made her an expendable luxury – she became a sideshow attraction from the late 1840s, mainly under the devices of American showman PT Barnum.

There are no known photographs of Moy, no reliable idea about how she felt about her experiences in America, and no record of her at all after 1850.

The merchants who brought her over from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (it seems that “money likely changed hands”) played up her “exoticism” – her bound feet, clothing and accessories – to promote the “authenticity” of Chinese imports.

She was taken on a 1,600-kilometre (1,000-mile) tour from New York to New Orleans, with a stop in Cuba, posing on stages alongside Chinese wares for sale. Moy was viewed by thousands of people, most of whom paid a small fee to lay their eyes on a Chinese woman for the first time.

Davis frequently references a lithograph printed to advertise Moy’s earliest “demonstrations”. The image most often associated with Moy (it is unknown whether it is an actual likeness) depicts her in Chinese dress and surrounded by vases, chairs, textiles and other products. The items displayed – like many Chinese goods manufactured today for foreign markets – were mass-produced, often knocked-off from European designs, and marked up in price for an American middle class eager to reap the rewards of expanding trade with China.

A newspaper clipping about Afong Moy.


While no solid impressions survive on how Moy herself felt about being objectified, there are hints. Davis writes that most disconcerting for her may have been “the attention paid to her by strange men in close proximity”, since women in China generally stayed out of public view. One business publication reported that “when some of them significantly ogled her through their quizzing glasses, we thought we saw on her brow, a frown of indignant rebuke”.

Not everyone was game to gawk at Moy. Some felt repulsed by what they regarded as a crass commercial venture that deprived her of dignity. An editorial in a New York City newspaper read: “We have not been to see Miss Afong Moy, the Chinese lady, nor do we intend to perform that ceremony to convert a lady into an exhibition. [It is] by no means to our taste.”

Later, Moy was able to communicate directly with audiences in English. She also sang, possibly the first performances in the United States of folk songs from her home province.

Cover of Nancy E. Davis’s The Chinese Lady.


She also emerged as something of a trendsetter – fashion plates depicted her “most becoming” hairstyle, stroked back from the forehead and knotted at the top of the head. It became a popular look widely adopted, especially by French women in New Orleans.

Moy’s last known chapter, unfortunately, relegated her to little more than a sensationalised caricature. From 1847, she was part of a circus sideshow, with PT Barnum pairing her with General Tom Thumb – his leading stage attraction – and joining her up with such figures as the Wonderful Monkey Man and the 430-pound (195-kilogram) Ohio Mammoth Girl. Her “differences” were mocked, and her personality was ridiculed.

A pamphlet advertising her oddity remarked that her “habits, everyday occupations and pursuits” were “opposite to all the received notions of every other civilised nation on the face of the earth”, and portrayed her as “vain, conceited, prideful and shallow”.

Animus towards outsiders was beginning to grow, and “a disdainful and derisive attitude toward the Chinese” had become standard. By 1850, Moy disappeared from Barnum’s spectacles, and she would be lost without further trace.

PT Barnum (left) and General Tom Thumb (stage name of Charles Sherwood Stratton) in a portrait circa 1850. Barnum founded Barnum & Bailey Circus, and for many years Tom Thumb was a popular dwarf performer in the circus.

Racial and ethnic tensions in Moy’s era resonate, depressingly, with American conditions today. The country she saw was gripped by nativism, as a fair chunk of Americans were wary of cultural and linguistic influences from overseas and advocated for tighter immigration and enfranchisement laws.

Davis emphasises that Moy, with her singular uniqueness, served as a cultural bridge between China and the United States, including in private and among elites. She met with President Andrew Jackson in February 1835, becoming, in the author’s words, the “first concrete example of China to a sitting American president”.

Portrait of Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president.

Davis’s book is a form of redress for a familiar injustice: the lives of the exploited, no matter how remarkable, rarely get remembered, much less told. Davis expresses hope that others can find out more about Moy, particularly from when history seemingly lost track of her, which would bring the “Chinese Lady” into greater relief.

If this happens, it would cast open wider a window into the treatment of women and racial minorities at tumultuous times in American history. And we might better grasp how attitudes and choices – about race, gender, culture and economics – shaped that society, and in turn help us assess the direction the country is going in today.

Asian Review of Books
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Significant, other: the first Chinese woman in America

How art spread Maoism around the world, from China all the way to Peru

An excerpt from Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, edited by Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García and Victoria H. F. Scott, explores the contradictions inherent in the global spread of China’s 20th century political doctrine
Manchester University Press Published: 1 Mar, 2020

“Contradiction is present in the process of development of all things; it permeates the process of development of each thing from beginning to end.”Mao Zedong, ‘On Contradiction’, 1937

Art and images were and continue to be central channels for the transnation­al circulation and reception of Maoism. Though it is rarely acknowledged as such, the so-called Great Chinese Proletari­an Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was one the most extraordinary political upheavals of the 20th century. And similarly, no other post-war statesman has elicited more conflicted emotions than Mao.

Indeed, despite being responsible, by some controversial accounts, for tens of millions of deaths, the man known as the Great Helmsman is still widely revered both inside and outside China, and in the 21st century, the contested legacy of this powerful figure has only expanded.

A 1967 poster features an illustration of Mao Zedong above the phrase “Raise High the Great Red Flag of Mao Zedong Thought to Carry Out to the End the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. Photo: Getty Images

Marking the 50-year anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, in both China and other countries, academic research produced pioneering studies of the Red Guards, the Shanghai People’s Commune, the “little red book” and seminal theoretical disputes (opposing, for instance, Mao to Deng Xiaoping). Some aspects of Maoism are being reasses­sed, partly because they speak to the present moment, such as Maoism’s critique of colonialism and racism.

If the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of anti-colonial struggles, and “an awakening sense of global possibility, of a different future”, this should also be ascribed to Maoism. Thus it comes as no surprise that Fredric Jameson viewed Maoism, rightly or wrongly, as “the richest of all the great new ideologies of the 1960s”, when the idea of “Maoist China” became a productive epistemological device to reimagine the world, to reinterpret its hierarchies and to act to change them.

Maoism preceded the Cultural Revolution, and can be traced to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, or even earlier. It was, however, only with the Sino-Soviet split and China’s experiments with nuclear weapons that it gained real momentum. Mao’s sustained criticism of the peaceful coexistence between the two superpowers, as well as his advocacy of armed struggles in the Third World, broke what many regarded as the theoretical and geopolitical impasse of Marxism.

Art and images were paramount in the dissemination and reception of Maoism’s revolutionary ambitions. Not only could they travel fast to distant places, but some visual conceits could also be easily adapted to specific contexts.

In recent years there has been a scholarly reappraisal of the art produced in China between 1966 and 1976. No longer stigmatised, this type of visual propaganda has been widely examined, helping to shed new light on the semantics, aesthetics and memories associated with Maoist plays, posters, photographs, paintings and artefacts of all sorts.


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The dynamics created by travelling objects (model works, “little red books”, posters, badges, pamphlets, journals, etc), people (intellectuals, party cadres, diplomats, activists, etc) and ideas associated with Maoism had an enormous impact. However, any effort to delineate the “standard Maoist position” on the arts is probably doomed to failure because of the long history, complex networks and diverse practices into which Maoism has crystallised. By the same token, searching for the putative “essence” of a Maoist aesthetic in Mao’s founding texts leads to an impasse.
The lecturer on modern Chinese history and literature
Julia Lovell has observed that the Cultural Revolution did not attract significant interest among students in the United States until 1968, when it began to resonate strongly with their own anti-establishment sentiment. She concludes that this identification is “far more informative about the preoccupations of these distant observers of Chinese politics than about Chinese politics itself”.

Students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing create political artworks. Photo: Getty Images


In his study of the anti-authoritarian Left in West Germany, the historian Timothy Scott Brown echoes Lovell’s remarks. He maintains that the reception of images associated with Maoism “served as a bridge between the global and the local”, and was driven “less by the meaning imputed to images or cultural products at their point of origin, than at the point of their reception”.

Yet scholarly literature has had little to say regarding the role played by art in global Maoism. The wealth of studies and exhibitions about the art of the Cultural Revolution has not been accompanied by comparable analyses of European, African, Asian and American artists who were heavily influenced and inspired by the events in China.

Nor has the recent interest in exploring the worldwide influence of Chinese communism in the 1960s and 1970s been met by a commitment to analysing the visual compo­nents of its reception. The omission is surprising, as for several years this global phenomenon shaped the work and thought of major artists as diverse as John Cage and Jörg Immendorff, to name just two.

For more than a decade, global Maoism permeated art production in a variety of ways that continue to be neglected by standard art-historical accounts of the post-war period. Caught between a cult of personality and libertarian impulses, thousands of artists, architects, designers and film directors appropriated or emulated the political ideals of the Cultural Revolution, translating them into a wide variety of visual propositions.

A Soviet communist poster. Photo: Getty Images

From the Californian campuses to the Peruvian campesinos, many attempted to integrate Mao’s principles and the Cultural Revolution’s material culture, iconography and slogans into their production and model of authorship, although in different, and at times highly incompatible, ways.

It is unlikely that the lack of scholarship on this topic is accidental. The widespread apprehension concerning the attribution of historical significance and intellectual sophistication to the Maoist phase of several American and European artists is directly related to the political implica­tions of espousing Mao Zedong Thought in the West. On the one hand, the predominant narratives of art history are still embedded in the Cold War dualistic conceptual frameworks, setting capitalism against communism.

Modern art and modernism were long ago constructed as the counterpoint to the propaganda of so-called totalitarian art, which brought durable discredit upon the latter. On the other hand, the current presence of Maoist guerillas makes the topic politically sensitive in several countries, pushing scholars to see Maoist artistic production as secondary over issues of state security. Moreover, claiming the political primacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution challenges the Eurocentrism of both the Left and the Right, which still, occasionally, thinks in terms of “oriental despotism”.

A further reason accounts for the scholarly reluctance to explore Maoist artists. The Red Guards’ “cultural” revolution represented a shocking rejoinder to the Western definition of “culture” as it had emerged since the Enlightenment. Denouncing ancestral traditions and wisdom not as a shared heritage that had to be preserved, but rather as an obstacle to the exigencies of communism, in the West the Red Guards were decried as vandals, destroying culture rather than renewing it

A poster created by communist trade unions celebrates May Day in Kolkata, India, on May 1, 2006. Photo: AFP


Maoism in India is still very much alive, and in several areas Maoist guerilla fighters continue to combat the Indian state. Sanjukta Sunderason’s chapter “Framing margins: Mao and visuality in 20th century India” maps the traces of Mao and Maoism in India’s long 20th century.

Drawing from the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s notion of visuality, Sunderason explores three key moments of Indian Maoism in relation to art: the iconography of resistance developed by the Communist Party of India in the 1940s, the Naxalites’ “statue-smashing” in Calcutta in the early 1970s and the afterlives of Maoism in Indian art from the mid-1970s to the present.

The early 1970s were a key period for Maoism in the US as well. Colette Gaiter’s chapter, “The Black Panther news­paper and revolutionary aesthetics”, looks at the work of the American artist Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, which at the time was subscribing to a political tendency known as “intercommunalism”.

More expansive than other strands of leftist thought, intercommunalism sought to unite countries of the world in resistance to global capitalism and imperialism. A wave of “Black Maoism” swept through black liberation movements at this time and came to visual life in Douglas’ work on The Black Panther newspaper.

An image in The Black Panther newspaper. Photo: Getty Images

The analysis then moves to the years of the Cultural Revolution, and to the two industrialised countries that were the first to see the emergence of a large Maoist movement: West Germany and France. Lauren Graber and Daniel Spaulding’s joint contribution, “The Red Flag: the art and politics of West German Maoism”, maps artistic Maoism in West Germany from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, tying it to both the student movement and the extra-parliamentary opposition. Looking at a broad sample of artists, the authors demonstrate how the image of Mao and the politics for which it stood became contested terrain where the complex dialectic of Pop and revolution was played out in perhaps its most spectacular form.

France is the European country where Maoism has had, perhaps, the most lasting and pervasive impact on society, with intellectuals – the most prominent being the philoso­pher Alain Badiou – continuing to eulogise Mao and the Cultural Revolution. This is especi­ally significant because of the role many French intellectu­als from this period had in the formulation and dissemi­nation of post­modernism.

Like their northern neighbours, southern European artists also appropriated the Cultural Revolu­tion’s political ideals and forms of authorship. “La Familia Lavapiés” as a collec­tive, collaborated but also argued with political leaders, mass organisations, political parties (especially the Communist Party), workers, students, neighbours and, of course, other artists.

Sympathetic to acracia (the suppression of any kind of authority, of domination, of power, of coercion) and Trotskyism, the members of La Familia Lavapiés saw art and Maoism as tools with which they unsuccessfully tried to challenge and transform the cultural and political milieu in which they carried out their activities.

Mao’s “little red book”. Photo: Getty Images

In several countries Maoism was so strongly refracted through the prism of the local specificities that it occasion­ally became a pretext and even a joke. Could one at once be a Maoist and poke fun at Mao’s cult? By 1976, some Italian militants were advocating a new form of Maoism that con­flated pop culture, autonomist Marxism, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s philosophy and, last but not least, avant-garde art. They defined this trend as “Mao-Dadaism”.

In “Another red in the Portuguese diaspora: Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro’s Un autre livre rouge”, Ana Bigotte Vieira and André Silveira examine Un autre livre rouge, an artists’ book made by the Portuguese artists Lourdes Castro and Manuel Zimbro while they were living in Paris. The two-volume work alluded to Mao’s “little red book” and was entirely devoted to the contradictory meanings and psycho­logical associations that red conveyed.

The work was craft­ed mostly between 1973 and 1975 at a time of radical political change in Portugal. The Carnation Revolution and the PREC (Período Revolucionário Em Curso, Ongoing Revolutionary Period) informed Un autre livre rouge, which was, however, both less and more than a political book.

The significance of Maoism for global independence movements around the world is an important subject that merits further attention, particularly for countries in Africa, for example. In “Avenida Mao Tse Tung (or how artists navigated the Mozambican Revolution)”, Polly Savage examines Maoism in Mozambique. Drawing on interviews and archival records, the study focuses on the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (or FRELIMO).

A Peruvian Communist Party poster. Photo: Getty Images
Between 1970 and 1977 FRELIMO negotiated an artistic and cultural agenda combining, not without difficulties, leftist internationalism and local traditions. The analysis of works produced by the graphic designer “Mphumo” João Craveirinha Jnr offers insightful perspectives on how these tensions materialised in images. In the case of the artist Juan Carlos Castagnino, often considered to be the official painter of the Argentinian Communist Party, his relationship with China informed both his politics and his practice.

Peru was on the verge of becoming a Maoist state in 1990, set against the background of the civil war between the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), also known as Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), and the Peruvian state, a conflict that began in 1980 and lasted well into the 1990s.

Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, published in 1950, is the world’s bestselling book in the field of art history. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, Gombrich wrote a scathing review of Arnold Hauser’s book The Social History of Art. Criticising Hauser’s methodology, Gombrich argued that contradiction was an ontological trap that led to theoretical paralysis. But the notion of contradiction is an insightful one for describing and understanding the impact of Maoism on the visual arts.

Instead of eschewing the paradoxes that animate art history, one must expose them and reveal cultural contra­dictions for what they have always been: a powerful source of political, social and aesthetic transformation, for better or for worse.

Excerpt from Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Edited by Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García and Victoria H. F. Scott. Published by Manchester University Press