Chapter 7
A Hand Across an Ocean

As America’s civil war escalated in the cause of human rights, the British craze for its minstrel music reached its height. While the nation was awash with the sounds of the ‘plantation south,’ looming in the background was a powerhouse textile economy gorging on cotton cultivated and harvested by enslaved African Americans that was then cleaned, processed and woven into cloth by the ill-fed, ill-clad, terrorised English mill hands working twelve- hour days in hot, noisy, confined conditions, breathing in oily air heavy with fibre dust and inhumanity.