Here are a few examples...
- Cyfarthfa Ironworks in Merthyr were built on the profits of the slave trade - Cyfarthfa Castle (pictured above) still displays the wealth of a business empire founded with money made as a result of slavery.
- Nathaniel Wells, the Squire of Piercefield in Monmouthshire, was the illegitimate son of slave trader William Wells from Cardiff.
- Joseph Potiphar was the first black person to be baptized in Wales - at St John's Church, Cardiff in 1687.
- Cardiff is home to around twenty families whose origins lie in the Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese slave colony off the coast of west Africa. Their forebears were merchant seamen who worked on vessels exporting coal and oil from south Wales via a fuel bunkering port in Cape Verde from the late 19th century to the 1970s.
- The poet Iolo Morgannwg (Edward Williams) denounced slavery at his first Gorsedd at Primrose Hill in London in 1792. He was also a fair trade pioneer, declaring that sweets sold at his shop in Cowbridge were "uncontaminated with human gore", as they were made from sugar produced by free labourers in the East rather than Caribbean slaves.
- Morgan John Rhys, a Baptist minister from Llanbradach who later emigrated to Pennsylvania, wrote a pamphlet on the horrors of slave transportation.
- Chepstow shipbuilders Bowsher, Hopkins and Watkins Co were one of many south Wales companies which produced vessels used for trade with the West Indies.
2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade involving British ships. Do you know of any stories or landmarks in south east Wales relating to slavery or the slave trade?
