By the eighteenth century, Welsh cloth traded through Shrewsbury had become part of the Atlantic slave economy. Plantation owners in the West Indies and American colonies regarded clothing as an investment that made enslaved people more productive and durable as laborers. William Lee of Virginia specifically wrote that 'Good Welch cotton seems upon the whole to answer best,' while describing alternative fabrics as 'light and insufficient.' The material was not cotton in the modern sense but coarse Welsh woollen cloth, including webs, plains, friezes, and flannels, much of it processed and marketed through Shrewsbury. Contemporary descriptions state that the town's cloth was sent chiefly to America to clothe enslaved Africans, while other consignments went to Flanders and later to markets across Europe and North America. The trade connected a medieval English guild and Welsh cottage producers to the brutal logistics of plantation slavery: rural makers supplied inexpensive cloth, merchants and factors financed and purchased it, and slaveholders used it as part of the system that maintained coerced labor. The source does not show that the Shrewsbury Drapers personally owned plantations or enslaved people, but it does document the commercial role of their cloth in an economy built on human bondage. Improved roads and direct purchasing by Liverpool and Bristol factors eventually weakened the company's dominance, even as the Atlantic demand that had enriched the regional trade continued.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1700s
Welsh Woollens for the Enslaved: Shrewsbury's Cloth Trade and the Atlantic Plantation Economy
Shrewsbury Drapers Company and Welsh cloth producers / 1700s
By the eighteenth century, Welsh cloth traded through Shrewsbury had become part of the Atlantic slave economy. Plantation owners in the West Indies and American colonies regarded clothing as an investment that made enslaved people more productive and durable as laborers. William Lee of Virginia specifically wrote that 'Good Welch cotton seems upon the whole to answer best,' while describing alternative fabrics as 'light and insufficient.' The material was not cotton in the modern sense but coarse Welsh woollen cloth, including webs, plains, friezes, and flannels, much of it processed and marketed through Shrewsbury. Contemporary descriptions state that the town's cloth was sent chiefly to America to clothe enslaved Africans, while other consignments went to Flanders and later to markets across Europe and North America. The trade connected a medieval English guild and Welsh cottage producers to the brutal logistics of plantation slavery: rural makers supplied inexpensive cloth, merchants and factors financed and purchased it, and slaveholders used it as part of the system that maintained coerced labor. The source does not show that the Shrewsbury Drapers personally owned plantations or enslaved people, but it does document the commercial role of their cloth in an economy built on human bondage. Improved roads and direct purchasing by Liverpool and Bristol factors eventually weakened the company's dominance, even as the Atlantic demand that had enriched the regional trade continued.
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