the Swansea population supported and campaigned for the anti-slavery
movement by the nineteenth century.
Despite their efforts, slavery continued in the West Indies. By the early
nineteenth century, though, the dimensions of slavery extended beyond the production of goods for Europeans and now served to sustain industrialisation. 94
Although Swansea had already departed from the traditional pattern by using
seaborne ore and smelting with mineral coal instead of smelting near the mines
that the ore was extracted from, the revision of the customs regime in the 1820s signified a radicalisation in this divergence. 95 This enabled copper masters to import foreign ores from places such as Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, and, most importantly, Cuba. 96 By utilising British capital and Cornish deep-mining
methods, the Cobre Company and the Santiago Company successfully
revolutionised the mining sector and began to exploit the lode at El Cobre in Cuba. 97 The establishment of these companies signified the incorporation of the
Cobre mine into the Swansea copper industry. The first chairman of the Cobre
Company, Charles Pascoe Grenfell, was also involved in the Middle Bank and
Upper Bank copperworks. Michael Williams of the Santiago Company was part
of a consortium with his family that were involved in the Rose copperworks from 1823 and established a smelting works in Morfa in the early 1820s. 98
The considerable demand from Swansea meant that every ton of ore
extracted from El Cobre was shipped across the Atlantic and consumed in the copperworks situated in the Tawe and Neath valleys. 99 Thus, it was not the slave
masters who condemned Africans to slave labour in El Cobre but Welsh
94 Evans, Slave Wales, p. 80. 95 Chris Evans, ‘A World of Copper: Introducing Swansea, Globalisation and the Industrial Revolution’, Welsh History Review, 27 (2014), 85-91 (p. 86). 96 Play, pp. 6-7 cited in Evans and Saunders, p. 4.
97 Evans and Saunders, p. 9. 98 Evans, ‘El Cobre’, pp. 115 -7. 99 Evans, Slave Wales, p. 83.
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