The Man Who Led the Peterloo Attack Came From a Slavery Fortune

Researchers at Global Threads say Hugh Hornby Birley — who led the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, local horsemen whose charge killed protesters among 60,000 people at St Peter's Field on 16 August 1819 — came from a family made rich by enslaving Africans across the Atlantic. It links Peterloo's cotton workers and enslaved Caribbean Africans in one shared story.