As Waterford Wedgwood goes bust and its obituaries written, it’s worth noting its contribution to an area for where it gets little credit: outlawing the slave trade. Much rot is spoken about the abolition campaign, mainly due to the vanity of MPs who like to portray it as the result of a parliamentary initiative. Rather, it was a grassroot social movement – in many ways a viral campaign which owes much the marketing genius of Josiah Wedgwood, the company’s founder, who joined the anti-slave trade campaigners in 1790.
He had a genius for what is today called product placement. He’d find ways of getting his vases into famous paintings, for example, and figured he could deploy the same techniques in a political campaign. He came up with the anti-slavery logo shown above: a picture of a chained African with the inscription “am I not a man and a brother?” It was everywhere, from hats to the stamps used to seal wax on envelopes.
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