Until last month, if someone had asked me what I thought about mahogany, like most, I would probably have said it was the wood used for making some of the finest furniture of the eighteenth-and nineteenth centuries. However, I have since learned that the wood bolstered the slave trade and contributed to the deforestation of the Caribbean.
It’s Black History Month in the UK and I’m going to look at the unsettling history of the wood that has been considered the highest quality in furniture design for the last three centuries.
Woeful Ignorance
At the end of September, I visited the Judges’ Lodgings Museum in Lancaster with my mum. Like many stately homes and castles around the UK, the rooms featured displays of eighteenth century furniture made from mahogany.
So, Mum and I were wandering around the rooms, “ooo”-ing and “ahh”-ing at the beautiful furniture, until we came across a display that opened our eyes to the disturbing reality that is often ignored regarding the creation of these pieces.
The history of mahogany is intrinsically linked to the history of sugar, and I don’t know why I hadn’t put two and two together before. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was ignorant of the connection of between mahogany and slavery, and its role in what many consider the golden age of British furniture manufacturing between 1725 and 1825. Well, I decided to put that right.
The Rise of Mahogany
From the 1650s, British slave ships often left the Caribbean with empty cargo holds. To provide ballast, they filled the holds with local tree timbers to keep the ship on an even keel. The timbers were then dumped on British docksides, and furniture makers in the area, unwilling to let the wood go to waste, started to use it to make their furniture.
A mahogany trees’ girth allowed for wide boards with straight, fine and even grain, and the carpenters found the wood had several benefits, for it was very workable, durable, resistant to wood rot and was never attacked by woodworm. It also displayed a beautiful sheen when polished.
Demand for furniture made from mahogany increased. Tax levies were high, which made items expensive and reserved for the rich. When the duties were lifted in 1725, mahogany became the predominant cabinet timber for the next century.
Mahogany and Slavery
Like sugar, mahogany was harvested using slave labour. What started as a means of clearing forests to make way for sugar plantations became a profitable endeavour. By 1735, coastal areas in the Caribbean had already been cleared, so plantation owners sent their workforces farther inland to the inaccessible hilly forests to harvest the millions of feet of mahogany required to keep up with demand.
As you would expect, the enslaved African labourers endured strenuous and inhumane conditions. Men, women and children worked in gangs of 30 or 40; men felled and hauled the timbers, women dragged and cleaned up the heavy branches and children bundled them up.
Gillow’s of Lancaster
Master furniture craftsmen like Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton all worked with mahogany. The Judges’ Lodgings Museum in Lancaster is crammed with items manufactured by the company that has been synonymous with fine furniture in Britain for centuries.
Before the rise of Liverpool docks (from the late eighteenth century), Lancaster was the primary commercial port in the Northwest of England. Robert Gillow first worked as a carpenter on the slave ships before earning a fortune from importing rum, sugar and mahogany, and founding his furniture-making company.
Gillow used his connections with the plantation owners to supply mahogany for his furniture business. Gillow’s furniture became famous across the globe, and it even mentioned in the work of Jane Austen and William Thackery.
The Decline of Mahogany
With the rise of the Abolition Movement from 1787, the taste for products of slavery declined.
“…in the depth of its grain, through all its polish, the hue of wretched slaves…”
Charles Dickens
European woods, such as oak and walnut, overtook the popularity of mahogany and pieces of furniture, like Gillow’s, became family heirlooms and continue to grace the rooms of stately homes across the UK.
In the light of new research, curators at the Judges’ Lodges Museum (which is situated across the road from the original Gillow’s warehouse) have been working with the Lancaster Black History Group to re-evaluate the museum’s collection of Gillow’s furniture.
While we may still gush over the beauty of eighteenth-century mahogany furniture, we must remember that its creation is firmly rooted in a complex and unattractive history.
Sources
In the wake of the slave-ship Norfolk
Facing our Past: The difficult history of mahogany
