Catalonia confronts past racism after slave trade documentary

Programme highlights fact that much of 19th-century wealth was built on the back of transatlantic practice

The government of Catalonia has said the wealthy Spanish region must confront the past racism" of its slave-trading history, after a documentary revealed how Catalan industrialists and seafarers profited from the transatlantic slave trade when the British abolished the practice in 1807.

It has long been acknowledged that many Catalan fortunes - including that of Antonio Gaudi's patron Eusebi Guell - were made on the back of slave labour in the tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations of Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico.