Slavery and the Railways, Part 1: Acknowledging the Past

Britain’s railway exists as a legacy of slavery. In this short series we look at this under-explored aspect of railway history, and talk to Network Rail about how we acknowledge that past and build a better present.

On 25th May 2020, George Floyd was allegedly murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, igniting vigorous protests against police brutality and wider institutional racism in the US. Across the globe, the Black Lives Matter movement regained prominence and in today’s social media era, institutions have been forced to look at their own legacies with increasing scrutiny. Statues are literally being toppled.

Not for the first time, the relationship between slavery and Britain’s railway network has been questioned. On the one hand is the overwhelming evidence of slavery’s deep-rooted impact on modern Britain; on the other is a near vacuum in published material looking at how the railways fit into that picture.

Countless history books covering Britain’s railways have been published over the years, including no small number of best-sellers in the last decade or two. However, the common theme among them is that slavery’s influence is hardly considered. Most often, slavery isn’t mentioned at all. Looking to Wikipedia, which is a good place to go to eyeball the popular understanding of any subject, the early British rail history page (covering the period from 1830 to 1922) returns no matches for “slave” suggesting that the subject has had little or no discussion in either popular or academic history.

But does the lack of discussion of slavery’s impact on the British railway network really reflect the scale of its actual influence on them?

History is as much – if not more so – about identifying the gaps in society’s knowledge as it is about tying together what is already known. The acknowledged scale of slavery’s physical legacy in Britain surely makes it unlikely that the railways were created entirely or even mostly independent of it. Given Britain’s well-established reputation for downplaying the extent of historic systemic racism and the Empire's involvement in racist atrocities (including slavery), could it be the case that such an influence exists but that nobody has bothered to explore it?

Actually, slavery’s legacy on the railways isn’t entirely unexplored. In 2015, historian David Olusoga made a BBC documentary looking at the wide-reaching legacy of slavery on shaping Britain’s industry, society and culture, including the railways. To do this, he looked at the UCL “Legacies of British Slave-ownership” database.

Following the money

Back in 1833, the UK government partially abolished slavery and decided to compensate former slave owners – not those who had been held as slaves, which was considered by many at the time to be immoral, just as it is today – to the tune of £20m which, depending on the method of calculation (zero marks for just using inflation), is between £20bn and £100bn in today's money.

This tremendous sum of money represented 40% of the government's budget at the time. The original loan taken out by the UK government to make this massive payment was only fully repaid 182 years later in 2015 (somewhat undermining people who worry about state debt and argue against increasing public investment in modern infrastructure and mega-projects).

The University College London team, led by Professors Matthew J. Smith and Catherine Hall, have been painstakingly assembling a detailed list of the recipients of this compensation, as well as their financial interests, for the best part of a decade now. The database includes all of those who were slave owners at the time of partial abolition across Britain’s Empire and so offers an insight into how far-reaching the tendrils of slavery were into British society, even if only through the narrow lens of slave ownership.

Around half of the slave owner compensation money paid out remained in the UK, despite only 3,000 of roughly 47,000 compensated slave owners living here, meaning that very wealthy individuals received huge payouts. In many cases individual compensation receipts reached the 1833 equivalent of tens of millions of pounds. These former slave owners needed somewhere to invest this money, and the embryonic but exciting new technology of railways naturally seemed like a solid bet to many.

The UCL database, which is being continually updated, currently includes 487 railway investments made by 175 slave-owning individuals accounting for £5,265,218 of capital.

These investments account for as many as two hundred individual railway projects spread across the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland. Some were prospective and never materialised into physical infrastructure, but the vast majority form the backbone of the railway seen today.

Putting the investment in context

The estimated costs of projects from the pre-Mania years (i.e. railways built in the 1830s and 1840s that set the precedent for the explosion of mileage in subsequent years) give a good idea of how much £5.2m of capital represents:

Captial cost of early railway projects

The extent to which railway lines depended on the major investments of former slave owners, independent of the percentage of a given project’s capital their backing represented, can be understood by looking at the directorships that some of these individuals held.

One of these men was John Moss, a Liverpool banker. As someone embedded in slave-trading and factoring, his fortune relied on slavery. His recorded investment in railways across Britain was £222,470 (at least £200m in today's money).

Moss was a critical figure in early railway schemes, being deputy chair of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (L&MR) and chair of the Grand Junction Railway (GJR), in both cases alongside several other slave owners.

It is worth pointing out that, whilst all the elements of a modern railway system were in place, at the time of its opening in 1825, George and Robert Stephenson’s Stockton and Darlington Railway was a hotch-potch of locomotive-worked, incline-worked and horse-worked sections without much in the way of regular services.

The Stephensons really pulled everything together for the L&MR, however. This was a truly modern system, and is the line that not only set the groundwork for Britain's national network but formed the template for railways worldwide.

Without Moss, it is unlikely that either the L&MR or the later GJR would have got off the ground, and without these lines linking the north to London (when the London & Birmingham Railway opened in 1838), the railway system would have looked very different today… Indeed, the overall success of the railways may have been slowed by the core of expansion remaining up in the north east of England, rather than being spread across the country.

The breadth of investment

Railways in the north west and the Midlands relied heavily on capital from Liverpool's slave traders and beneficiaries, but so too did the railways of the south. For example, the Liverpudlian merchant Robert Browne invested initially in the L&MR but then substantially in the South Eastern Railway. Browne's total investment accounted for £577,260 (at least £550m in today's money), more than any other individual railway investor in the UCL database. For an idea of scale, this one man funded around 60 miles of railway at the going construction rates of the day.

Glasgow was also a major beneficiary of the slave trade, and its early railway network received large sums of money straight from slave owners. Thomas Dunlop Douglas, a Glaswegian West India Company merchant, invested £396,100 in the railways around the Scottish Central Belt.

Many northern industrialists relied heavily on slavery for the raw materials which drove railway development, but significant capital investment also came from slave-owning northerners.

In fact, if you go through the list of compensation recipients who went on to invest in railways, there are countless examples of industrialists hailing from Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull and across the north of England and Scotland.

And this is without looking to Bristol and its prominent role in the slave trade. Slave traders, beneficiaries and merchants relying on the slave trade or the trade in slave-produced raw materials and goods were promoters, directors and major investors in the Great Western Railway.

The myth of the ‘small investor’

The extent to which these rich slave traders and beneficiaries were involved in the railways is further bolstered when you investigate the erroneous claims still made today that “small” investors made up the majority of railway capital. This was dispelled as a myth by Campbell and Turner in 2012. As they showed, 60% of railway capital came from large investors - middle class professionals only accounted for 3.8%.

Even when we account for that low-level investment however, we must also recognise that many middle class professionals were also heavily invested in slavery and the slave trade.

Looking at the UCL database again, the middle classes represent a significant number of claims, even if the total value is not as large as for richer recipients. When it comes to the railways, over half of the listed investments are for less than £5000. So where the middle classes were investing in railways, there's a good chance their money had been earned off the back of slavery.

Looking beyond the money

However, valuable though the UCL database is, it only offers a glimpse of slavery’s legacy on Britain’s railways.

Many railways (the L&MR being a key example) were created primarily to haul slave-won raw materials and their derivative products and were funded as a going concern by charging to haul slave-won materials and products. Long after slavery’s partial abolition in the British Empire, these railways relied on the exploitation of black slaves, independent of the extent to which they had also relied on capital from slave owners to be built.

This is the story for many of the railways across Britain, particularly those in and around Lancashire where the textile industry – which imported much of its cotton from slave plantations in the southern United States – was the single largest source of economic output.

In all, the picture remains largely incomplete. There are snippets and snapshots, and the UCL database is certainly the largest effort to date in demystifying the relationship between slavery and Britain’s railways, but this has only just scratched the surface. There is clearly more work to be done.

Though they have fallen out of the UK’s news cycles, the George Floyd protests in the US are still continuing, as is the violent response to them from state and federal authorities. It is crucial that worldwide pressure is kept up to undermine institutional anti-black racism – which still exists pervasively across society – in all its forms.

The railways are generally considered to be a force for good in the world, and they certainly should be today, but that doesn't mean that the circumstances in which they were created should be forgotten. Rather than leaping for exceptions or defences, acknowledging and understanding slavery's legacy can allow society to move on. Obscuring or diminishing it does not.

The railways owe a significant legacy to slavery’s deep roots. Only by understanding what shape those roots take, can they be pulled up.

In Part 2 of this series, we talk to Loraine Martins of Network Rail about what they, and the industry, need to do to start pulling those roots up.

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