Thread by @GarethDennis

In last night's #RailNatter, we talked about #BlackLivesMatter and how it is crucial to keep up the pressure and for all of us to learn about our colonial past.

Here's a really important #RailwaysExplained about how Britain's railways only really exist as a legacy of slavery…

Back in 1833, the UK government abolished slavery and decided to compensate former slave owners - not the people who had been held as slaves - to the tune of £20m…

That's more than £19bn in today's money, and represented 40% of the government's budget at the time.

Around half the money stayed in the UK despite only 3000 of the 47000 compensated slave owners living here, meaning that very wealthy individuals received huge payouts.

People like George Hibbert and John Gladstone received the 1833 equivalent of tens of millions of pounds each.

Former slave owners needed somewhere to invest this money, and the embryonic but exciting new technology of railways seemed like a solid bet…

Lines like the Liverpool and Manchester and the Great Western Railway were substantially funded using their compensation.

In fact, the greater part of the compensation money that stayed in the UK was invested in railways, meaning that the railway network that grew up in the 1830s and 1840s was largely paid for off the back of slave ownership.

It is a legacy we cannot ignore.

We think of the railways as being a force for good in the world - and they certainly can be today - but that doesn't mean we should forget the circumstances in which they were created, and the way in which they were used to accelerate injustices in Europe's imperial past.

We don’t learn history by preserving statues of evil racists. We learn history by reading, understanding and sharing stories about the past.

You can read more about the research behind this #RailwaysExplained in @iansteadman's 2013 piece on @WiredUK: wired.co.uk/article/slaver…

Disappointingly, a certain demographic has taken umbrage with this thread. It was intended to be short and snappy because it was important that people read to the end (regular followers will know how long my threads usually end up).

However, more detail is clearly required.

So far, I've raised three ideas: 1⃣ that a significant proportion of slave-owner compensation was reinvested into the railways; 2⃣ that Britain's railways are a direct legacy of slavery and colonialism; and 3⃣ that this legacy is hopelessly under-explored.

Over the last couple of days, I've broadly seen five claims being made as a rebuttal to these ideas. I shall tackle each of them in turn.

CLAIM 1:
"Some compensation money may have gone into rail but there is absolutely no evidence it was substantial."

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

You can view the database here: ucl.ac.uk/lbs/commercial/

These investments, made off the back of slave owner compensation, account for as many as 200 individual railway projects spread across the length and breadth of the British Isles (yes, this includes Ireland).

Spot any you recognise?

At the time, the railways of the day cost the following:

Liverpool & Manchester: £0.82m
Leeds & Selby: £0.3m
Grand Junction: £1.6m
London & Birmingham: £5.5m
London & Southampton: £1.6m
Great Western Railway: £6.5m

If £5.6m isn't substantial by comparison, I don't know what is.

CLAIM 2:
"Much of the early money came from northern industrialists who were nothing to do with the slave trade."

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.

Let's look at three of them: John Moss, Robert Browne, and Thomas Dunlop Douglas.

John Moss was a Liverpool banker, and as someone embedded in slave-trading/factoring, his fortune relied on slavery.

His recorded investment in railways across Britain - from slave owner compensation alone - was at least £222,470 (around £200m in today's money)…

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

Without Moss, it is unlikely that these schemes would have got off the ground, and without the strategically important L&MR and GJR (linking the North to London when the London & Birmingham Railway opened in 1838), the railway system would have looked very different today.

The L&MR relied heavily on capital from Liverpool's slave traders and beneficiaries. Later on, this included slave owner compensation.

Liverpudlian merchant Robert Browne invested his compensation payout initially in the L&MR but substantially in the South Eastern Railway.

Browne's total investment from his compensation payouts alone accounted for £577,260 (around £550m in today's money), more than any other individual railway investor.

For an idea of scale, this one man funded around 50 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 compensation.

Thomas Dunlop Douglas, a Glaswegian West India Company merchant, invested £396,100 in the railways around the Scottish Central Belt.

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.

View this map: ucl.ac.uk/lbs/maps/brita…

CLAIM 3:
"Much early rail investment came from the growing number of middle class people with small sums available and no connection to slavery."

The idea that "small" investors made up the majority of railway capital was dispelled as a myth by Campbell and Turner in 2012: jstor.org/stable/2323945…

60% of railway capital came from large investors - middle class professionals only accounted for 3.8%.

The suggestion that middle class professionals were unconnected to slavery is also false.

If we look to the UCL database again, we can see that 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 off the back of these claims are for less than £5000. So where the middle classes were investing in railways, there's a good chance their money was compensation for the slaves they had previously owned.

CLAIM 4:
"Just because the railway carried e.g. cotton (a trade that was one of the drivers behind its construction), you can't then go on to say that it was funded by slavery."

In my eyes, a railway that was created to haul slave-won raw materials and their products, was funded as a going concern by charging to haul slave-won materials/products, and relied in part on capital from slave compensation to be built, was certainly "funded by slavery".

This accounts 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.

CLAIM 5:
"Less than a third of the railway mileage eventually built was completed by 1850 so the rest was built with other finance."

This is a specious argument. Without the creation and success of the early railways, the remainder would never have existed.

A search of the early British rail history wiki page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o…) returns 0 matches for "slave".

Is this aspect of history really so minor?

There is clearly more work to be done here, and hopefully this #RailwaysExplained has raised some awareness of the subject.

The claims above aren't mine. They are being made with increasing volume by historians as we unpick our colonial past.

Rather than jumping for exceptions or defences, acknowledging and understanding slavery's legacy can allow us to move on. Hiding or diminishing it does not.

https://twitter.com/christianwolmar/status/1274479066431750156

Also, this should obviously be "Liverpool & Manchester Railway" not "London and Manchester Railway" (this is why subeditors are a thing):

https://twitter.com/GarethDennis/status/1274761333955846152