Description
Presented paper - Slavery and the early railway industry in the United Kingdom – directorial connections.Scholars have recently explored in more detail how wealth generated from slavery stimulated industrial development in the United Kingdom and how the £20 million compensation money of the 1830s, provided to slave owners for the loss of their ‘property’ on emancipation, constituted a considerable economic stimulus.
Nonetheless, the connections between early railway development and slavery-generated wealth have only been touched on. Predominantly, the ‘Legacies of British Slave Ownership’ project linked railway subscriber lists to the slavery compensation lists of the 1830s. The fruits of this research were important steps forward in our understanding, but the sources and approach provided a limited snapshot of the connections. Particularly, the subscriber lists used covered railways promoted in 1837, 1845 and 1846, meaning that the investors in railways promoted in the years when most of the compensation money was distributed – 1835 and 1836 – were not investigated.1 This is significant, as the first significant railway promotion boom took place between 1835 to 1837, and collectively the lines authorised in 1836 had a higher estimated capital value than those in 1837, £23.5 million verses £11.3 million.
This paper, after addressing these gaps in our understanding, presents the results of a supplementary research approach, exploring the backgrounds of early railway directors using an expansive range of sources. Given that directors were the shareholder’s elected representatives, the sources of wealth of the former to an extent mirrored that of the latter. By identifying directors who had generated wealth from slavery, it therefore provides a way into enhancing our understanding the relationship between slavery and early railway investment.
Whilst no perfect proxy, this approach has proven revealing. Of the 439 directors of 34 railways in 1841, 10% are known to have derived at least part of their wealth from the direct ownership of enslaved individuals inside or outside of the British Empire. Another 6% have been identified as being active in slave-linked supply chains (e.g. Cotton, Sugar). Whilst further research might increase these figures, they suggest that slavery-linked wealth played a notable role in early railway development.
The paper then proceeds to dig deeper into the data. It assesses where the directors of railways connected to Birmingham (six railways) and Leeds (five) in the early 1840s generated their wealth, using as a starting point director lists for 1841 and 1844. In the former case, 23.1% of the 91 directors, half of whom were based in the North West, derived some of their wealth from enslavement. By contrast, of the 75 directors of Leeds connected railways, only 6.7% did, none of which came from Yorkshire. This suggest that slavery-linked wealth was not uniformly distributed in the capital of the early railway industry.
This paper will therefore illuminate an under-researched topic, but also will demonstrate more broadly the nature of slavery-derived wealth in the UK economy in the 1830s and 1840s.
| Period | 27 Jun 2024 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | York, United KingdomShow on map |