CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 43 Let’s have a closer look at the facts, starting with that reference to Liverpool. It is true that Liverpool slave traders benefited hugely from the profits of the slave trade and doubtless much of this wealth was used to finance shipping fleets, banks, new dock systems and elegant Georgian buildings. It also part-funded the Liverpool to Manchester Railway, the world’s first intercity railway line. Several of the railway’s promoters were slave holders. But Liverpool was not the only, nor the main, beneficiary of slave-holding wealth, by which is meant the actual ownership of slaves (which may have been a less significant source of wealth than slave trading). The other cities involved were Bristol, Bath and, of course, London, which was by far the greatest centre of slaveholding wealth2. There were no cotton mills in any of these places (except for Bristol, which had one). A map provided by The Economist3 shows that London, Bristol and Liverpool had very small shares of workers employed in manufacturing in 1831. The great concentrations of manufacturing were not the three cities benefiting from slavery, but rather areas of the East Midlands, the West Midlands, West and South Yorkshire, and around Manchester. Turn to the hypothesis that wealth derived from slavery financed the railways. Slavery was abolished in 1807 and chattel slavery in British colonies ended in 1833, only three years after the opening of the first intercity railway between Liverpool and Manchester. Huge compensation payments were made to slave owners and the detailed record of payments provides a remarkable insight into the geography of slave-holding wealth. There were very low or non-existent levels of slave-holding in the places which produced crucial industrial products and innovations. Railway technology, for example, came from the north-east of England, where the Stockton and Darlington Railway, completed in 1825, is widely accepted as the world’s first railway. There was little or no slave-holding wealth in the North East. While it seems likely that the great railway construction boom between 1830 and 1860 was financed in part by slavery compensation payments, this was not wealth derived from slavery or slave-holding. It was a transfer of wealth via taxation from all Britain’s taxpayers to the small group of former slave owners. Recipients could spend the money as they wished, though doubtless some of the monies went into the ² UCL Legacies of Slavery Database ³ Economist (2023) ‘Mother of Invention’, 21 January Bath, like Bristol, Liverpool and London, owed a great deal of its wealth to slave-holding. (Photo: David Iliff, Wikimedia)
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