44 CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 great railway-building boom. But the suggestion that railways were the world’s gift to Britain, financed by the exploitation of workers in other countries, does not seem to hold water. Railways, like our industrial heritage as a whole, were financed by the exploitation of the British and in-migrant working classes who were a pittance for working in the mills, down the mines and in the steel works. American academic Joel Mokyr is the world’s leading economic historian of the Industrial Revolution. He has devoted a lifetime’s thought and research to the subject 4, arguing that intellectual rather than material factors were the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution, with one important exception. Before 1780, most of the cotton coming to Britain came from the West Indies. The explosive growth of Britain’s cotton industry came to depend on the south of the USA. ‘Simply put,’ writes Mokyr, ‘without United States slave labour it is hard to see how the tremendous growth in demand for raw cotton could have been satisfied... It is here and not in the consequences of the [British] eighteenthcentury triangular trade that slavery really mattered for the Industrial Revolution.’ British economic historians Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson have scrutinised the available evidence on slavery and the Industrial Revolution. Their book provides a carefully balanced account 5 which is essential reading for those who want to get to the bottom of this controversy. The depth to which slavery influenced Britain’s economy is certainly striking. In the prosaic words of John Carey, a Bristol sugar merchant speaking in 1712: ‘The African Trade is a Trade of most Advantage to this Kingdom... for we have in return Gold Teeth [ivory], Wax and Negroes, the last whereof are much better than the first, being indeed the best Traffic the Kingdom hath.’ African slaves were essential to the sugar plantations, to the wealth generated by the sugar trade and thus to changing patterns of consumption. Surprisingly remote places were involved. Britain’s mining and smelting industries were stimulated by the Atlantic trades. Copper from Cornish mines was used to build vats for boiling sugar cane in the West Indies. Of huge importance was the extraordinary impact of the sugar trade on the growth of finance and banking, especially in London. Credit and payment systems evolved, involving the use of traded ‘bills of exchange’. All this laid the foundations for London’s role as an international financial centre, rather than the backer of unschooled provincial manufacturers. Berg and Hudson do not push their analysis beyond the evidence. They accept that if slavery alone explains the Industrial Revolution, it is hard to understand why Spain, Portugal, France and the Low Countries were not industrial leaders. Clearly other factors were at work. There is, they accept, little hard evidence on the flow of investment funds from slavery to the textile industry. Liverpool’s slavery compensation monies seem to have flowed mainly into shipping, insurance and banking – the pursuits of the gentleman capitalist. And their maps continue to pose a dilemma. Evidence on the regional distribution of textile employment shows massive concentration in Yorkshire and West Lancashire, and absolutely no textile employment around London, Bristol and Liverpool. Such as it is, the geographical evidence suggests a continuing divide between the slave owners, traders and financiers, and the industrialists and inventors. Does it matter? When I discussed this with a New Zealand friend, she wondered if it was more evidence of a country locked into the past and not looking to the future. I would have to disagree. Industrial heritage is a huge part of Britain’s history, reflecting the unparalleled global significance of Britain in the 19th century. No less than a third of our world heritage sites have a direct connection with the Industrial Revolution and mitigating its worst features. To do the job properly, interpretation must accurately tell the story of how the heritage arose, within the limits of available evidence. That is the point: we must not allow speculation to replace evidence. There is one other critical reason for examining the past, including the less-than-benign elements that we might rather forget. Only by genuinely understanding history can we shake off our illusions of unblemished greatness, understand the racism that pervaded the British empire, re-evaluate our hugely expensive ‘world role’ (we are still the world’s third biggest military spender), and begin to set a new, perhaps diminished, but ultimately more humane course for the future. ⁴ Joel Mokyr (2009) The Enlightened Economy ⁵ Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson (2023) Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution Liverpool in 1808, the year after the slave trade in the British Empire was abolished. Slaves in the colonies (excluding areas ruled by the East India Company) were not freed until 1838 – and only after slave-owners, rather than the slaves themselves, received compensation. Ian Wray is professorial fellow at Manchester University’s planning school.
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