Image from a Robert Hudson catalogue showing enslaved workers in 1920s Portuguese West Africa. Courtesy Leeds Galleries and Museums
Dr Oliver Betts, Research Lead at the National Railway Museum and Dr David Turner from the University of York, on a new project exploring the history of railways and slavery
Slave-owners in South Carolina offering up human labour as easily as land-access when building a new railway to Charleston.
Bales of cotton, picked and sorted by unfree hands, packed from ship to railway in Liverpool, bound for the mills of Manchester.
Enslaved workers across the Caribbean milling sugar cane on steam-mills imported from Boulton and Watt in Birmingham.
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These are just three examples of the ways in which, as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, the labour of enslaved people drove forwards the industrial revolution that was reshaping the world.
Too often the legacies of slavery are seen as something of the eighteenth century – distinct from the industrialisation of the century to come.
This is particularly the case when it comes to railways; with the Abolition of the Slave Trade in British territories in 1807 and the ending of slavery itself in 1834-5 there is very little overlap, so the argument goes, with a railway system that in the 1830s was still in its early infancy. Our project will explore the extent to which this is wrong.
How do Steam-power and Slavery connect?
Bales of cotton being loaded onto a freight train at Akola station, on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, about 1930. Cotton was produced in India, and much of it was exported to Britain which ruled India at this time. It was transported by rail to docks where it was shipped abroad. The GIPR was opened in 1853, from Bombay (Mumbai) to Thane. It expanded quickly and by 1870 stretched all the way across India to Calcutta. Photograph, 1920s; 1930s.
The profits of slavery were a key part of the economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century and provided networks of investors and sources of investment for expanding new industries.
This was a period when perceptually distances shrunk and of increasing demands – industrial processes fed an ever-hungry public with new goods and, in turn, demanded more and more raw material. Steam power replaced human and horsepower in places but the steamship and the railway prompted industrial expansion in others. At the heart of the steam age was a need for both labour and capital.
Slavery provided both. George Gibbs, a well-established member of the Bristol merchant class with long-standing connections to slave plantations in Barbados and Jamaica, ploughed thousands of pounds into the Great Western Railway, the Bristol Dock and Canal Company, and the Great Western Steamship Company.
Robert Hudson’s light railway catalogue page highlighting their African interests. Courtesy Leeds Galleries and Museums
John Fowler of Leeds exported locos and machinery to Cuba up to the abolition of its slave system in 1886. Courtesy Leeds Galleries and Museums
Robertson Gladstone, a Liverpool merchant dealing with the West Indies and brother of the future Prime Minister, was compensated over £21,000 when the 393 enslaved people on his estate in British Guiana were freed – ten years later he invested £92,580 (£5.5 million today) in the Trent Valley railway.
New technologies like the railways were chancy investments –those with substantial capital risked their money and drove forwards railway projects, and in the early nineteenth century many networks of capital and investors had their roots in slavery.
We also want to go further into the nineteenth century to understand the legacies of enslaved labour and steam. Slavery may have been abolished in the British Empire but it continued well into the mid nineteenth century elsewhere. With British investment, British steam engines, British engineers and officials, and British contracts for goods and services connecting to the slave states of the American south, to Cuba, and to Brazil it is clear that a bigger story of transatlantic steam and slavery needs to be told.
What is Slavery and Steam?
John Fowler locomotive Cheetal, which worked on harbour building in colonial Karachi now Pakistan. Courtesy Leeds Galleries and Museums
Slavery and Steam is a collaboration between three Universities (York, Sheffield, and Leeds) and three museums (National Railway Museum, York, Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, and Leeds Industrial Museum) supported by the White Rose University Consortium.
Over the next year we will be holding workshops across our sites, looking again at the collections we hold, the stories we tell, and the research we still need to do. Across our sites we hold everything from fine industrial goods through to the heavy engines of production and transportation – many of which were closely tied to the work of enslaved people across the world.
Understanding these connections is the first step towards being able to tell the stories of those men and women whose coerced labour was central to some of the great changes of the industrial age.
Handkerchief, commemorates the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, cotton, 1830-1831. Made of cotton that was almost certainly the product of slave labour before it reached a steam-powered factory in Britain to be finished. Courtesy National Railway Museum / Science and Industry Museum
It will create a forum for discussion, where research ideas can be shared and new connections made. With our workshops we hope to bring in the wider community, especially those with close connections to the places and peoples affected by slavery.
Collaboration between Universities and Museums allows us to bring in a wealth of expertise – in economics, management studies, geography, transport studies, archaeology, and trans-Atlantic and African history – and work at the cutting-edge of scholarship.
A passion for change lies at the heart of the project, a testament to the emerging museum professionals and early career researchers who have been key to driving it forward. We hope that Slavery and Steam will be a starting point, leading to new research projects and discoveries but also new ways of telling diverse stories in our museums, our schools, and across our landscape today – a landscape shaped by the profits and tragedies of unfree labour in the age of steam.
How to get involved
Our project is open to all – as discussions take place, we’ll be sharing our findings and our ideas for the future on social media and through our museum websites.
This project is about expanding what we know about the beginnings of the modern industrial world, not replacing it, and about telling new stories and reaching new audiences.
Our network was born out of a desire to pool our expertise and passion but also to uncover just how much we don’t know about the topic – and we would encourage people to reach out and contact us if they want to be involved.
Dr Oliver Betts is Research Lead at the National Railway Museum. Dr David Turner is Lecturer & Programme Director of the MA in Railway Studies, Centre for Lifelong Learning and the York Management School at the University of York.
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National Railway Museum
York, North Yorkshire
The National Railway Museum is in York houses the world's greatest collection of railway items. This includes the record-breaking Mallard, the iconic Japanese Bullet Train and a stunning collection of Royal Trains The museum is part of the Science Museum Group and is free to enter. With daily demonstrations and…