19th Century Railway Investment
You can see the deceptive bounty
Derived from West Indies plantations
In classical, elegant Clifton,
And the Regency spa splendour
In the streets of Bath and Cheltenham:
The honey-stone Age of Enlightenment,
Sweet reason, proportion and symmetry –
But not even these straight lines so true
Can utterly obscure the triangles
Of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade –
But it’s easier for British railway lines
To separate themselves from the West Indies:
It seems counter-intuitive to find a link,
A signal, a junction and a connection
To something so far away in space and time.
Because
Railways after the 1825 Stockton and Darlington,
And after the 1830 Liverpool and Manchester,
Seemed to herald a steam powered modernity:
Coal and iron and steel and speed and farewell
To the Regency age of the coach and the ostler,
And farewell to the barge, towpath and canal.
The Age of the Railway Mania, however,
With all those speculative investments,
Needed money from somewhere –
It might not grow on trees … but it did on sugar cane …
And an examination of the records
Of the great and the good who gained so much
From the abolition of slavery in the British Empire,
Reveals hundreds of great investments
Made in railways in the United Kingdom
By those who gained so much from abolition:
There is the signal, junction and connection.
The £20 million paid by the British Government after abolition was a colossal amount: some 40% of the annual income of the Treasury. More than 40,000 enslavers benefitted. Over 800,000 enslaved people received nothing.