Britain's economic success based on the slave trade has sparked protests in recent years, reflected in the toppling of the statue of slave owner Sir. Edward Colston in 2020. Photo: Harry Pugsley/Getty Images Europe
As identity politics comes to a head and history is plundered for ideological purposes and to settle scores, we desperately need an outstanding body of impartial research on the macroeconomics of slavery.
Was the system of slave plantations in the West Indies and America the decisive catalyst for Britain's economic takeoff in the 17th century?
Was it the springboard for the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the 18th century and everything that followed in the saga of empire that still shapes the British economy?
Or are such claims post hoc, ergo propter hoc , a fallacy of superficial causality fueled by deceptive illogicalities that distort the way the world economy works? We need to know.
We have an old but outdated masterpiece, Capitalism and Slavery, a deep dive into the colonial archives of Eric Williams, the black Oxford historian who later became the leader of Trinidad and Tobago. a quarter of a century.
He argued that every industrial or commercial city in Britain was connected in one way or another to the triangular slave economy, and it was this that created incendiary capital for the Industrial Revolution.
Williams took the machete to a comforting tale of national redemption. He reduced Wilberforce to the level of a wavering reactionary pedant. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and plantation slavery in 1833 were not the fruit of altruism. Slavery by that time had become unprofitable, «a millstone around Britain's neck.»
The sugar monopoly of the Caribbean planters prevented the increase in profits from global free trade. Commercial capitalism, which created plantations in the West Indies, gave rise to industrial capitalism, which «turned around and destroyed slavery and all its products» when the time came.
It wasn't a complete break. British refineries continued to import slave-grown sugar from Brazil or Cuba, and Manchester textile mills imported slave-grown cotton from pre-war America with the tacit consent of the British state.
This was too outrageous even for the most radical London publisher, who considered the verdict was «contrary to British tradition» and therefore unprintable. She came to the USA in 1944 and was received coldly, and then was buried under the cover of scientific silence.
Williams outlived his critics. This year, the book was re-released under the title Penguin Modern Classic and became a terrific bestseller.
Most economic historians thought that Williams miscalculated his sums. The training models of the Industrial Revolution saw Britain's domestic factors as the decisive driving force behind the technological leap forward.
They considered the profits from the plantations insignificant. One study concluded that it accounted for only 1% of domestic capital accumulation in the 18th century.
Some paid more attention to Francis Bacon and the early triumph of scientific empiricism in England, or to the pro-entrepreneurial character of Common Law.
Williams himself was aware of the contradiction that pervaded his work: capitalism is an anti-hero, a Schumpeterian liberating force that respects no hierarchy and destroys vested interests.
But the more we learn, the clearer it becomes that he was right in linking the economy of slavery to wider imperial trade and giving it more weight as a catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. The question is how much.
An archive of documents is now available on the Internet. All known transatlantic slave shipments from 1500 to 1875 are posted on savevoyages.org. Spain, Portugal and Brazil — or merchants associated with these states — together shipped 6,909,790 slaves. The UK sent 3,259,441 shipments, France 1,381,404, the Netherlands 554,336 and Denmark/Baltic countries 110,040.
0109 largest shippers of slaves
Britain played a minor role until the Restoration, when the Stuarts took advantage of the Royal African Company as a source of income for the Crown, free from Parliament. Trade began after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, when Great Britain won the Portuguese Asiento as spoils of war, gaining the right to send Africans to Spanish America.
Every pound paid in compensation to planters after 1833 is published digitally. We see that Sir John Gladstone, father of the moralizing prime minister, was paid over £106,769 for 2,508 slaves on 14 estates in Jamaica and Demerara in British Guiana.
An avalanche has hit America and the English-speaking world books and articles shedding new light on the imperial economic system. But little is combined or filtered. Some of them are works of turbulent, agenda-driven history.
We finally have a major work by two economic historians that brings these threads together. In their book Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson do not claim that slavery was the cause of Britain's industrial takeoff.
He explicitly rejects such a claim. But each successive page guides the reader in that direction. Those who are already inclined to think the worst will find convincing confirmation.
We learn that «agribusiness» sugar plantations predate the modern American corporation with its complex «M-shape» structure.
“The planters of the British Caribbean Islands were responsible for some of the first large-scale integrated enterprises in the Western world… unlike anything known in mainland Europe at the time.”
Actually Europe knew such a business. For example, the Falun copper mine in Sweden in the 17th century employed a thousand people in hellish conditions. But let's not quibble.
By 1700, a typical sugar plantation already needed a hundred workers. Sugar had to be ground, shaped, and crystallized immediately, requiring a brewhouse, a brewhouse, a distillery, and a warehouse.
By the end of the 1770s, there were 1,830 plantations in the British Caribbean and 1,350 in the more profitable French Isles. The average plantation had 600 acres of land, 200 slaves and 174 heads of cattle to drive the machines.
Planters bought in England the latest Newcomen engines for pumping water. They imported steam engines from Boulton & Watt in the West Midlands for rotary power. They bought plantation equipment from Ambrose Crowley's large ironworks in County Durham.
This scale required capital and complicated bookkeeping, with annual reports of all rents, profits and production for absent shareholders. The plantations were used as laboratories for agricultural experiments.
“The slave trade and slave plantations in Britain formed the basis of an early complex multilateral trading system that spread throughout the world. It predates capitalist globalization based on slavery and cotton in the US by more than a century,” write Berg and Hudson.
It was a diamond-shaped network linking Britain, the American colonies, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India .
The supply of food and goods from the Americas enabled the West Indies to specialize in cash crops. Bright cloth from India was used to pay for slaves in West Africa. Ireland raised cattle for the sugar islands.
Trade created a surplus to buy English manufactured goods, which in turn generated capital for colonial expansion.
All together created what modern economists call a positive feedback loop. From my point of view, covering today's world economy, this hypothesis is convincing. So yes, the authors convinced me that the slave economy is an underestimated catalyst for the industrial revolution.
0109 number of slaves shipped
If only they would stop there. But on that basis, they advance a different set of claims, suggesting that the financial structure and wealth of Britain today is a direct function of slavery two centuries ago, and, moreover, that colonialism left particularly dangerous forms of racism and inequality in Britain.
When Sajid Javid calls the UK «the most successful multi-racial democracy on earth», is he wrong? Is Sir Trevor Phillips, the black TV presenter, right when he says that contemporary Britain is «the best country in Europe for a black person to live in»? Was Labor Party spokesman David Lammy wrong when he describes Britain's «multicultural journey» as a huge success?
The fact that the British prime minister is a practicing Hindu, that the UK has the most diverse cabinet of any major country, and the fact that no one batted an eyelid might lead to the opposite conclusion. Instead, did the Empire make Britons more open and tolerant?
Berg and Hudson, in a podcast, suggest the book is meant to inform the reparations debate that is under litigation now that the Caribbean states have jointly filed a lawsuit in The Hague against Great Britain, France and the Netherlands for the «historical injustice» of slavery.
They also say they were inspired to write by the Black Lives Matter movement, which to some of us looks like an imported America.
Slavery, capitalism and the industrial revolution embrace this doctrine. global «racial capitalism» originating in the American movement known as the Black Radical Tradition.
But what is this concept?
As Eric Williams wrote, the early British capitalists were too ready send English children to the mine.
Shenzhen has factories with «body-catching nets» near dormitories to keep Chinese migrant workers from throwing themselves out of windows in suicidal desperation. The biggest forced labor abuse in the world today is perpetrated by the communist regime against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Everything bad that happens in Britain today is blamed on the original sins of the 17th century: inequality; modern deindustrialization; split between North and South. “These are the products of a long history or racism resulting from transatlantic slavery,” it says, as if there were no rusty bowl regions in other countries shaken by global change.
We are told that slavery and colonialism laid the foundations of Britain's «rentier economy» and that the mechanism of modern capitalist finance — from insurance to collateral, charter companies and property rights — dates back to plantations.
But modern banking and trade credit originated in late medieval Italy and Flanders. In 1555, English merchants founded the Moscow Company as a joint stock company.
I have two main criticisms of slavery, capitalism and the industrial revolution. First, countries and economies are constantly reinventing themselves. China's dizzying industrialization has changed the planet in just thirty years. Hundreds of millions of Asians have joined the global middle class in my adult life.
Countries can rise or fall several times in two hundred years. Individual families may have coffers leading to slavery (the Gladstones have a problem), but organic national economies cannot accumulate wealth for long without undermining their own production system.
The success or failure of these companies depends on the human capital of each generation.
My more serious criticism is that the book glorifies Eric Williams only to come to conclusions that he categorically refused to come.
Slave family in a cotton field in Georgia, USA, 1860s. Photo: Bettmann/CORBIS
“Slavery in the Caribbean was too narrowly identified with Negroes,” he wrote, using language that was considered appropriate at the time.
“In this way, what is essentially an economic phenomenon has been given a racial connotation. Slavery or racism was not born; rather, racism was a consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and Pagan,” he wrote.
For the first thirty years, the sugar plantation system was built on white wage labor, often bought and sold, and with heavy use of whipping poles. “White slavery was the historical foundation on which Negro slavery was built,” he wrote.
These were Cromwell's prisoners during the Civil War or Irish campaigns; or destitute Germans fleeing the Thirty Years' War; or Quakers; or «loafers»; or kidnapped children.
These were beggars who stole a shilling or stole a rabbit, which were among the capital crimes under English feudal law. The criminals were offered debt bondage or the gallows.
These were poor souls who were forced by the «spirits» to give up their freedom in a gigantic human trafficking scheme. Corrupt judges in Bristol with an interest in sugar tricked the penitentiary system into «opening up» forced labor.
The unfortunates were «packed like herrings» for shipment across the Atlantic. If there was any humanity based on kinship with whites, then «there is no trace in the annals of that time.»
The transition to African labor was driven by profit. It was cheaper and easier to import Africans. “So, here are the origins of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial. This was due not to the color of the worker, but to the cheapness of labor,” wrote Williams.
Doctrinal racism developed later to rationalize slavery, and, like any mental pollution, it took a long time. to clear our collective heads.
Williams feared reparations. The concept of racial guilt, passed down through the ages, completes the circle. He ascribes a permanent hereditary condition based on skin color, undermining the colorblind society so laboriously achieved by liberal democracies.
The re-racialization of everything ends in obscurantism and reaction. This is our modern trahison des clercs.
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