Capitalism and Slavery

"Trinidad and Tobago, that’s right. He’s a really fascinating person. His lived experience is crucial here, too. This is someone who grew up in Trinidad when it was still part of the British Empire. He went to Oxford as an undergraduate and postgraduate in the 1930s and, despite his enormous intellectual ability, felt slightly marginalized there. So, what you have here is a lived experience developing this sense of injustice and channelling that injustice not only into absolutely superb academic research, but ultimately into national self-determination. This is someone who wrote a superb book about the history of the transatlantic slave trade that basically became a manifesto for the independence of his own country. And what’s more he led that independence movement himself. So, he’s a really extraordinary figure, particularly if you’re interested in the way certain kinds of observations of injustice can motivate research by historians that, ultimately, lead to massive political change. There are two aspects to it. First, that the capital required to develop the industrial revolution derived from profits from the slave trade. He makes the straightforward argument that one of the reasons why the industrial revolution appears to emerge in the north of England is because, in places like Liverpool and Lancaster, there’s a lot of spare capital around and that capital happens to come from profits from trading in human beings. So, if you like, British economic greatness derives from the profits of the slave trade. The second thing was more controversial at the time and still is now, namely that, actually, the abolitionists were not disinterested humanitarians. They were actually capitalists themselves, who saw the slave trade and slavery as a kind of monopoly that needed to be destroyed to create a much freer economic system that they could profit from. He is particularly critical of—and clearly acutely disliked—William Wilberforce. He thought the abolitionists were actually arch-capitalists who were using the pretext of humanitarianism as a way to sweep an old system aside and free up opportunities for their wealth elsewhere. Those are the two aspects of the Williams thesis and the implications of the second one are somewhat larger, but both of them are still going concerns. Neither of those arguments have been completely dismantled. Yes, that’s it. There are extraordinary sequences in the book, with Williams’ Marxist ideology to the fore—and this was a debate that was live at the time in the 1790s and early part of the 19th century—where he argues that these abolitionists had a much higher opinion of enslaved people they’d never met than the British people whom they enslaved in their own factories. That was also what people said about them at the time. There’s a clear connection between Williams’ thesis and criticism of the abolitionist movement at the time. That’s the idea that American slave owners often developed with reference to British abolitionists—that these people were talking about supporting the interests of enslaved African people while simultaneously crushing the economic interests and the lives of thousands and thousands of their employees. I think the distinction between the slave trade and slavery is one to make here because, actually, profits from slave trading are much more uncertain and much smaller in terms of their macro-economic impact than the profits generated by the cultivation of sugar and tobacco. The sugar economy, once you had a plantation up and running in Jamaica, really was highly profitable. Slave trading itself was much riskier. The profit margins were much smaller because slave voyages happened over twelve, fifteen, eighteen months and you had to navigate West Africa as well as the Caribbean and elsewhere, never mind six or seven thousand miles of ocean crossing. If you were to total up the entire profits from slave trading they would be substantial, but they wouldn’t offer anything like the amount of money that you needed to invest in the Industrial Revolution. Profits from slavery itself, however, were big enough to make a difference. So, my answer is that I think Williams is guilty of eliding the slave trade and slavery into one overarching system, when actually, economically speaking, it does make sense to disconnect them in this context."