The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas

"This is a really good book. Williams’ argument is that slavery and the slave trade are really designed to promote the economic interests of a capitalist group and that actually profit maximizing is the sole, ahistorical motivation. Eltis challenges that robustly and says, ‘Let’s ask fresh and big questions about how the system of the slave trade was established and how it endured and let’s ask throughout our examination of that system whether or not it was done as efficiently and as profitably as it could have been.’ And this revisiting of every single aspect of explaining the rise of slavery lead Eltis into some really wonderful analysis that has become very influential. His first point is to say that it’s not about profit maximizing because, if it was about profit maximizing, they wouldn’t have used Africans. That was the most expensive way of doing this. If people had wanted to solve the Americas’ problem of labour supply with the objective of profit maximisation, they would have shipped Europeans. “If it was about profit maximizing, they wouldn’t have used Africans. That was the most expensive way of doing this” This is the foundational insight that leads into arguing that the cultural parameters of early modern Europe and the early colonizing nations were more important than the profit-maximizing impulse. And he leads this into a really interesting analysis of each of the economies and nations involved in the slave trade, in Europe, North America and West Africa. He puts West Africa front and centre, which is very important to his analysis. These societies all have different attitudes to belonging in their society, which makes it easier or harder to enslave their own people. There are different attitudes to freedom in these different contexts. And all of these differences in the way in which these peoples relate to these cultural parameters actually explain a lot more about how and why the slave trade got going than a timeless notion of greed. He notices the conjunction of the emergence of what we would now call ‘liberal ideas’ taking off and taking root at exactly the same time as the slave trade is—as he’s careful to say—re-established and he wants to understand exactly why that is. And I think that takes us back to the importance of slavery being something that you do to other people. As you become more conscious of your own humanity and your own rights as an individual you can become more conscious of your ability to deny those rights to other people. It’s very difficult to pin that sort of insight down via historical data, but it’s kind of compelling and it does explain certain different paradoxes that I think historians should be focused on. Eltis’s version of the slavery paradox is more elusive, more fluid than the versions you would see in Edmund Morgan’s book and, I hope, the version that I pieced together in my book, Freedom’s Debt , where you have the actors in the story—in my case, slave trade lobbyists—saying these things: ‘We wish to enslave more people because we are a free people.’ You actually have it written there. The basic insight that offers is that the individuals who developed the African slave trade, unsurprisingly, didn’t believe African slaves to be people at all. They were goods. And that’s the basic insight that reconciles the slavery paradox. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The crucial thing about the slavery paradox is how it is used as a bridge between the slave trade and the abolitionist movement. Ultimately it becomes the engine room for the abolitionist movement. As the Americans separate from Britain, the slavery paradox gets political traction. The key person there is Samuel Johnson, who asked, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negro slaves?” It’s a way of Britain redefining itself as a free country in contradistinction to the Americans: the Americans—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson—talk about freedom, but they’re all slave owners. British people talk about freedom, as Johnson would have it, and they actually mean it and will prove it by abolishing slavery. This enabled British freedom to be reconditioned around abolition. Whereas, in the early 18th century people—Bristolians, Liverpudlians and the slave traders in London—were quite happy to say that they needed the freedom to profit from the enslavement of other people. And that freedom is central to the establishment of the United States. Broadly speaking African slavery solves the problem of labour supply, not because of the slave trade—I’m talking now about colonial North America, what becomes the United States—but because they establish a culture of slave-owning that supports what they call ‘the natural increase’ of that population. So slaves are, in effect, bred. At abolition, there is a certain concern about whether or not no longer having access to the slave trade will undermine the plantation economies and plantation societies in America. But, because this idea of ‘natural increase’ is so well established and the population of enslaved people is quite substantial, it doesn’t present a significant problem. And, by the way, if you get rid of the slave trade you increase the value of your existing slaves, which increases your ability to borrow money. So it’s actually quite good for plantation owners, as long as they don’t feel they need for additional access to slave supplies. Famously what does happen in the 19th century is that populations from Europe begin to substitute for the movement of populations from West Africa, and that leads to the massive influx of southern Italians, Irish men and women, as well as other Europeans. Those people are understood to be the industrial labour force that will take the United States away from its slavery roots."