Slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the politics of racial guilt

As identity politics reaches fever pitch, and history is plundered for ideological purposes and the settling of scores, we badly need a magnum opus of dispassionate scholarship on the macroeconomics of slavery.

Was the slave plantation system in the West Indies and the Americas the critical catalyst for Britain’s economic take-off in the 17th century? 

Was it the springboard for the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the 18th century, and all that followed through the saga of empire, still shaping the British economy today?

Or are such claims an exercise of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the fallacy of facile causality, fed by beguiling non-sequiturs that misrepresent how the world economy works? We need to know.

We have the vintage but ageing masterpiece of Capitalism and Slavery, a deep-dive into the colonial archives by Eric Williams, a black Oxford historian who later went on to lead Trinidad and Tobago for a quarter of a century.

Every manufacturing or trading town in Britain was connected in one way or another to the triangular slave economy, he argued, and it was this that generated the ignition capital for the industrial revolution.

Williams took a machete to the comforting narrative of national redemption. He relegated Wilberforce to a vacillating reactionary prig. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and plantation slavery in 1833, were not the fruit of altruism. Slavery had by then become uneconomic, a “millstone around Britain’s neck”.

The sugar monopoly of the Caribbean planters impeded the greater profits of global free trade. The commercial capitalism that created the West Indian plantation engendered the industrial capitalism that “turned around and destroyed slavery, and all its works” when the time was ripe.

It was not a clean break. British refiners continued to import slave-grown sugar from Brazil or Cuba, and Manchester’s textile industries imported slave-grown cotton from ante-bellum America, with the acquiescence of the British state.

This was too incendiary even for London’s most radical publisher, who deemed the verdict “contrary to the British tradition” and therefore unprintable. It came out in the US in 1944, to a frigid reception, before being buried under a blanket of scholarly silence.

Williams has outlasted his critics. The book was released again this year as a Penguin Modern Classic and has been a cracking bestseller.

Most economic historians thought that Williams got his sums wrong. Textbook models of the industrial revolution saw internal factors within Britain as the critical driver of the technological leap-forward. 

They dismissed plantation profit as marginal. One study concluded that it accounted for just 1pc of domestic capital accumulation over the 18th century.

Some gave greater emphasis to Francis Bacon and the early triumph of scientific empiricism in England, or to the pro-enterprise character of Common Law. 

Williams himself was aware of the contradiction running through his work: capitalism is the anti-hero, the Schumpeterian liberating force that respects no hierarchy and smashes vested interest.

But the more we learn, the clearer it becomes that he was right to connect the economics of slavery to the wider imperial trade, and to give it greater weight as an accelerant of the industrial revolution. How much weight is the question.

An archive of documents is today available online. Every known slave shipment across the Atlantic from 1500 to 1875 is posted on slavevoyages.org. Spain, Portugal, and Brazil – or traders linked to these states – together shipped 6,909,790 slaves. Britain shipped 3,259,441, France 1,381,404, the Netherlands 554,336, and Denmark/the Baltics 110,040.

Britain played a minor role until the restoration, when the Stuarts seized on the Royal African Company as a source of crown revenue free of Parliament. The trade took off after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, when Britain won the Portuguese Asiento as spoils of war, acquiring the right to ship Africans to Spanish America.

Every pound paid in compensation to planters after 1833 is published in digital form. We can see that Sir John Gladstone, father of the moralising Prime Minister, was paid over £106,769 for 2,508 slaves on 14 estates in Jamaica and Demerara in British Guiana.

An avalanche of books and papers have appeared in America and the Anglophone world that shed new light on the imperial economic system. But little is joined up or filtered. Some are works of wild, agenda-driven history.

We at last have a major work by two economic historians that pulls these threads together. Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson does not state that slavery caused Britain’s industrial take-off. 

It explicitly disavows such a claim. But every page thereafter bends the reader in that direction. Those already inclined to think the worst will find compelling validation.

We learn that the sugar ‘agri-business’ plantations predated the modern American corporation with its sophisticated ‘M-form’ structure. 

“Planters of the British Caribbean were responsible for some of the earliest large-scale integrated businesses in the Western world… unlike anything known in mainland Europe at the time.”

Actually, Europe did know such businesses. To name one that I have visited, Sweden’s Falun copper mine employed a thousand people in Hellish conditions in the 17th century. But let us not quibble.

By 1700 the typical sugar plantation already required a hundred workers. The sugar had to be milled, bodied, and crystallised immediately, needing a boiling house, a curing house, a distillery and a warehouse. 

By the late 1770s  there were 1,830 plantations in the British Caribbean, and 1,350 on the more profitable French islands. The median plantation had 600 acres, 200 slaves, and 174 head of livestock to drive machinery.

The planters bought the latest Newcomen engines from England to pump water. They imported steam engines from Boulton & Watt in the West Midlands for rotary power. They bought plantation equipment from Ambrose Crowley’s great ironworks in County Durham.

Such scale required capital and complex book-keeping, with annual accounts of all rents, profits, and produce, for absentee shareholders. The plantations were run as laboratories of agricultural experimentation.

“Britain’s slave trade and slave plantations underpinned an early complex multilateral trading system that stretched worldwide. It predated by over a century the capitalist globalisation that rested on US slavery and cotton,” write Berg and Hudson.

It was a diamond-shaped network linking Britain, the American colonies, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India.

Food and commodity supplies from America allowed the West Indies to specialise on cash crops. Brightly-coloured cloth from India paid for slaves in West Africa. Ireland raised the livestock for the sugar islands. 

The trade generated the surpluses to buy English manufactures, which in turn generated capital for colonial expansion.

Every part combined to set off what modern economists call a positive feedback loop. From my angle of vision covering the world economy today, this hypothesis is compelling.  So yes, authors have persuaded me that the slave economy is an underestimated catalyst for the industrial revolution.

If only they had rested the case there. But from this they go to make a different set of claims, suggesting that Britain’s financial structure and wealth today is a direct function of slavery two centuries ago, and furthermore that colonialism has left Britain with particularly virulent forms of racism and inequality.

When Sajid Javid calls the UK “the most successful multiracial democracy on earth”, is he wrong? Is Sir Trevor Phillips, the black broadcaster, wrong when he says that modern Britain is “the best country in Europe for a black person to live in”? Is Labour’s David Lammy wrong when he describes Britain’s “multicultural journey” as a huge success?

The fact that Britain’s Prime Minister is a practising Hindu, that the UK has the most diverse cabinet of any major country, and that nobody bats an eyelid, might lead one to the opposite conclusion. Has the Empire instead made the British more open and tolerant?

Berg and Hudson suggest in a podcast that the book aims to inform the debate over reparations, which is a court matter now that the Caribbean states have jointly sued Britain, France, and the Netherlands in the Hague for the “historic wrong” of slavery. 

They also say that they were inspired to write by the Black Lives Matter movement, which to some of us looks like imported Americana.

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution embraces the doctrine of global “racial capitalism”, which has its origins in a US movement known as the Black Radical Tradition.

But what is this concept?

As Eric Williams wrote, early British capitalists were all too willing to send English children down a mineshaft. 

There are factories in Shenzhen with “body-catching nets” outside the dormitories lest Chinese migrant workers hurl themselves out of the windows in suicidal despair. The largest abuse of coerced labour in the word today is committed by a Communist regime against the Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Everything bad in Britain today is blamed on the original sins of the 17th century: inequality; modern deindustrialisation; the North-South divide. “These are the products of the long history or racism that was set in place by transatlantic slavery,” it says, as if there weren’t rustbowl regions in other countries convulsed by global change.

We are told that slavery and colonialism laid the foundations for Britain’s “rentier economy”, and that the machinery of modern capitalist finance – from insurance, to collateralized credit, to chartered companies, and property law – tracks back to the plantations. 

But modern banking and trade credit had their origins in late Medieval Italy and Flanders. English traders launched the Muscovy Company as a joint stock company in 1555.

I have two central criticisms of Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. The first is that nations and economic systems constantly reinvent themselves. The breakneck industrialisation of China has transformed the planet in just thirty years. Hundreds of millions of Asians have joined the global middle class in my adult life-time.

Countries can rise or fall multiple times over two hundred years. Individual families may have treasuries that track to slavery – the Gladstones have a problem – but organic national economies cannot hoard wealth for long without subverting their own productive system. 

Whether they prosper or fail depends on the human capital of every generation.

My larger criticism is that the book celebrates Eric Williams only to reach conclusions that he adamantly refused to reach. 

“Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro,” he wrote using language that would have been deemed appropriate at the time. 

“A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born or racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labour in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan,” he wrote.

The first thirty years of the sugar plantation system was built on white indentured labour, often bought and sold, and with much use of the whipping post. “White servitude was the historic base upon which Negro slavery was constructed,” he wrote.

They were Cromwell’s captives from the Civil War or Irish campaigns; or destitute Germans fleeing the Thirty Years War; or Quakers; or ‘idlers’; or kidnapped children.

They were paupers who stole a shilling or poached a rabbit, which were among the capital crimes of English feudal law. Perpetrators were offered debt bondage or the gallows.

They were poor souls induced by “spirits” on commission to sign away their freedom in a giant scheme of people trafficking. Corrupt magistrates in Bristol with sugar interests gamed the penal system to “discover” forced labour.

The wretches were “packed like herrings” for Atlantic shipment. If there was any humanity extended on the grounds of white kinship, “there is not a trace in the record of the time”.

The switch to African labour was driven by profit. It was cheaper and easier to import Africans. “Here, then is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial. It had not to do with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour,” Williams wrote.

Doctrinal racism evolved later to rationalise slavery, and like all mental pollution, it has taken a long time to clear from our collective heads.

Williams was wary of reparations. The concept of racial guilt passed down over the centuries takes you full circle. It ascribes a permanent inherited condition based on colour, subverting the colour-blind society achieved with such difficulty by the liberal democracies.

Reracialising everything ends in obscurantism and reaction. Such is our modern day trahison des clercs.