Slavery and British Industrialisation: The ‘New History Of Capitalism’ and Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery

1^ Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

2^ Barbara L. Solow, “Capitalism and Slavery in the Very Long Run,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987), 732.

3^ See Roger Anstey, “Capitalism and Slavery: A Critique,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 21 (1968), 307-20 and Stanley L. Engerman, “The Slave Trade and British Capital Formation in the Eighteenth Century: A Comment on the Williams Thesis,” Business History Review 46 (1972), 430-43 for early criticisms. For a defense, see J.E. Inikori, “Market Structure and the Profits of the British Atlantic Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981), 745-76. A mostly critical set of essay was Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For a more positive view, see Heather Cateau and Selwyn H.H. Carrington, eds. `Capitalism and Slavery’ Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams – A reassessment of His Work (New York, 2000). An excellent survey of the historiography on the topic up until 2000 is Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29-35, 47-50.

4^ David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain,” Journal of Economic History 60 (2000), 125-27, 138.

5^ See “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History 101 (2014), 503-36.

6^ Sven Beckert, “Slavery and Capitalism,” Chronicle of Higher Education 12 December 2014; Greg Grandin, “Capitalism and Slavery,” The Nation, 1 May 2015; and Seth Rockman and Sven Beckert, “How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism,” Bloomberg, 25 January 2012.

7^ Beckert, “Slavery and Capitalism.” See also Seth Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” in Cathy Matson, ed. Capitalism and Econometrics in Early American Economic History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 335-62; idem, “Slavery and Capitalism,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (2012), ;idem, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” Journal of the Early Republic 34 (2014), 439-66

8^ As Louis Hyman argues, “the essential problem is not to primly define capitalism like a schoolmarm, but to think about why capitalism, which appears to be so simple, evades easy definitions. And in the last decade, there has been a renewed interest among historians in not only challenging existing definitions, but in historicizing that very untidiness.” Hyman, “Why Write the History of Capitalism?” Symposium, 8 July 2013. See also Seth Rockman’s comments that “scholars seem willing to let capitalism float as a placeholder while they look for ground-level evidence of a system in operation.” He applauds that the “empirical work of discovery takes precedence over the application of theoretical categories,” justifying this argument by stating that “the turmoil of the current global economy has revealed a system wildly inconsistent with theorized accounts of “pure” capitalism.” Rockman, “Why is Capitalism Noteworthy?” 442.

9^ For institutions, see Douglass C. North and Barry Weingast, “Constitutions and commitment: the evolution of institutions governing choice in seventeenth-century England,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), 803-32; Weingast, “Constitutions as governance structures: the political foundations of secure markets,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 149 (1993), 286-312. For bourgeois dignity, see Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). For the state as an actor in promoting mercantilism, see Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)

10^ Rockman, “Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” 347.

11^ Beckert, “Slavery and Capitalism.”

12^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xv.

13^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 171-2, 239

14^ Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 468; J.R. Ward, “The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies, 1650-1834,” Economic History Review, 31 (1978), and David Richardson, “Profits in the Liverpool Slave Trade: The Accounts of William Davenport, 1757-1784,” in Roger Anstey and P.E.H. Hair, eds., Liverpool, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Abolition. Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, (1976), vol. 2.

15^ Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 52.

16^ For recent work on this area, see Catherine Hall et al, Legacies of British slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

17^ Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833: A Study of Social and Economic History (New York, 1928)

18^ Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 169. For the fate of West Indian planters after the American Revolution, see Christer Petley, ed., “Special Issue: Rethinking the Fall of the Planter Class,” Atlantic Studies 9 (2012), 1-123.

19^ Hilary McD. Beckles, “’The Williams Effect’: Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of West Indian Political Economy,” in Solow and Engerman, British Capitsalism and Caribbean Slavery, 303-16; W.A. Darity, “Eric Williams and Slavery: A West Indian Viewpoint,” Callaloo 20 (1998), 801-16. For a recent appreciation of Williams as a politician and an intellectual, see Tanya L. Shields, The Legacy of Eric Williams: the Postcolonial Moment (University of Mississippi Press, 2015).

20^ Cited in Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Bridgetown: University of the West Indies Press, 1974), 5-7.

21^ I do not examine here the debate around Adam Smith’s arguments as they applied to the colonies. For a useful summary, see S.D. Smith, “Merchants and Planters revisited,” Economic History Review, 55 (2002), 434-65 and Emma Rothschild, “Adam Smith in the British Empire,” in Sankar Muthu, ed. Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 184-98.

22^ Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 5-6.

23^ Ibid, 164-5.

24^ P.J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),.

25^ David Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

26^ Selwyn H.H. Carrington, The British West Indies during the American Revolution (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988).

27^ Nicholas Draper, “The Rise of a New Planter Class? Some Counter-currents from British Guiana and Trinidad, 1807-1834,” Atlantic Studies 9 (2012), 65-83.

28^ David Ryden, ‘Does decline make sense? The West Indian economy and the abolition of the British slave trade’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31 (2001), 347-74. See also .G. Checkland, ‘Finance for the West Indies, 1780-1815’, Economic History Review, 2^nd ser., 10 (1958), 461-9

29^ Reviews of the book can be found at http://svenbeckert.com/.

30^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xv, 92.

31^ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), I: 361.

32^ B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean 1807-1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 50. Beckert does not cite recent work on the production of West Indian cotton, such as Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) or David Beck Ryden, “`One of the Finest and Most Fruitful Spots in America’: An Analysis of Eighteenth-Century Carriacou,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43 (2013), 539-70. Instead, he uses an 1848 history of Barbados for information on ant invasions and an obscure article from 1944 on cotton production. Beckert also cites Michael Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 79, although Edwards does not support his argument, and an article from 1987 by Selwyn Carrington but the pages cited (841-2) refer not to cotton production but to Britain banning American shipping from the West Indies. Carrington does mention rising cotton production in the 1780s on p. 847 but provides no figures similar to those that Beckert quotes. Selwyn H. H. Carrington, “The American Revolution and the British West Indies Economy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987), 823-50.

33^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 56-60 (quote 60).

34^ Legacies of British Slave holding project, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/10314

35^ It is very clear, however, where Beckert’s theoretical proclivities lie. His work is indebted to the world-system analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein and as such is a variant of grand Marxist narratives, although not probably a variant that more conventional Marxists would agree with. For his intellectual sympathies in respect to slavery and capitalism, imperialism, global history and commodities, see Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 450-51 fts. 7, 12, 15, and 16. For a Marxist criticism of Wallerstein, see Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (1977), 25-92.

36^ This summary is drawn from Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xv-xvi, 37-8, 52, 54, 92, 155, 165-66, 169, 171-3, 239

37^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 92.

38^ Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism trans. Siȃn Reynolds 3 vols. (London: Collins, 1981-4).

39^ For a critique, see P.K. O’Brien, “European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 35 (1982), 1-18.

40^ Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction,” in Jerry H. Bentley, Subrahmanyam and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., The Cambridge World History vol. VI, The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 CE Part 1 Foundations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 11.

41^ Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3-5 (quote 4); Patrick K. O’Brien, “European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery,” Economic History Review 35 (1982), 1-18; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 95 (2005), 546-79. For a counter-view, see E.A. Wrigley, “The transition to an advanced organic economy: half a millennium of English agriculture,” Economic History Review 59 (2006), 435-80.

42^ C. Knick Harley insists that while the Atlantic economy made a central contribution to the causes of the Industrial Revolution, the route through which this contribution came was through trade to the non-plantation colonies of British North America. These colonies wanted industrial goods from Britain and financed them by developing the burgeoning provision trade to the West Indies. Harley argues that “in the absence of slavery, the northern settlements would have found alternative goods to sell into the Atlantic economy and their growth, and their demand for British manufactures, seems unlikely to have been stifled.” C. Knick Harley, “Slavery, the British Atlantic Economy, and the Industrial Revolution,” in A.B. Leonard et al, The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy (2015), 182. For mercantilism and empire, see Jonathan Barth, “Reconstructing Mercantilism: Consensus and Conflict in British Imperial Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” WMQ 3d ser. 73 (2016), 257-90.

43^ Patrick O’Brien, “The nature and historical evolution of an exceptional fiscal state …,” Economic History Review 64 (2011), 415.

44^ Ibid, 415-6.

45^ Ibid, 416; Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The exploitation of occupied industrial societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

46^ Ibid, 435-36.

47^ Ibid, 439.

48^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xviii, 190-1.

49^ E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: the Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also P.H.H. Vries, “Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence,” Journal of World History 12 (2001), 407-46.

50^ For women as workers, see Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 69, 185-88, 190-92, 406-7, 415-6. For a more expansive view of women in cotton see Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 132 (2004), 85-142.

51^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 149. Knoop’s wife was Louise Hoyer. http://tarisio.com/cozio-archive/cozio-carteggio/baron-knoop/

52^ Riello, Cotton; Robert S. Duplessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

53^ Riello, Cotton, 278-82.

54^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton,

55^ Barbara Hahn, “Review,” Agricultural History (2015), 482-6.

56^ Riello, Cotton, 240-46.

57^ Riello, Cotton, 4, 10; Eltis and Engerman, “Importance of Slavery.”

58^ There is a rich literature on the connections between war and capitalism, most of which is ignored by Beckert, somewhat surprisingly given his emphasis on war as an active agent of change in the economic realm. For some themes, see Bartolmé Yun-Casalilla and Patrick K. O’Brien, eds., The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 1500-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State (1989); Philippe Contamine, ed. War and Competition behind States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Rafael Torres-Sanchez, ed., War, State and Development: Fiscal-military States in the Eighteenth-Century (Pamplona: Eunsa 2007); and Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden as fiscal-military states, 1500-1600 (Routledge: New York, 2002).

59^ Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

60^ Nuala Zahedieh, “Colonies, copper, and the market for inventive activity in England and Wales, 1680-1730,” Economic History Review 66 (2013), 805-25.

61^ Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure & Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves.

62^ Andrew O’Shaughnessy, “The West India Interest and the Crisis of American Independence,” in Roderick A. McDonald, ed., West Indies Accounts: Essays on the History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy in Honour of Richard Sheridan (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1996),.

63^ Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, ch. 5.

64^ Simon Newman, Free and Bound Labor in the British Atlantic World: Black and White Workers and the Development of Plantation Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), chs.3 and 5.

65^ Carla Gardina Pestana, “English Character and the Fiasco of the Western Design,” Early American Studies 3 (2005), 1-31.

66^ Nuala Zahedieh, “Making mercantilism work: London merchants and Atlantic trade in the late seventeenth century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1999), 43-84.

67^ Zahedieh, Capital and Colonies, 285, 292.

68^ Richard S. Dunn, “The Glorious Revolution and America,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1 The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 463-65. We need to note that Britain did not dislodge France and Spain in the Caribbean and had only limited power over agents at the periphery. Nuala Zahedieh, “Commerce and Conflict: Jamaica and the War of the Spanish Succession,” in Leonard, Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy, 78-80. Moreover, the process of British state formation was a contested process of highly partisan politics in which compromises were repeatedly negotiated between various irreconcilable public priorities and private interests. Aaron Graham, Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

69^ Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves and Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). A useful summary of the politics of slavery over the long durée is John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires: North American Borderlands and the American Civil War, 1660-1860,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (2014), 264-98. Still insightful is Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies 1739-1763 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936)

70^ Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 115. For the Seven Years’ War in the Caribbean, see Burnard and Garrigus, Plantation Machine. See also Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714-1783 (London: Allen Lane, 2007).

71^ Walsh, Motives of Honor, and Emory Evans, A Topping People: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2009) and Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Slavery at the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

72^ Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, ch. 5.

73^ Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

74^ Allan Kulikoff, “`Such Things Ought Not to Be’: The American Revolution and the First National Great Depression,” in Andrew Shankman, ed., The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Expansion, Conflict, and the Struggle for a Continent (Routledge: New York, 2014), 134-64.

75^ Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 73 (2016), 725-765.

76^ Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, ch. 3.

77^ Lindert and Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After The Revolution,” 747; Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, “Conjectural Estimates of Economic Growth in the Lower South, 1720 to 1800,” in William Sundstrom and Timothy Guinnane, eds., History Matters: Economic Growth, Technology, and Population (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), .

78^ Lindert and Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the Revolution,” 741-2, 750-53; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (2002), 1231-94; and Kulikoff, “‘Such Things Ought Not to Be’, 134-64.

79^ David Brion Davis, “Slavery, Emancipation, and Progress,” in Donald A. Yerxa, ed., British Abolitionism and the Question of Moral Progress in History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 18-19.

80^ Richard Follett et al, Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

81^ Steven Sarson, The Tobacco-Plantation South in the Early American Plantation World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

82^ Lindert and Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the Revolution,” 742.

83^ Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic, 77-8.

84^ Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 2006) and John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, eds. Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 20

85^ Trevor Burnard, “Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolition,” Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011), 185-98.

86^ Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 112, 122.

87^ Cited in R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 6.

88^ Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).

89^ Ibid; Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979); and W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

90^ Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64-97.

91^ Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2010); R.J.M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2001).

92^ Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), 103-36 and Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 202-3, 231-37.

93^ Jay Sexton, “Then United States in the British Empire,” in Stephen Foster, ed. British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 320-21, 334.

94^ Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959), 3-5; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 131-33.

95^ Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013).

96^ Catherine Hall, “Gendering Property, Racing Capital,” History Workshop Journal 78 (2014), 23.

97^ Edward Long, The History of Jamaica … 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), I: 493-4.

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