RELATIONSHP BETWEEN CAPTALSM AND
SLAVERY
Since the first publication of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery in
1944, a shift in the historiography of the transatlantic world has
occurred, although by the end of the twentieth century Drescher and
others had seriously challenged certain key parts of Williams's
interpretation. One of Williams's arguments, which is germane to this
article, asserts that through most of the eighteenth century Britain's
mercantilist empire promoted economic development within the
metropolitan country, including the industrialization of textiles. Central
to Britain's economic development were slaves: first as the primary
commodity in the Middle Passage and secondly as unpaid laborers in
Britain's colonies. Employing considerable evidence, Williams (1961)
takes great efforts to develop the case that, up until the end of the
eighteenth century, the slave trade, which Britain dominated in that
century, was very profitable for the metropole. During that same
period, Britain's sugar colonies were profitable for the metropole
because the government created a monopoly for the West Indies
planters through the use of high tariffs; often these planters returned
to England very wealthy and invested in other enterprises there,
including textiles. Many businesses within the metropolitan country—
such as the makers of iron chains, the builders of slave ships, and the
handloom weavers who made the clothes sold on the West African
coast—benefited by being the core of Britain's extensive mercantilist
empire. Williams traces the rise of prominent cities such as Liverpool,
which was tied to the slave trade, and Manchester, which arose
because of the textile factories, and asserts that with the end of the
slave trade and the decline of the West Indies, Liverpool became the
emporium to the world of textiles manufactured in Manchester. For
Williams, this development epitomizes the emergence of Britain's new
industrial capitalism from its earlier slave-centered economy.
As Drescher (1999) notes in From Slavery to Freedom:
Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery, the two
very different socioeconomic systems of industrial capitalism and
plantation slavery, which still often relied on the slave trade, existed
side by side during the nineteenth century. The analysis concerning
the coexistence of these two socioeconomic systems can support an
even stronger statement—that the two systems were mutually
supportive of one another. Some statistics covering the decades from
the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth
century illustrate part of the relationship between the rise of industrial
capitalism and slavery. From the period of 1781 to 1789, which is
often considered the first decade of Britain's industrial takeoff, to the
ten years between 1850 and 1859, which is the last decade of the
antebellum period in U.S. history, British consumption of cotton
increased by fifty-four times. Between 1781 and 1789 the annual
mean amount consumed was 16.9 million pounds, whereas between
1850 and 1859 the annual mean amount was 927.9 million pounds. A
table in Capital and the Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution
shows that, through the first half of the nineteenth century, the
increases through successive decades were regularly quite large. By
the 1850s, moreover, 80 percent of the cotton imported into the
country for use in British factories was from the United States. It is
ironic, then, that during the same period that Britain campaigned
against the slave trade and emancipated slaves in its own empire, the
British economy became heavily dependent on slave-produced cotton.
A similar process occurred during the same period in the United
States. In 1800 the value of the cotton crop was 1.83 percent of the
gross domestic product (GDP), but by 1860 it accounted for 6.52
percent. As for cotton manufactures, in 1800 they accounted for only
0.037 percent of the GDP, but by 1860 that figure had increased to
3.01 percent (Farnie 2004, p. 572). Again, it should be noted that
these tremendous increases in the part of the economy connected to
cotton were tied either directly or indirectly to slavery; in the case of
the cotton crop the connection was direct, while in the case of the
manufactured textiles it was indirect.
In conclusion, then, slavery did play a significant role in the rise
of modern capitalism. First, during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, key west European states, especially
Britain, established mercantilist empires that laid the basis for
the later development of industrial capitalism. Certain parts of
these empires, such as the plantations in the Caribbean basin,
were ruthlessly operated according to basic capitalistic
principles; one of the results was the use of Africans as a labor
commodity. The colonies in the Western Hemisphere and the
African west coast were tied to metropolitan countries in Europe
within a system of trade that promoted economic development
and capital accumulation for the European country. For instance,
the development of a large merchant fleet in Britain, both for
direct trade with the West Indies and for the Middle Passage,
provided the seamen and, on some occasions, the ships for
Britain's navy. Britain's large navy first, during the eighteenth
century, helped acquire new territories for an expanding empire,
and then, during the nineteenth century, served to ensure the
stable international relations that facilitated capitalistic
enterprise, trade, and a global economy. Secondly, the industrial
capitalism of the nineteenth century that replaced the mercantile
capitalism of the eighteenth century was centered on cotton, and for
more than half of the nineteenth century the cotton crop that fed the
factories of Manchester, England, and Lowell, Massachusetts, was
grown by slaves in the United States. For its part, Manchester
developed during the nineteenth century into an economic zone
comprised of many industries, providing employment for 4.75 million
persons in a 500-squaremile area of Lancashire County. The many
industries of Lancashire were all subsidiary to Manchester's textile
industries, which employed 700,000 operatives . Finally, much of the
cotton—up to 80 percent of which was imported during the mid-
nineteenth century—was produced within the institution of slavery.
Between about the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, networks of
production and distribution became larger and more complex than
ever before. Maritime empires and large corporations like the Dutch
East India Company helped to spread practices like bonds and joint-
stock companies. This set the stage for the modern economic system
of capitalism. The proponents of capitalism believed that free markets
in goods and labor and the ability to invest money for profit would
make the world a better place.
This same period also saw the development of a widespread
system of chattel slavery. In the Atlantic world, large numbers of
people—mainly from Africa—were enslaved. European and colonial
American societies considered them property, rather than people.
These enslaved people were part of a capitalist economic system we
call the plantation system, in which they were forced to work, without
pay, in terrible conditions, in order to generate profits for people who
legally owned them.
These two systems—plantations and capitalism—developed and
became widespread at about the same time, in about the same
regions of the world. But by the late nineteenth century, slavery
was criminalized across much of this region, while capitalism
remains not only legal, but the dominant economic system in the
world today. What was the relationship of slavery to capitalism
through this period of human history? Did slavery and capitalism
depend on each other for success, as some people argue? Or did
capitalism help to end slavery, as others suggest?
Historians have struggled to answer these questions in part because
they have meaning for debates we have today. For example, if slavery
helped to support capitalism in this early period, then it arguably
contributed to the wealth that many people and companies have
today, and the descendants of enslaved people have reason to
demand some of that wealth back. Similarly, if capitalism helped to
end slavery, then we have to give this system credit for helping to
liberate people. But both of these ideas are still debated.
Rival systems
The idea that capitalism and slavery were rival systems. In this view of
history, plantation slavery was part of an older way of organizing labor.
Then capitalism came along and defeated it. For much of the early
twentieth century, almost all historians believed this to be the case.
But is this an accurate narrative of the past?
In theory, capitalism promotes labor done by free people, rather than
slavery. One of its central principles is free markets. The idea is that
without interference, a buyer and a seller will negotiate. The seller
wants a high price for the goods she is selling. The buyer wants to
spend as little as possible. In the end, they will come to a fair price
that works for both of them. Capitalism suggests that the same is true
for labor. A person should be free to ask for as much money as they
can for their labor. An employer will want to pay as little as possible.
Between them, they will come to a fair wage for a person's work.
Slavery in the Atlantic model, of course, is not a free market. There is
no pay to negotiate. The enslaved get nothing, except perhaps a poor
bed, bad food, and a pittance—none of which is negotiable. This is not
how capitalism is supposed to work. More to the point, historians who
argue that capitalism helped end slavery note that this system makes
the enslaved person unmotivated. Why work hard, offer your good
ideas, or do anything to impress a boss who "owns" you and will never
pay you? That's why many historians have argued that slavery was
inefficient compared to a system where workers were paid wages and
could negotiate for better pay or move up the ranks. In particular, U.S.
historians such as Eugene Genovese and Mary Beard argued that
wage workers in the industrial north of the country were more efficient
than enslaved workers in the plantation south. For some of these
historians, the U.S. Civil War represented a victory of capitalism over
slavery.
Other historians have similarly seen the abolition of the Atlantic Slave
Trade as a victory of capitalism over slavery. They argued that many
of the owners of slave-worked plantations in the Caribbean were in
fact connected to old European leadership groups, to aristocrats or
nobles. Many abolitionists, by contrast, were connected to new
industry. They argued that wage labor was both more efficient and
morally better than slave labor. So, historians have used these two
arguments to support the idea that capitalism ended slavery: First,
they say wage labor was a better system and made free societies
stronger than those that used enslaved labor. Second, they argue that
people in capitalist, industrial societies were natural opponents of
slavery.
Sibling systems
But it may have been that capitalism and slavery were more
compatible than this evidence suggests.
In addition to free markets, proponents of capitalism argue that it is
important to make a profit. If people are investing money, they expect
a return on their investment. Many historians have pointed out that the
Atlantic slave trade was, in fact, immensely profitable. People in
Britain and elsewhere invested in shares in slave trading companies
and made a fortune. As historian Eric Williams and others have
collectively argued, they may have used these profits to start other
companies and underwrite many of the scientific and technical
advances that made industrialization and the rapid spread of
capitalism possible.
Plantations that depended on the forced labor of enslaved people
were also very profitable at times. A group of historians writing in the
last decade, including Walter Johnson and Ed Baptist, have argued
that, contrary to what earlier historians argued, slave plantations in
fact helped create the modern capitalist world. Johnson focuses on
cotton, one of the leading crops produced by enslaved labor in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He reminds us that cotton fed the
textile machines that were among the world's leading capitalist
industries in the nineteenth century. Since most of that cotton was
produced by slave labor, it was slavery that made this major chunk of
industrialization possible.
Ed Baptist goes even further. He says that plantations growing cotton
developed many of the innovations of modern industrial capitalism.
These included productivity "targets" for enslaved people similar to the
quotas of many modern factory workers. He also argued that
enslavers developed technologies—especially punishments—that
made enslaved workers productive, perhaps more productive and
efficient than factory workers who were paid wages.
When you add it all up, these historians argue that capitalism and
slavery worked hand-in-hand, like siblings supporting each other
rather than rivals. The slave trade and the plantation system created
profits for capitalists and the plantation system even helped develop
and inspire new industrial techniques for later capitalists.
From the twelfth century to the black that population growth a
complete the rise of the world trade and from the second half of the
16th century as the woolen industry run into exporting difficulties that
continued into the 17th population growth provided enough stimulus to
sustain the ongoing process of capitalist transformation. But by the
end of the middle of the seventeenth century population densities
throughout England reached a point where under the prevailing
agrarian structure for the population growth dependent strictly on the
growth of employment opportunities. To summarize the vigor of the
external sector in the 17th and the eighteenth century dependent
entirely on the growth during that period of Atlantic system based on
the slave trade and African slavery in the new world. Hence the export
slave trade from Africa New World slavery were crucial to the capitalist
transformation of England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Without the
opportunities offered by the expansion of slave based Atlantic system
the English economy and some other major Western European
economy would have suffered the fate of the Mediterranean countries
after the crisis of the seventeenth century. The division of labor
between the new world and the Western Africa was brought about the
operation of Atlantic area as a defacto common market.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/05/03/the-clear-connection-between-
slavery-and-american-capitalism/?sh=6f3fc87d7bd3
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/slavery-and-
rise-capitalism
https://www.jstor.org/stable/204653?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior
%3A162d42a2eef0be20090317a0472e4850&seq=23#page_scan_tab_contents
Book on British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery the legacy of Eric Williams edited by Barbara
L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman
