Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution: A Dissent - History Reclaimed -12.09.23

by Lawrence Goldman

In this review of the recently published book by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Lawrence Goldman argues that the authors have exaggerated the importance of the Atlantic slave economy to Britain and have failed to demonstrate its major role in the Industrial Revolution, the origins of which had relatively little to do with slavery.

Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson are two eminent, well-published, and widely admired economic historians of modern Britain. They have together published a new study on Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Polity, 2023). Yet despite their wealth of academic experience, their book yokes together historical research and contemporary politics and in so doing undermines the authority of their arguments.

It opens with an account of recent public controversies over the legacies of slavery in Britain. It ends discussing ‘lasting discrimination in Britain and restorative justice’, and links the history of slavery to continuing prejudice in the racist society that is Britain today, at least in their eyes (p. 203-6).

Few books have better demonstrated the need for History Reclaimed. It ignores the barriers that academics used to respect between objective analysis, political advocacy, and ideology – the framing of a subject in a particular way. Berg and Hudson have set out to make a case. A subject as sad and tragic as the history of slavery requires and merits a different sort of scholarship.

The rationale of the book is to place chattel slavery in the British West Indies between the late 17th and early 19th centuries – roughly 150 years – at the very heart of British and global capitalism. More or less every notable economic development in this formative period is relatable to slavery in this account. To do this Berg and Hudson synthesise recent work on the history of slavery, the Atlantic economy, and economic globalisation. The authors have not themselves gone into the relevant archives but rely upon the work and views of those authors they have chosen to use.

There has never been any doubt about the important place of slavery in the trading systems between the old and new worlds in this era. As the basis of the Caribbean economy, slavery supplied commodities in one direction, took in finished goods coming in the other direction, and made some people rich by exploiting and destroying the lives of the millions of chattel slaves carried from Africa to the Americas. Britain’s international history in this period, her eagerness to win and hold sugar islands from the early 17th century under both the Stuart monarchy and the Cromwellian Republic, demonstrates this.

But Berg and Hudson want to place slavery at the very heart of almost every economic process, and in so doing they overplay their hand. Indeed, among the mountains of data they supply (so much, that a kindly reader or a wise publisher should have told them that they are in danger of obscuring their case) is material that undermines their central arguments.

Berg and Hudson begin where everyone else always begins, with the so-called ‘Williams Thesis’ set forth by Eric Williams, later a prime minister of Jamaica, in his Oxford doctorate that became the book Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. It was comprehensively critiqued and undone by a generation of historians in the 1960s and 1970s, but in present times it has made a comeback. In a cynical exercise in historical materialism, Williams argued that Britain emancipated the slaves in 1833 when the sugar economy of the West Indies was no longer profitable.

Emancipation occurred when advancing industrialisation at home offered greater and more secure returns than those to be gained from the exploitation of colonies abroad, now in decline. The half century of public campaigning by the anti-slavery movement had little to do with it, in his account. He also argued that the profits from slavery provided the necessary capital for industrialisation: that the slave trade and slave labour ‘provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution’.[1] We will return to this point later.

For all of this article with the references below, please click here and for the pdf verion please click on the link below:

https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/slavery-capitalism-and-the-industrial-revolution-a-dissent/

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution - A Dissent - by Lawrence Goldman for Hi.

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References:

[1] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944) (1961 edn.), vii, 52-5.

[2] Mark Cartwright, ‘The Steam Engine in the British Industrial Revolution’, World History Encyclopedia, https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2166/the-steam-engine-in-the-british-industrial-revolut/

[3] Stanley Engerman, ‘The Slave Trade and British Capital Formation in the Eighteenth Century: A Comment on the Williams Thesis’, Business History Review, vol. 46, no. 4, Winter 1972, p. 442.

[4] Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy. Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837-1873 (Oxford, 2005).

[5] P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism. Innovation and Expansion 1688-1914 (London, 1993)

[6] T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830 (London, 1948)