The following is a review of Eric Williams's famous work Capitalism and Slavery. It was composed in January of 2013 for Dr. Brad Austin's course on slavery in New England, taught at Salem State University, Salem, Massachusetts.
Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, originally published in 1944, remains in print almost three-quarters of a century later. In this seminal work, Williams famously presents the European enslavement of Africans in the New World as a choice shaped exclusively by economic factors, not racism; argues that profits derived from the slave trade and the plantations upon which Africans were enslaved provided the capital that financed the Industrial Revolution; and argues that political and economic factors best explain the abolition of the slave trade and, finally, slavery itself.
An introduction by Colin Palmer of Princeton University provides the background to the publication of this important work and some relevant details about Williams. Williams, born in Trinidad in 1911, served as prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1961 until his death in 1981, but insisted on a West Indian, as opposed to a Trinidadian, identity. He studied modern history at Oxford in the 1930s, during which time he developed the prototype of what would become Capitalism and Slavery.
Capitalism and Slavery begins with Williams’s famous explication of the “origin of negro slavery” and concludes with the abolition of slavery and the slave trade by Britain. Slavery, Williams asserts, is adopted when the quantity of free labor necessary to produce staple crops is unavailable. He demonstrates what he believes to be the irrelevance of race as a factor in the enslavement of Africans in the New World by pointing out that enslaved Native Americans and white indentured servants were the labor pool to which European planters originally turned. What ultimately led these planters to turn to enslaved African labor was the relative costs of these different types of labor—“the Negro slave was cheaper.” (19)
Williams convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the slave trade to the development of British industry in the eighteenth century by systematically investigating its relationship to various industries, including shipping and shipbuilding, the manufacture of woolen and cotton textiles, the refinement of sugar, the distillation of rum, and metallurgy. The great cities of Britain—Liverpool, Manchester, and Bristol among them—can trace their celebrated opulence directly back to the slave trade. It was the production of cotton goods to be exchanged for slaves in Africa that provided the impetus for the development of the cotton industry in Manchester, for example; and it was the shipping of goods produced for such reprehensible exchanges that transformed Liverpool into a great seaport. The planters of the British West Indies accrued astounding wealth, and with so many within British society benefitting economically from the slave trade, Williams shows that the planters of the British West Indies also wielded tremendous political power.
By the early nineteenth century, the monopoly enjoyed by the West Indian planters over sugar importation to Britain had become an economic handicap for British industry. A theme in Williams’s work is that the political power and ideologies of entrenched groups resonate within a society long after their economic practices and the ideologies that celebrate them have become obsolete. Williams systematically analyses the turn toward abolition by the representatives of various industries and argues that a more plausible explanation for this turn than humanitarian grounds is that these industries now saw the West Indian planters and their monopoly on sugar importation as an impediment to the importation of raw materials in the quantities and at the prices necessary for British industry to remain competitive internationally.
Williams’s work looks at economic data and British and international politics, and it is within the context of this economic and political framework that he presents the public pronouncements of political figures, including the abolitionists. In his conclusion, Williams explicitly dismisses the value of any investigation of political attitudes that fails to so contextualize them, and the abolitionists are not spared this unsentimental method. At best, they are seen as men of their times, too steeped in the ideology of the new industrial order to recognize that it too imposed gross injustices upon those upon whose labor it depended; at worst (and it is within this latter category that he seems to place most of the abolitionsists), they were hypocrites who derived their wealth from slavery in the East Indies or from non-British slave plantations in the West Indies.
Important to Williams’s argument as regards the origins of slavery is a controversial emphasis on the similarities of the conditions of indentured servitude and slavery. For Williams, the slave trade and slavery simply built on precedents such as the kidnaping of the children of the poor in Britain or the consignation of felons to plantation labor. The Middle Passage, Williams writes, was “a part of the age” to which white servants were also subjected. (13) However, as brutal as were the experiences of all of the laboring classes, their experiences were indeed different. While the relative costs of different types of labor is sufficient to explain why one type of labor would be used at any given time, it is not sufficient to explain the dissimilarities in the conditions of labor between white indentured servants as compared to that of enslaved Native Americans or Africans, and because Williams does not acknowledge such differences, he consequently provides no explanation for them.
Additionally, though the reader is led to infer from Williams’s charge of hypocrisy against the abolitionists that slavery in the East Indies and Britain’s relationship to it was essentially identical to that in the West Indies and that Britain was as capable of abolishing slavery there as it was of abolishing it in the West Indies, Williams neglects to present any description whatsoever of the British East Indies, and for this reason the reader, unless already knowledgeable about the British East Indies, is not able to assess the strength of his arguments as regards those abolitionists involved in the East Indian trade.
Slavery itself is yet to be extirpated from the world, but not even the slavery of bygone times has been, or could be, cleansed from our civilization. Rather than simply a regrettable episode in human history, the African slave trade and the plantation system are fundamental factors in the creation of the world in which we now live, and Slavery and Capitalism masterfully defines them as such.
Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, originally published in 1944, remains in print almost three-quarters of a century later. In this seminal work, Williams famously presents the European enslavement of Africans in the New World as a choice shaped exclusively by economic factors, not racism; argues that profits derived from the slave trade and the plantations upon which Africans were enslaved provided the capital that financed the Industrial Revolution; and argues that political and economic factors best explain the abolition of the slave trade and, finally, slavery itself.
An introduction by Colin Palmer of Princeton University provides the background to the publication of this important work and some relevant details about Williams. Williams, born in Trinidad in 1911, served as prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1961 until his death in 1981, but insisted on a West Indian, as opposed to a Trinidadian, identity. He studied modern history at Oxford in the 1930s, during which time he developed the prototype of what would become Capitalism and Slavery.
Capitalism and Slavery begins with Williams’s famous explication of the “origin of negro slavery” and concludes with the abolition of slavery and the slave trade by Britain. Slavery, Williams asserts, is adopted when the quantity of free labor necessary to produce staple crops is unavailable. He demonstrates what he believes to be the irrelevance of race as a factor in the enslavement of Africans in the New World by pointing out that enslaved Native Americans and white indentured servants were the labor pool to which European planters originally turned. What ultimately led these planters to turn to enslaved African labor was the relative costs of these different types of labor—“the Negro slave was cheaper.” (19)
Williams convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the slave trade to the development of British industry in the eighteenth century by systematically investigating its relationship to various industries, including shipping and shipbuilding, the manufacture of woolen and cotton textiles, the refinement of sugar, the distillation of rum, and metallurgy. The great cities of Britain—Liverpool, Manchester, and Bristol among them—can trace their celebrated opulence directly back to the slave trade. It was the production of cotton goods to be exchanged for slaves in Africa that provided the impetus for the development of the cotton industry in Manchester, for example; and it was the shipping of goods produced for such reprehensible exchanges that transformed Liverpool into a great seaport. The planters of the British West Indies accrued astounding wealth, and with so many within British society benefitting economically from the slave trade, Williams shows that the planters of the British West Indies also wielded tremendous political power.
By the early nineteenth century, the monopoly enjoyed by the West Indian planters over sugar importation to Britain had become an economic handicap for British industry. A theme in Williams’s work is that the political power and ideologies of entrenched groups resonate within a society long after their economic practices and the ideologies that celebrate them have become obsolete. Williams systematically analyses the turn toward abolition by the representatives of various industries and argues that a more plausible explanation for this turn than humanitarian grounds is that these industries now saw the West Indian planters and their monopoly on sugar importation as an impediment to the importation of raw materials in the quantities and at the prices necessary for British industry to remain competitive internationally.
Williams’s work looks at economic data and British and international politics, and it is within the context of this economic and political framework that he presents the public pronouncements of political figures, including the abolitionists. In his conclusion, Williams explicitly dismisses the value of any investigation of political attitudes that fails to so contextualize them, and the abolitionists are not spared this unsentimental method. At best, they are seen as men of their times, too steeped in the ideology of the new industrial order to recognize that it too imposed gross injustices upon those upon whose labor it depended; at worst (and it is within this latter category that he seems to place most of the abolitionsists), they were hypocrites who derived their wealth from slavery in the East Indies or from non-British slave plantations in the West Indies.
Important to Williams’s argument as regards the origins of slavery is a controversial emphasis on the similarities of the conditions of indentured servitude and slavery. For Williams, the slave trade and slavery simply built on precedents such as the kidnaping of the children of the poor in Britain or the consignation of felons to plantation labor. The Middle Passage, Williams writes, was “a part of the age” to which white servants were also subjected. (13) However, as brutal as were the experiences of all of the laboring classes, their experiences were indeed different. While the relative costs of different types of labor is sufficient to explain why one type of labor would be used at any given time, it is not sufficient to explain the dissimilarities in the conditions of labor between white indentured servants as compared to that of enslaved Native Americans or Africans, and because Williams does not acknowledge such differences, he consequently provides no explanation for them.
Additionally, though the reader is led to infer from Williams’s charge of hypocrisy against the abolitionists that slavery in the East Indies and Britain’s relationship to it was essentially identical to that in the West Indies and that Britain was as capable of abolishing slavery there as it was of abolishing it in the West Indies, Williams neglects to present any description whatsoever of the British East Indies, and for this reason the reader, unless already knowledgeable about the British East Indies, is not able to assess the strength of his arguments as regards those abolitionists involved in the East Indian trade.
Slavery itself is yet to be extirpated from the world, but not even the slavery of bygone times has been, or could be, cleansed from our civilization. Rather than simply a regrettable episode in human history, the African slave trade and the plantation system are fundamental factors in the creation of the world in which we now live, and Slavery and Capitalism masterfully defines them as such.
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