A review by rickayers
Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams

5.0

 

This incredible study from 1944, groundbreaking Black research as paradigm-changing as DuBois’ Black Reconstruction 10 years earlier, proves how slave labor created the massive wealth, and incipient trade routes, that was the impetus for the birth of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Shipping in Bristol and Liverpool,  the first banking and heavy industry as well as the stock markets – all owe their beginning to the slave trade. James Watt’s invention of the steam engine (p. 102) was made possible from capital accumulated from the West Indian trade. Also resultant was the development of insurance and the railways. When cotton became the new raw commodity, (after the cotton gin was invented, 1793) it increased even more. With steam looms, cloth manufacturing in Manchester and Lancashire exploded. Iron, and coal to smelt it, expanded. 1800 reform in England, the expansion of the parliament, was forced on the monarchy and brought government in line with productive relations, with manufacturers, the new capitalist class, dominating. 

 

Slavery was the basis for the “primitive accumulation” of capital required for launching the capitalist class to ascendance. To quote Marx: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. ­– from Capital, Volume 1, chapter 31 

Quotations: 

p. 52 

The Triangular Trade According to Adam Smith, the discovery of America and the Cape route to India are “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” The importance of the discovery of America lay not in the precious metals it provided but in the new and inexhaustible market it afforded for European commodities. One of its principal effects was to “raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to.”1 It gave rise to an enormous increase in world trade. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the centuries of trade, as the nineteenth century was the century of production. For Britain that trade was primarily the triangular trade. In 1718 William Wood said that the slave trade was “the spring and parent whence the others flow.” 

 

The triangular trade thereby gave a triple stimulus to British industry. The Negroes were purchased with British manufactures; transported to the plantations, they produced sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses and other tropical products, the processing of which created new industries in England; while the maintenance of the Negroes and their owners on the plantations provided a new market for British industry, New England agriculture and the Newfoundland fisheries. By 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution. 

 

The West Indian islands became the hub of the British Empire, of immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of England. It was the Negro slaves who made these sugar colonies the most precious colonies ever recorded in the whole annals of imperialism. To Postlethwayt they were "the fundamental prop and support" of the colonies, "valuable people" whose labor supplied Britain with all plantation produce. The British Empire was "a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation."