capitalism and slavery thesis

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Eighty-year-old study of British slave trade is back in the bestsellers list

Capitalism and Slavery, by the future first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago Eric Williams, argues that the abolition of slavery was motivated by economic, not moral, concerns

A book of unpalatable truths about Britain’s slave trade has become a UK bestseller, almost 80 years after author Eric Williams was told by a British publisher: “I would never publish such a book, for it would be contrary to the British tradition.”

Capitalism and Slavery was first published in the US in 1944. It was published in the UK by the independent publisher André Deutsch in 1964, with a number of reprints over the next 20 years.

Published in a mass-market edition for the first time in the UK by Penguin Random House this week, it has sold what the publisher calls an “astonishing” almost 3,000 copies in its first few days and will appear at No 5 in the Sunday Times paperback non-fiction chart this weekend.

The contentious core of the book by Williams – who was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago for 25 years until his death in 1981 – was that the abolition of the slave trade was not born out of humanitarian wishes but of economic necessity.

His thesis was that slavery just became economically unviable, and that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was driven more by the Industrial Revolution changing the way that Britain did business rather than any moral desire to stop the practice of slavery in its colonies.

Britain’s role in the slave trade has come under fresh scrutiny in the last couple of years, with organisations such as the National Trust publishing reports into the links between many of the historic properties and stately homes it manages and profits made on the back of slavery in the Caribbean. And a new generation of activism has seen events such as the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol being toppled by protesters in 2020.

Chloe Currens, the UK editor of Williams’s book for Penguin, said on Wednesday: “The publication of Capitalism and Slavery represented a watershed moment in the historiography of empire; it has proven to be a true classic among historians. We’re so excited to see its vital, urgent analysis reach a new generation of readers almost 60 years after it was first released in the UK.”

Although virtually unknown in the UK, Capitalism and Slavery has never been out of print in the US since its first publication by the University of North Carolina Press. It is now on its third edition and between that and the second edition, just a few years ago, has sold 40,000 copies.

While studying at Oxford, Williams, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1911, wrote his thesis on the subject. That formed the basis of Capitalism and Slavery. He took it to Fredric Warburg, a leading publisher of revolutionary texts who had put out all of Stalin’s and Trotsky’s works. Warburg categorically refused. “Mr. Williams,” he said, “are you trying to tell me that the slave trade and slavery were abolished for economic and not for humanitarian reasons? I would never publish such a book, for it would be contrary to the British tradition.”

For Williams’ daughter, Erica Williams Connell, the British publication of Capitalism and Slavery is an “incredible” moment.

Williams Connell is the founding curator of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research Library, Archives and Museum at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. Speaking from her home in Miami, Florida, she said, “To think that almost 80 years after it was published, Britain is finally discovering Capitalism and Slavery is amazing to me.

“Everyone who has heard about the book finally being re-published in the UK has said the same thing to me: well, it’s about time!”

There have been many rebuttals and affirmations of what has become known the Williams Thesis since it was first published in 1944, and in answer to these, Williams Connell quoted from the foreword of the recent third edition, by William Darity of Duke University in North Carolina, who wrote: “Although scholars of the British Industrial Revolution generally have ignored Williams’s proposition, they only can continue to do so by placing their own intellectual integrity at peril.”

While prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Williams was the only head of state of the British former colonies that gained independence after 1950 to refuse the UK’s “golden handshake” of money – which could only be spent on British-made goods – which Williams said was insufficient reparation and the strings-attached deal insulting. He said in a speech to the London School of Economics in 1962: “The West Indies are in the position of an orange. The British have sucked it dry and their sole concern today is that they should not slip and get damaged on the peel … The offer is quite unacceptable and we would prefer not to have it … it amounted to aid to Britain rather than to Trinidad … I do not propose to accept any concept of the Commonwealth which means common wealth for Britain and common poverty for us.”

His daughter described how a letter he wrote to that effect “dropped like a bomb in 10 Downing Street”.

Williams Connell added: “The battle lasted a full year, and he eventually capitulated, but not without becoming a giant thorn in the British backside!”

Capital and Slavery by Eric Williams is published by Penguin Modern Classics (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

This article has been amended. A previous version stated that Capitalism and Slavery had been out of print in the UK since 1964.

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Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

Eric Williams’s book, Capitalism and Slavery , was first published in 1944. It was, and remains, of fundamental importance for the understanding of slavery in the British Caribbean and its relationship to the development of British capitalism.

Directed against the bland imperiousness of those who wanted to explain the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery as primarily or simply the products of British humanitarianism, Williams launched an assault rich in argument, historical example, and political and moral fervour. If the book had its foundations in an Oxford University thesis, its ultimate point was not only historical but also political: that the story of capitalism had been enmeshed with that of slavery; that the subordination of black people and their subjection to racism was a systematic, structural, dimension of that relationship; and that overcoming racism could only be achieved by political independence and a recognition of the burdens of history.

Penguin has just (February 2022) re-issued the book: Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery .

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People of Interest

Ann eliza french.

1787 - 1835

Daughter of "free Mulatto" lodging-house-keeper Jane Charlotte Beckford (c. 1759-1825); possibly the daughter of George Ffrench, Clerk to the Jamaica Assembly. Spinster; independently wealthy slave-owner.

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Capitalism and Slavery revisited: the legacy of Eric Williams

Posted on 14th january 2023 by richard donnelly, christian høgsbjerg.

Penguin’s 2022 republication of the seminal and path-breaking 1944 study Capitalism and Slavery in its “modern classics” series is hugely welcome. The reprint of the book, written by black Trinidadian historian and politician Eric Williams, comes in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. It will help enable an even wider reception and engagement with one of the most influential and important works ever written on slavery in the Caribbean. As Ken Boodhoo notes, Capitalism and Slavery established Williams himself “as one of the leading intellectuals of the Third World”. 1 Amid decolonisation, Williams developed a political career as a leading Caribbean nationalist and became the first prime minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. He held this position until his death in 1981, while continuing to write and publish works of history. 2

As this article will hopefully show, it is right to recognise Capitalism and Slavery as a “modern classic”. The book powerfully elucidates some fundamental truths about the development of capitalism—with a particular focus on British capitalism—and the connection of this new world system to slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, particularly in the Caribbean. At a time when British Conservative and Labour politicians alike worship at the altar of patriotism and “British values”, it is vital to remember what took place in the 18th century, the “golden age” of the slave trade. At this time, “Britain was not only the foremost slave-trading country in the world”; it had become, in the words of Scottish abolitionist James Ramsay, “the ‘honourable slave carriers’ of her rivals”. This relationship to competing states such as France and Spain enabled Liverpool to become “the greatest slave-trading port in the Old World” by the end of the 18th century. 3 Between 1690 and 1807, English slave ships carried off an estimated 2,532,300 enslaved Africans. 4 Williams revealed how many of the “heroes” of the British ruling class were implicated in the enslavement of Africans and its defence through a slave-owning lobby group, the so-called West India Interest. These include Admiral Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and prime minister William Gladstone. Also incriminated were key institutions of the British state such as the royal family, the Church of England, banks such as Barclays and insurance houses such as Lloyd’s of London. In his The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery , historian Michael Taylor notes, “The West India Interest was not simply supported by the establishment; it was the establishment”. 5

Capitalism and Slavery has a timeless quality to it because it is based on detailed empirical research on contemporary colonial records and speeches of members of parliament and colonial officials. It can thus be read and re-read with profit. Indeed, profit is the operative word here. The book deals with detailed records of the British institutions and capitalists—not only sugar refiners and cotton manufacturers but also a wide range of others including shipbuilders and gun-makers—that made huge profits from slavery. There is a mass of information about the fortunes accrued in the City of London and how port cities such as Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow (as well as other cities such as Manchester and Birmingham) benefited, growing massively on the back of these profits. All this means reading the work for the first time is a shocking, unforgettable, revelatory experience, especially for many British readers. As academic Anita Rupprecht points out, “One of the most memorable aspects of Capitalism and Slavery is Williams’s naming of prominent financiers, manufacturers and commercial merchants who profited from the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery and were also key mediators in the development of British industrialisation”. 6 Poet and activist Michael Rosen has also commented on his first encounter with the work:

This book, recommended to me by a Jamaican fellow-student in 1968, changed my view of the world. It was the first time I was brought up hard and fast, face to face, with how modern Britain developed off the back of the transatlantic slave trade and the wealth created from the labour of slavery. 7

Capitalism and Slavery is perhaps best placed alongside two other seminal works of its time. The first is the great black United States radical W E B Du Bois’s 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America 1860–1880 , which explores the US Civil War and its aftermath. The second is The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution , published in 1938 by Williams’s compatriot and one-time teacher C L R James. This work chronicles the self-emancipation struggles of slaves during the Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804, led by the liberated slave and military commander Toussaint L’Ouverture. 8 These three books by Williams, Du Bois and James should be seen as a trilogy that revolutionised the study of Atlantic slavery and abolition from a broadly Marxist perspective. All three were researched and written in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and amid the global crisis of capitalism in the 1930s. All three authors were of African descent and had ancestors who were enslaved, and all three wrote to help ideologically arm the liberation struggles against Jim Crow racism and the white supremacy of European colonialism. Moreover, all three played leading roles in these fights. The three books shared the objective of showing that the racism and imperialist domination experienced by the authors had its origins and material roots in the emerging capitalist system and the barbarism of the slave trade. Lastly, all three authors wanted to reveal the hidden history of abolition, in which the enslaved themselves played a critical role—indeed, the central role—in their own liberation.

Unlike Du Bois and James, Williams was no Marxist and never claimed to be. It is indicative of his politics that he failed to mention Karl Marx once in Capitalism and Slavery (although he did cite Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in passing). 9 The political differences in approach between, on the one hand, Williams and, on the other hand, James and Du Bois would become steadily more apparent as decolonisation unfolded within the context of the Cold War. Nonetheless, the influence of Marxism on Capitalism and Slavery —above all through the inspiration provided by James’s own writings and thinking—is critical to understand if we are to fully appreciate the power and originality of the book.

Williams’s turn to radical history

Williams was born in 1911 into the black middle class of colonial Trinidad—a class that valorised educational achievement as a key method of advancement. James, born a decade earlier into the same class, first came across Williams in the early 1920s, when he was a small boy in shorts in the lower forms at Queen’s Royal College (QRC), the elite school James had also attended after winning an exhibition scholarship and where he was now employed as a teacher of English and history. 10 At QRC, the rich and radical history of the Caribbean was simply missing from the curriculum; Williams described the Trinidad of this time as “politically, economically, socially, educationally, culturally and literally a British colony” in his 1969 autobiography, Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister . 11 Nonetheless, towards the middle of the 1920s, a nationalist movement emerged around the charismatic self-declared champion of “the barefooted man”, Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani, who was the leader of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association.

James became a supporter of the idea of “West Indian self-government”, which was associated with Cipriani, and he even introduced elements of West Indian history into the school curriculum for the first time. In 1932, he resigned from a prestigious post as a lecturer in English and history at Trinidad’s Government Training College in order to move to Britain. His job was initially offered to Williams. However, Williams had been training for a Trinidadian government scholarship to study at Oxford University with James’s help. In 1931, Williams successfully won the distinguished Island Scholarship and followed in James’s footsteps, also arriving in Britain in 1932. 12 James describes meeting Williams that year, “congratulating him on his scholarship and saying to him that I was glad to see that he had broken out of the law and medicine routine and was going in for history”. It is unclear what impact the mood of nationalism had on the young Williams, but James noted, “When he took history at Oxford instead of law or medicine, he made a new significant break with the colonialist mentality”. 13

However, James’s and Williams’s paths diverged in Britain. James became a primarily political figure, active in campaigning for West Indian self-government and then militant Pan-Africanism, also finding his way to Marxism and the tiny Trotskyist movement. The young Williams did not radicalise to anything like the same degree as James, even as the ideological crisis resulting from the economic and political chaos gripping the Europe of the Great Depression found expression at Oxford University; an Oxford Union vote in 1933 rejected fighting for “king and country”. Instead, Williams studied hard for his undergraduate degree in modern history, which involved studying Latin, French, political economy and European history from 700 to 1789. He also took British colonial history from 1830 to 1860 as a special subject. 14 Williams later recalled, “My training was divorced from anything remotely suggestive of Trinidad and the West Indies… In my special subject, British colonial history, there were some references to the West Indies, but they were in terms of European diplomacy and European war. What I knew of slavery and the plantation economy came from Roman history”. 15 The closest that Williams seems to have got to political activity at Oxford was attending “regular meetings of the Indian nationalist students in their club, the Majliss”. 16

Yet, despite their divergence, the two Trinidadian friends stayed in contact. James recalled:

Williams used to come to my house in London and spend his vacations with me. Frequently, I used to go up to Oxford and spend some time with him… He used to send me his papers from Oxford on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Plato and Aristotle for my comments. 17

James also recalls spending free evenings on pub crawls around London with Williams and his friends from Oxford, which he could enjoy so long as he had “Marx, Jane Austen or H G Wells in my pocket”. 18

In 1935, Williams graduated with first class honours and came top of his class, which was a tremendous achievement. “I had come, seen and conquered—at Oxford!” At the start of the new term in September 1935, he enrolled on another course (this time in PPE—philosophy, politics and economics) in an attempt to win a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. 19 A month later, in October 1935, fascist Italy launched its war on the people of Ethiopia. In time-honoured fashion, Benito Mussolini declared this criminal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation “a war of civilisation and liberation” in order to justify his 19th century-style empire-building. This rationale was supported by claims that forms of slavery still existed under the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie. 20 Williams now entered the political arena for the first time. He later recalled that he “led the fight…against Italian imperialism and advocated League of Nations support for Ethiopia” at Aggrey House, a hub for colonial students in London. 21 For the first time, as historian Pepijn Brandon notes, Williams now took part in “anti-colonial networks focused on England”, witnessing speeches by leading anti-colonial figures such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru. 22

Williams was unsuccessful in winning a fellowship for reasons doubtlessly connected to institutional racism at Oxford University and his status as a black colonial subject. He abandoned his PPE course in 1936 to return to historical scholarship. In the summer of 1936, Williams approached James, whose own research on the Haitian Revolution was now well advanced. James later described the conversation:

Williams came to me, as he usually did, asking me questions. He said, “I am to do a doctorate. What shall I write on?”… I told him, “I know exactly what you should write on. I have done the economic basis of slavery emancipation as it was in France. But that has never been done in Great Britain, and Britain is wide open for it. A lot of people think the British showed good will. There were lots of people who had good will, but it was the basis, the economic basis, that allowed the good will to function.” He said, “Do you think it will be good?” I said, “Fine.” He said, “Well, what shall I say?” I said, “Give me some paper!” I sat down and wrote what the thesis should be with my own hand, and I gave it to him. He must have copied it down and taken it to the Oxford authorities. Later, he told me they said it was fine. And he went from there. 23

Whatever input James had in formulating the primary thesis, it was the wider political situation that spurred on Williams’s research: fascist Italy’s war on Ethiopia, the material support provided by Britain and other European powers to Mussolini’s war machine, and their own continued colonial domination over Africa and the Caribbean. Amid this international context, Williams saw evidence against those who claimed that the British state played a progressive role in the abolition of slavery and continued to do so on the contemporary world stage. These included the likes of Reginald Coupland, who held the Beit professorship of colonial history at Oxford. Coupland authored The British Anti-Slavery Movement and a book about the moderate abolitionist parliamentarian William Wilberforce, Wilberforce: A Narrative . Williams explained:

Coupland, in a lecture at Oxford, stated, “The British will do justice to Africa because they are heirs and guardians of a great tradition.” As it was clear to me that they had not and were not doing justice to the West Indians, as the Hoare-Laval peace plan seemed to me to be irreconcilable with justice to Ethiopia, it became imperative to analyse the “great tradition”. 24

Events in Ethiopia led Williams to begin his doctorate on “The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery”, which he regarded as, “of all the chapters in British colonial history, the least known”. He described this as “the most important decision I had made in my life” after the initial decision to read history at Oxford against the wishes of his father. His doctoral supervisor was Vincent Harlow, a historian of 17th century Barbados and “the premier colonial scholar at Oxford”. 25 According to the late Trinidadian historian Selwyn Ryan, who authored a monumental biography of Williams in 2012, this decision “turned out to be one of the most critical in his academic and perhaps political career”. 26

Destroying the myths of abolition

James and Williams now worked very closely together in their historical researches. Whenever James went over to France for research purposes, Williams “would go with me”. 27 They made use of pioneering French and German scholarship on British abolition. Critically important for both was also a 1928 work by US historian Lowell Joseph Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean 1763-1833: A Study in Social and Economic History . Like many other white US professors in the 1920s, Ragatz was personally racist. 28 Nonetheless, he understood the need to examine the social and economic history of the Caribbean, and he traced the striking long-term structural decline of the colonial economy of the West Indies from the 1750s to the 1830s. In the 1750s, West Indian sugar planters “were the conspicuously rich men of Britain”. These often included absentee landlords such as the Lascelles family, who used the proceeds of slavery to construct the extravagant Harewood House in Yorkshire and later married into the royal family. Ragatz described this highpoint of the British slave economy in the Caribbean:

Sugar was king. They who produced it constituted the power behind the throne, and the islands on which their opulence and commanding position had been reared were regarded by all as the most valued of overseas possessions. 29

However, by the 1820s, the position of this once powerful planter class in the British Caribbean could not be more different. As the once beneficial monopoly of trade with Britain became a stranglehold:

The dwindling returns from their decayed properties were all but completely engrossed by creditors… The sugar colonies themselves, sunk into social and economic stagnation, were viewed with hostile eyes and their value to the homeland was commonly questioned… Never in imperial history has there been a more striking contrast. 30

The impact Ragatz’s thesis made on James and Williams should not be underestimated. For James, it was “yet another of those monumental pieces of research into European history that US scholarship is giving us in such profusion”. 31 When Williams’s thesis was eventually published, he dedicated it to Ragatz, saying that his “monumental labours in this field may be amplified and developed but can never be superseded”. 32

While Williams was researching his doctoral thesis, the Caribbean labour rebellions, which had been steadily building, reached their crescendo. There was a mass strike in Trinidad in 1937 and a full-blown rebellion in Jamaica in 1938. Williams was regularly in London in order to do research and became a “frequent caller and guest” at the offices of the International African Service Bureau (IASB), a militant Pan-Africanist organisation. The IASB was led by another black Trinidadian radical, George Padmore. James was also an important figure, as was Amy Ashwood Garvey, a Jamaican activist and the former wife of the influential US Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. Although Williams never formally joined the IASB, he did read a draft of its pamphlet on the Caribbean labour rebellions, which was compiled by the Saint Lucian economist Arthur Lewis. 33 In turn, James apparently read two drafts of Williams’s thesis before submission. 34 James recalled that, “in our various ways, Padmore, myself and Lewis were part of this tremendous intellectual and political training” of Williams. 35 Williams had “long conversations with Padmore” during this period. Later, Williams acknowledged Padmore’s contribution to conceiving his thesis, even if he considered Padmore to be “more journalist than historian”. 36 As Boodhoo notes, “Interactions with these two radicals must have contributed to the radical slant of Williams’s thesis”. 37 Indeed, Williams would later talk of himself, James and Padmore as “the Trinidadian trinity” that challenged British imperialist ideology. 38 James spoke of “the long discussions we had as to what the thesis” of Williams’s work “should be and how it should be tackled”. 39

The Marxist analysis of abolition developed by James underpins Williams’s argument. This analysis is no supplementary correction to the conventional thesis of humanitarianism. Instead, it represented a revolutionary overthrow of the contemporary idealistic story of abolition put forward by historians such as Coupland. In 1935, for example Coupland gave a lecture on “The Meaning of Wilberforce”:

The conscience of all England was awakened. That, in a word, is how the slave system was abolished. Not because it was good policy or good business to abolish it—it was neither, it was the opposite—but simply because of its iniquity. 40

Against this idealistic interpretation, the Marxist analysis stressed the material foundations of abolition. In his The Black Jacobins , James agreed that “profits were always high” in the slave trade, but went on to simply point out that “nothing, however profitable, goes on forever”. 41 It seemed clear from Ragatz’s work that the British abolished the slave trade partly because they were slowly realising that slavery itself was less profitable than free labour and that the old mercantilist system was potentially less profitable than free trade. James continued:

The rising industrial bourgeoisie, feeling its way to free trade…was beginning its victorious attack upon the agricultural monopoly, which was to culminate in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. The West Indian sugar producers were monopolists whose methods of production afforded an easy target… Adam Smith and Arthur Young, the forerunners of the new era, condemned the whole principle of slave labour as the most expensive in the world. 42

He then tore into Coupland with typically devastating wit:

Those who see in abolition the gradually awakening conscience of mankind should spend a few minutes asking themselves why it is that man’s conscience, which had slept peacefully for so many centuries, should awake just at the time that men began to see the unprofitableness of slavery as a method of production in the West Indian colonies. 43

James denounces Coupland’s ilk as “a venal race of scholars” and “profiteering panders to national vanity” who “conspired to obscure the truth about abolition”. Arguably for the very first time in the English language, James had, in the words of historian of slavery Roger Anstey, articulated “an ingenious explanation of how humanitarian motives were subordinated to economics in the William Pitt the Younger’s conduct of abolition in the 1790s”. 44 This breakthrough was doubtlessly helped considerably by Williams, who spent two years undertaking doctoral research in the Public Record Office on parliamentary papers, Hansard, various documents from the Colonial Office and Foreign Office, and the collection of Pitt’s correspondence known as the Chatham papers. 45

According to James, the battle over abolition was more than a struggle between the stagnant West Indian sugar planter class (alongside their representatives in parliament) and the dynamic industrial bourgeoisie in Britain. Rather, ending slavery was “but one stage in the successive victories of the industrial bourgeoisie over the landed aristocracy” that shaped the development of British capitalism in the 19th century. 46 Moreover, it was also a struggle between two factions of the British capitalist class: the “British bourgeois”, who were the “most successful of slave-traders”, and “those British bourgeois who had no West Indian interests” who, “with tears rolling down their cheeks for the poor suffering blacks…set up a great howl for the abolition of the slave trade”. 47

James’s conclusions did not dishonour the memory of the great historic contribution made by “those millions of honest English nonconformists who listened to their clergymen and gave strength to the English movement for the abolition of slavery”. Indeed, these people would be “remembered with gratitude and affection” by “the sons of Africa and the lovers of humanity”. Yet, James damned the likes of Wilberforce; invoking a phrase of the colonial magnate Cecil Rhodes, he lambasted “the ‘philanthropy plus five per cent’ hypocrites in the British Houses of Parliament”. 48 As James had written in his 1938 A History of Negro Revolt :

The abolitionists, it is true worked very hard… Thomas Clarkson, in particular, was a very honest and sincere man. But that a considerable and influential section of British men of business thought that the slave trade was not only a blot on the national name, but a growing hole in the national pocket, was the point that mattered. 49

Williams brought this point home throughout his 1938 dissertation. Since Coupland was one his examiners, as Cedric Robinson notes, “It had been incumbent on Williams to produce a rigorous essay documented extensively by primary sources”. 50 He certainly achieved that. The dissertation (which was finally published in 2014) has a tight chronological focus on the period of 50 years period between the American Revolution in 1783 and the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1833. It concentrated on the campaign for abolition in the imperial metropolis of Britain and, in particular, the parliamentary debates of this time. The focus on abolition means that it did not discuss the making of New World colonial slavery, but it did stress the debt owed to the slave trade by cities such as Liverpool, Bristol and London, pointing to the role of the “West India interest” in Britain. Williams also showed that fear of slave revolts, particularly following the victory of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, was a key factor in abolition: “After San Domingo had gone up in flames, the fear of a servile war hung like a sword of Damocles over the head of the planters in the British islands”. 51 Economist and historian William Darity explains:

The Haitian Revolution was the decisive event in Williams’s abolition thesis… Pitt sought a reconquest of San Domingo after the slave revolt had wrenched it from the French. The reconquest failed. Only when the effort failed in the 1790s, Williams argued, did abolition become an easier cause to win. 52

As Darity stresses, Williams’s many critics simply ignore the fact that “it is not the decline or prosperity of the British West Indies that lies at the heart of Williams’s abolition narrative… The control and conquest of San Domingo is the centrepiece of his abolition narrative ”. 53 Thus, the dissertation’s detailed discussion of the impact of the Haitian Revolution on British metropolitan politics serves as the complementary companion work to James’s The Black Jacobins .

Williams’s thesis leaves the reader with no doubt about the moral bankruptcy of the wealthy parliamentary representatives of the abolition movement as well as the political corruption and hypocrisy demonstrated by parliament over the question of “humanitarianism”. He excelled at condemning figures such as Pitt by damning them through their own mouths. Williams later reflected on his thesis:

All the dice were loaded against me… At Oxford, I had committed the unpardonable sin—I had challenged the British interpretation of the abolition of slavery. I have not been forgiven—as if it is my fault that the British utilised and profited from slavery and then threw the emancipated West Indians onto the rubbish heap. I still recall how I was told, in unambiguous language, that if I persisted in my analysis of Pitt’s policy in respect of slavery and the slave trade in the war with France, not only would my thesis be failed but, in the opinion of the spokesman, rightly failed. 54

The dissertation’s radically democratic but anti-parliamentary streak made it less than ideal from the perspective of British publishers; Britain was about to go to war against Nazi Germany, nominally in defence of parliamentary democracy. In 1939, Williams approached several publishers, including the radical Fredric Warburg, who had recently published George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and anti-colonial classics such as Padmore’s Africa and World Peace and James’s The Black Jacobins .

I tried to get my thesis published. No one would buy. Warburg, Britain’s most revolutionary publisher…told me: “Mr Williams, are you trying to tell me that the slave trade and slavery were abolished for economic and not humanitarian reasons? I would never publish such a book, for it would be contrary to the British tradition”. 55

Capitalism and Slavery

In 1938, both Williams and James moved to the US. Williams had been unable, again due to institutional racism, to easily find an academic post in Britain, so he accepted an assistant professorship at Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington DC. James’s move was initially supposed to be temporary; he was part of a lecture tour on black and colonial liberation for a US Trotskyist organisation, the Socialist Workers Party. In reality, James ended up staying for 15 years. The two remained personally close.

From 1943, as Williams revised his thesis for publication, he began bringing in a wider and more systematic critique of capitalism. For the first time, he used the words “capitalist” and “capitalism” rather than more neutral references to “the economy”. In 1944, he was finally able to secure publication of his new work with the University of North Carolina Press with support from Ragatz. It would be titled Capitalism and Slavery , and he sent his draft to James for comments. Among other comments, James pointed out that the draft said a lot about slave-owners but little about the enslaved themselves. This convinced Williams to quickly add the final chapter, “The Slaves and Slavery”, making use of material from his dissertation that described official responses to the rising tide of slave revolts in the British Caribbean after the Haitian Revolution (most notably, in Barbados in 1816, British Guiana in 1923 and Jamaica in 1831). 56 As Williams now put it in Capitalism and Slavery :

The successful slave revolt in San Domingo was a landmark in the history of slavery in the New World… After 1804, when the independent republic of Haiti was established, every white slave-owner in Jamaica, Cuba and Texas lived in dread of another Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Indeed, “The most dynamic and powerful social force in the colonies was the slave himself… To coercion and punishment, he responded with indolence, sabotage and revolt”. 57 In 1833, therefore, “The alternatives were clear: emancipation from above, or emancipation from below. But EMANCIPATION”. 58

Williams paid tribute to James’s The Black Jacobins , where “the thesis advanced in this book is stated clearly and concisely and, as far as I know, for the first time in English”. 59 Williams also deployed the innovative theoretical analysis of capitalism and slavery developed by James’s book, which included an outstanding application of the “law of uneven and combined development” associated with Leon Trotsky. 60 James had explored how the plantations and slave ships of the Atlantic world were fundamentally modern capitalist institutions, which not just enriched the French and British bourgeoisies but were actually created by them and, in turn, shaped them. James described plantations as “huge sugar factories” and the enslaved as a proto-proletariat, “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time”. Hence, the Haitian Revolution was thus “a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement”. When the enslaved of San Domingo rose, they did so as “revolutionary labourers”; when they set fire to the plantations, James compared them to “the Luddite wreckers” who resisted the attacks on English textile workers in the 19th century. 61 James’s views about the essential modernity of the West Indian working class was vindicated by the recent Caribbean labour rebellions, and he described the most militant rebels of the Haitian Revolution as “revolutionaries through and through…brothers of the Cordeliers in Paris and the Vyborg workers in Petrograd”. 62 It was James’s grasp of the modernity of the transatlantic slave trade and the slave experience that made The Black Jacobins such an outstanding advance on all previous scholarship as much as his understanding of the class dynamics of abolition.

In Capitalism and Slavery , Williams built on James—indeed, even going further than him—in describing the capitalist nature of the development of the plantations in the British Caribbean of the 17th century: “King Sugar had begun his depredations, changing flourishing commonwealths of small farmers into vast sugar factories owned by a camarilla of absentee capitalist magnates and worked by a mass of alien proletarians”. 63 As Nick Nesbitt explains in much technical detail in The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean , equating colonial slavery with alienated wage labour (or “wage slavery”) is, from a strict Marxist perspective, a categorical error. Only wage labour produces value (as opposed to profit), and James thus only went as far as describing the enslaved as “closer to a modern proletariat” than other groups of workers at the time, rather than claiming they were actually proletarians in the full sense. 64 Nonetheless, Williams made clear his view that the slave-owning planter class in the West Indies were capitalists and the enslaved Africans, who they often worked to death on their “vast sugar factories”, essentially represented a mass of “proletarians”: “Sugar was and is essentially a capitalist undertaking, involving not only agricultural operations but the crude stages of refining as well… There could be only two classes in such a society: wealthy planters and oppressed slaves”. 65 This basic configuration continued even after slavery had been abolished, and the plantations remained. Williams claims that, amid the “dollar diplomacy of our own time” and “under US capital, we have witnessed the transformation of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic into huge sugar factories…owned abroad and operated by alien labour on the British West Indian pattern”. 66

The primary accumulation

In 1964, after Capitalism and Slavery was published in Britain, this journal carried an appreciative review of the book by Tony Cliff, founder of the International Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party. Cliff also looked at another work on slavery, Daniel P Mannix and Malcolm Cowley’s Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1518-1865 (Longman’s, Green and Co, 1962). The short but succinct review is worth quoting in full:

Williams’s book is a very interesting piece of Marxist research. It is an attempt to place in historical perspective the relation between early capitalism and negro slavery. It shows how the slave trade provided the necessary capital for the industrial revolution in England and how mature industrial capitalism destroyed the slave system. It is a study in the economic history of England and the West Indies. The book is very useful for understanding the process of “primitive capital accumulation” in rising capitalism, incidentally giving short shrift to “liberals”, Stalinists and fellow travellers in the “Third World”. Black Cargoes is a very colourful descriptive history of the Atlantic slave trade between 1518 and 1865. It shows quite clearly that capitalism, not only in its death agony—not only in Auschwitz and Hiroshima—but even at its birth, was brutal and brutalising. 67

As Cliff points out, a key merit of Capitalism and Slavery is that Williams (consciously or not) added a wealth of detail to the sketching out of the process of the “primitive” or “primary accumulation of capital” provided by chapter 31 of Marx’s Capital . There Marx described how “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”, building up the initial capital needed to set the system in motion through colonisation and enslavement:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things that characterise the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. 68

This is not the place to review Marx’s many other writings on slavery, some of which have only been brought to light in recent years. It is, however, noteworthy that, as early as 1847, in his The Poverty of Philosophy , Marx pointed out that slavery was “an economic category of the greatest importance”:

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits and so on. Without slavery, you have no cotton; without cotton, you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. 69

Cliff viewed Williams’s clear description of the capitalist nature of colonial slavery as not just in line with Marx’s own perspective, but also as having wider implications. By disproving the claims of some left-wing theorists that slavery was a “pre-capitalist” phenomenon, Williams’s analysis implicitly showed the folly of a stageist road to socialism that postpones the struggle for workers’ power to a distant future in favour of building alliances with “progressive capitalists” in order to secure “democracy”.

Williams’s account of primary capital accumulation through what he called “the barbarous removal of the Negroes from Africa” has been deepened by subsequent Marxist works on slavery such as Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1972), Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (Verso, 1997) , Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human Story (Penguin, 2007) and many others. 70 As Blackburn writes, “Plantation slavery was an artificial extension of mercantile and manufacturing capital in the age of capitalist transition, extending their reach at a time when fully capitalist social relations were still struggling into existence”. 71 Earlier, Williams had explained:

The Atlantic triangular trade…gave a triple stimulus to British industry. 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 another market for British industry, New England agriculture and the Newfoundland fisheries. By 1750, there was hardly a trading or manufacturing town in England that 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 that financed the Industrial Revolution. 72

Importantly, Williams also recognised the critical role of the exploitation of the newly emerging working class in Britain itself for the Industrial Revolution:

It must not be inferred that the triangular trade was solely and entirely responsible for the economic development. The growth of the internal market in England, the ploughing in of the profits from industry to generate still further capital and achieve still greater expansion, played a large part. 73

Indeed, part of Williams’s critique of the parliamentary leadership of the abolitionist movement was that they ignored the horrendous exploitation all around them in Britain:

The abolitionists were not radicals. In their attitude to domestic problems, they were reactionary. The Methodists offered the workers Bibles instead of bread, and Wesleyan capitalists exhibited open contempt for the working class. Wilberforce was familiar with all that went on in the hold of a slave ship but ignored what went on at the bottom of a mineshaft. 74

Nesbitt has challenged William’s analysis of primary accumulation and the rise of capitalism, claiming he viewed capitalist development as an inevitable result of human nature:

Williams develops his argument as though capitalism were an immanent natural tendency of human nature: an inevitable, recurring, transhistorical opportunity to realise profits in the exchange of commodities that had been historically hindered until the accumulation of British Atlantic wealth in the 18th and 19th centuries. 75

According to Nesbitt, this makes it impossible for Williams to explain why the slave trade drove primary accumulation and the rise of capitalism in a country such as England but not other colonial powers such as Spain:

In the absence of any working definition of capitalism, it is impossible for Williams to explain, to take the most obvious example, why the accumulation of enormous wealth by Spanish colonisation of the Americas…failed to drive a transition to capitalism but instead merely fuelled the continued expansion of essentially feudal societies. 76

However, this criticism seems entirely misplaced. Williams, again following James, stressed the importance of bourgeois-democratic revolutionary upheavals such as the English, American and French Revolutions for the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For him, capitalism is not an “immanent natural tendency of human nature”. Instead, he underlined the importance of political revolutions and class agency to the development of capitalism. Through such political upheavals, the “rising capitalist class” removed “severe feudal laws” and other barriers to capital accumulation. 77 Those influenced by the Political Marxism school of history, which includes Nesbitt, may reject the concept of “bourgeois revolution”, but Williams did not. Instead, he described the role of bourgeois revolution in opening the way for capitalist development and the slave trade: “When, by 1660, the political and social upheavals of the English Civil War came to an end, England was ready to embark wholeheartedly on a branch of commerce whose importance to her sugar and her tobacco colonies in the New World was beginning to be fully appreciated”. 78 Revolution in England and France meant that “what was characteristic of British capitalism was typical also of capitalism in France”, enabling them to “usher in the modern world of industrial development and parliamentary democracy with its attendant liberties”. 79 This contrasted with the statis of feudal Spain, which did not experience a similar bourgeois revolution.

As part of explaining how the Atlantic slave trade emerged alongside capitalism, Capitalism and Slavery also expanded upon James’s arguments in The Black Jacobins about the systematic racism that arose accordingly. James had noted, “From no classes of people have Negroes suffered more from than the capitalists of Britain and America. They have been the most pertinacious preachers of race prejudice in the world”. 80 Williams, like James, had doubtless had a big dose of both British racism and the Jim Crow racism in the US by the early 1940s. His first chapter in Capitalism and Slavery explored the rise of racialisation as a process in some detail, famously declaring, “Slavery was not born of racism; racism was the consequence of slavery”. 81 The “money that procured a white man’s services for ten years could buy a Negro for life”, and thus the reason for mass black enslavement “was economic, not racial”. It had to do “not with the colour of the labourer, but the cheapness of the labour”, and it was rooted in the desperate need of the slave societies for labour to work the plantations. With the Enlightenment spreading ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, “Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalise Negro slavery, to exact the mechanical obedience of a ploughing ox or a carthorse—to demand that resignation and complete moral and intellectual subjugation that alone makes slave labour possible”. 82

The ecology of slavery

Interestingly, Capitalism and Slavery displays an awareness of some of the ecological dimensions of the system of slavery. Williams points to the damage caused by soil erosion and deforestation in the Caribbean by generations of monoculture production practised through the plantation system. In 1876, Friedrich Engels had exclaimed, “What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees! What cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! ” 83 Williams explained that, “From the standpoint of the grower, the greatest defect of slavery lies in the fact that it quickly exhausts the soil.” “Rotation of crops and scientific farming” are “alien to slave societies”, which treated both human life and the land as of little worth. The cheapness of slave labour disincentivised investment in more advanced agricultural methods; as the 19th century Irish classical political economist John Elliott Cairnes wrote, the slave planter was, “In the picturesque nomenclature of the South, a ‘land killer’” who exhausted both slave and soil. 84

The plantations not only drove this type of direct ecological degeneration, but also helped accumulate the mercantile and manufacturing capital that fed the emergence of fossil-fuel driven industrial capitalism. Of course, Williams did not know about the full environmental consequences of the shift to a fossil fuel-based economy in Britain in the early 19th century. Nevertheless, he was still able to note that “it was the capital accumulated from the West Indian trade that financed James Watt and the steam engine”. 85 Today, we can grasp the importance of the transition from water power to steam power and the concomitant rise of coal, and Williams highlighted the role profits from slavery played in this jump. 86

From revolution to realpolitik

While he was researching and writing Capitalism and Slavery , Williams understood that the logic of the book’s argument was not only anti-colonial, but also anti-capitalist:

Slavery was an economic institution of the first importance. It had been the basis of the Greek economy and had built up the Roman Empire. In modern times, it provided the sugar for the tea and coffee cups of the Western world. It produced the cotton that served as a base for modern capitalism. It made the US South and the Caribbean. Seen in historical perspective, it forms part of that general picture of the harsh treatment of the underprivileged classes, the unsympathetic poor laws and severe feudal laws, and the indifference with which the rising capitalist class was “beginning to reckon prosperity in terms of pounds sterling and…becoming used to the idea of sacrificing human life to the deity of increased production”. 87

This was powerful stuff. Yet, as early as the 1940s, Williams tried to balance his principles as a “public intellectual” and radical scholar with attempts to build a conventional career in Caribbean nationalist politics. Between 1942 and 1944, he cultivated sympathetic contacts in the British and US ruling classes. This helped him secure a period of employment with the Office of the Coordinator of Information, a US propaganda and intelligence institution that later became the Office of Strategic Services and was a predecessor organisation of the infamous Central Intelligence Agency. This opened the way for him to win a place working with the newly formed Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, and he tried to push for reforms through exploiting the tensions between the rising US empire and the declining British Empire. 88

The reception of Capitalism and Slavery

Far from being hailed as a “modern classic” when it was first published in 1944, Capitalism and Slavery was generally met with an embarrassing silence from Western scholars. Once Williams became the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, the book could no longer be ignored and was met with a ceaseless barrage of criticism. As Dale Tomich explains, “Williams’s subtle and complex argument” about capitalism and imperialism was “reduced to the question of whether or not slavery was ‘profitable’” in the Caribbean. The critics judged that slavery was profitable and that his whole argument, rather than certain specifics, must thus be “incorrect”. 89

This article is not the place to try and assess all the arguments and debates in the voluminous scholarly literature generated by Williams’s work, which is still proliferating. Nevertheless, the fertility of the debate generated by Williams is recognised even by the most serious and substantial efforts to critique the supposed “economic determinism” of what became known as the “Williams thesis”: Seymour Drescher’s Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). Drescher writes that Williams’s “search for the ecology of British anti-slavery, its general social and imperial context…has generated the most fruitful and most intense controversy”. 90 Of course, talk of a “most intense controversy” was a somewhat euphemistic description of how Capitalism and Slavery suffered caricature, misinterpretation, ridicule and sustained attack from the Western historical establishment in a manner few other works have. Perhaps this was to be expected given the book’s strident title, which Williams courageously fought with his publishers to keep. One doubts Milton Friedman had the same problem with his 1962 paean to the “free market”, Capitalism and Freedom . Given all this, Nesbitt is right to claim the book’s mere existence “constitutes an ideological intervention”, because it “unites what liberal, imperialist ideology had studiously held apart: the moral odium of slavery and the glorious historical progress of capitalism”. 91

Yet there was a deeper, almost psychological, aspect to the backlash. In a brilliant 1987 article on “Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography” in History Workshop Journal , Cedric Robinson explained that the book was attacked because it “struck a vital nerve at the ideological core of Western historiography”. 92 In the century before its publication, Western scholarship had failed to seriously grapple with the hard social and economic questions relating to what the enslaved called the “barbarity time”. Race, slavery, the slave trade, abolition and imperialism—and the inextricable intertwining of these issues with the development of capitalism as a world system—were pushed to one side. Instead, scholars generally justified the ever-growing expansion of European power by inventing a new nationalist tradition associated with ideas of imperial “humanitarianism” and the West’s “civilising mission”. British scholars in the Whig tradition comforted themselves with the liberal myth of progress, stressing that there were two main things to know about slavery. First, the slave trade and slavery were abolished across the breadth of the British Empire, respectively, in 1807 and 1833. Second, abolition was the result of a glorious “moral crusade” waged from above by progressive European states, pressured by the campaigning of philanthropic politicians such as Wilberforce. Williams famously derided this legend: “The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it”. 93 This mythology lived on in Williams’s detractors. Darity notes, “Critics tend to pick at Williams’s text rather than confront head on their own implicit belief that Christian missionary zeal was sufficient to change the world in the face of the pecuniary and strategic interests of those who ostensibly wanted the world unchanged”. 94

In recent decades, however, we have seen quite a remarkable shift in the historiography of slavery and abolition. There is a growing interest in an emergent historiographical school, the so-called New History of Capitalism, with a section of economic historians wanting to take the role of slavery more seriously than many have done in the past. In Britain, for example, we have benefited from the recent work of historians involved in the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at University College London, which has built up a public database of the records of the compensation paid out to slave-owners when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833. This project has vindicated Williams’s essential argument in Capitalism and Slavery that the economic foundations through which Britain became “great” were constructed in no small part through the forced labour of enslaved Africans. As Williams wrote, “The triangular trade made an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development. The profits from this trade fertilised the entire productive system of the country”. 95

In their study of colonial slavery and the “formation of Victorian Britain”, Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang argue that “slave-wealth” was not just “important to the social, cultural and political fabric” of 19th century Britain, but also that “wealth from ownership of slaves was among the significant forces reshaping British society and culture in the 19th century”. They write, “Capital from the British colonial slave economy was a significant contributor to remaking Britain’s commercial and, to a lesser extent, industrial fabric all the way through the first half of the 19th century.” In their detailed and valuable scholarly survey of the recent state of the debate surrounding Capitalism and Slavery , they conclude, “It appears to us that there is now movement—by no means linear, but perceptible—towards a modified version of Williams’s position among economic historians”. 96

The legacy of Eric Williams

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Williams galvanised a nationalist mass movement in Trinidad and Tobago around his new People’s National Movement, giving many powerful and inspiring anti-colonialist speeches in Woodford Square, a public space in Port-of-Spain, the Trinidadian capital. Here, at what he called “the University of Woodford Square”, he declared “massa day done”. Yet, despite this work, Williams was never an anti-capitalist radical or a socialist, let alone a Marxist. Trinidadian historian Walton Look Lai instead describes him as “a complex liberal nationalist, often torn between the militancy of his anti-colonial sentiments and a liberal’s pragmatic realism about Third World potentialities”. 97

In 1962, when Williams became Trinidadian prime minister, he signalled to the wider world that he was happy to side with Western capitalism and US imperialism in the Cold War. This led to a break with James, his one-time mentor. Williams was now himself worshipping “the deity of increased production”; indeed, as a representative of the new post-colonial capitalist ruling class in Trinidad and Tobago, he was benefitting from it. In his address on the day the country gained independence in 1962, he declared that “Production” was to be a key part of the slogan of the new nation “for all time”. Its other components would be “Discipline” and the liberal virtue of “Tolerance”. Williams, doubtlessly aiming partly at the nation’s strong labour movement, proclaimed, “Indiscipline, whether individual or sectional, is a threat to democracy. Slacking on the job jeopardises the national income, inflates costs and merely sets a bad example”. 98 However, the real “threat to democracy” in Trinidad would ultimately come from Williams’s own increasingly autocratic style of government; his Industrial Stabilisation Act banned unregulated strike activity, and James was actually put under house arrest in 1965. Throughout the 1960s, as Look Lai notes, “Despite all his militant rhetoric, Williams had studiously avoided any attempt to touch the traditional economic arrangements inherited from the colonial order”. 99

In 1970, a Black Power rebellion erupted against Williams’s government. This revolt from below was part of a wider wave of radicalism across the region. Williams was shaken to his core, and he was almost toppled. He responded by declaring a state of emergency in 1971, arresting and imprisoning militant leaders of the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union such as George Weekes. He then imposed a further limitation on trade union power through the Industrial Relations Act in 1972. 100 Williams was saved politically by the boom in oil prices after the 1973 global oil shock. As the decade wore on, it became opportune for him to shift towards increasing state intervention in order to minimise foreign economic domination and reorganise national economic planning. Such measures had been advocated by his left-wing critics since the 1960s. Look Lai concludes that, by the late 1970s, “Trinidad remained a low-keyed but decisively altered economic order from the one that had existed between 1956 and 1970, proclaiming no ideology or doctrine but concretely achieving far more than many of its more high profile radical neighbours.” All this took place “in a social atmosphere that mixed pragmatic left liberalism with rampant corruption and opportunism”. 101

Overall, we should draw inspiration from Williams the radical historian influenced by Marxism, not Williams the liberal bourgeois nationalist politician who collaborated with Western imperialism. Williams’s Preface to Capitalism and Slavery speaks as much to our moment as to the global crisis of the 1930s and 1940s within which they were originally written: “Every age rewrites history, but particularly ours, which has been forced by events to re-evaluate conceptions of history and economic and political development.” Moreover, as Williams concluded, history should be a “guidepost” to action, not merely “cultural decoration or a pleasant pastime, equally useless in these troubled times”. 102 He warned that the ideas of racism (particularly, though not limited to the idea of the “inferiority of the Negro”) had survived the end of slavery and continue to “work their old mischief”, repeatedly reproducing themselves within capitalism: “We have to guard not only against these old prejudices but also against the new that are being constantly created”. 103

Capitalism and Slavery is a vital work for the ongoing arguments about reparations and attempts to seek justice for the slave trade. This dark passage in history saw the criminal enslavement of millions, which followed the genocide of the Caribbean’s indigenous people. As Williams remarked, “The blood of the Negro slaves reddened the Atlantic and both its shores. Strange that an article like sugar, so sweet and necessary to human existence, should have occasioned such crimes and bloodshed!” 104 In his important 2013 work, Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide , Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles writes:

Williams had constructed the framework for the reparations case. Capitalism and Slavery still represents the most persuasive articulation of the evidence… The modern Caribbean reparations movement is a legal, political and moral response of grassroots organisations and political networks to the evidence presented by many scholars, but notably in Williams’s seminal study. 105

Capitalism and Slavery was not only about challenging British “forgetting”; it was also about Caribbean “remembering”. It concerned itself with explaining how the economic logics and material legacies of enslavement laid the ground for the impoverished political and economic conditions of the mid-20th century West Indies. Williams meticulously detailed these conditions in his first published book, The Negro in the Caribbean (Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1943). 106 The modern reparations movement, alongside Black Lives Matter, is beginning to win important victories such as the glorious toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020. 107 However, if the reparations movement is to truly win anything like justice for those who were once enslaved, the capitalist system must be destroyed. This system has already sacrificed so many lives in the past for profit; today, once more, it places profit before people and planet. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, “Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must the chains be broken”. 108 We should draw inspiration from those who broke their chains during what Blackburn refers to as “the overthrow of colonial slavery” and prepare for those revolutionary working-class struggles ahead that are necessary for the overthrow of wage slavery.

Christian Høgsbjerg teaches history at the University of Brighton and is the co-editor, with David Featherstone and Alan Rice, of ­ Revolutionary Lives of the Red and Black Atlantic since 1917 (Manchester University Press, 2022).

1 Boodhoo, 1986, pvii. My thanks to Steve Cushion, Anita Rupprecht and Ozzi Warwick for their helpful comments on a draft of this article. I am also indebted to the staff of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford for allowing me to consult Williams’s 1938 doctoral thesis back in 2011. I am also grateful to the Society for Caribbean Studies for the opportunity to present an earlier form of this article as a paper at their annual conference the same year.

2 Williams’s later works include From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (Harper and Row, 1970). In 2022, The Blackest Thing in Slavery Was Not the Black Man: The Last Testament of Eric Williams , an unfinished manuscript written during the 1970s, was posthumously published by University of the West Indies Press—see Samaroo, 2022.

3 Williams, 2022, pp30-31.

4 Beckles, 2013, p93.

5 Taylor, 2020. See also Beckles, 2013.

6 Rupprecht, 2007, p8.

7 Quoted in Williams, 2022, pi.

8 For more on <>Black Reconstruction in America , see Kelly, 2019. For more on The Black Jacobins , see Høgsbjerg, 2010.

9 Williams, 2022, p235. See also Brandon, 2017, p319.

10 Jones, 1983, p13.

11 Williams, 1969, p24.

12 Williams, 1969, p39.

13 James, 1993, p332.

14 Williams, 1969, pp40 and 49.

15 Williams, 1969, p35.

16 Boodhoo, 2002, p157.

17 Munro and Sander, 1972, pp36-37.

18 Grimshaw, 1991, p59.

19 Williams, 1969, pp43 and 45.

20 Padmore, 1972, p153.

21 Ryan, 2012, pp24-25.

22 Brandon, 2017, p318.

23 Munro and Sander, 1972, pp36-37.

24 Williams, 1969, p50. The Hoare-Laval Pact was a plan to partition Ethiopia, giving Mussolini two-thirds of its territory. It was drawn up by British foreign secretary Samuel Hoare and French prime minister Pierre Laval. Prepared in secret, the agreement was leaked to the British press and caused a firestorm of opposition. It never went into effect, and Hoare was forced to resign.

25 Williams, 1969, pp49 and 51.

26 Ryan, 2012, p26.

27 Munro and Sander, 1972, pp36-37.

28 A quote from Ragatz suffices to demonstrate his racism: “The West Indian Negro had all the characteristics of his race. He stole, he lied; he was simple, suspicious, inefficient, irresponsible, lazy, superstitious and loose in his sex relations.”—Ragatz, 1963, p27.

29 Ragatz, 1963, ppvii, 50.

30 Ragatz, 1963, pvii.

31 James, 2001, p334.

32 Williams, 2022, pvii.

33 Hooker, 1967, p42; Polsgrove, 2009, p68.

34 Worcester, 1996, p39.

35 James, 1993, p333.

36 Boodhoo, 2002, p63.

37 Boodhoo, 2002, p63.

38 Williams, 1994, p164.

39 James, 1993, pp333-334.

40 Quoted in Williams, 1994, p157.

41 James, 2001, pp18, 21.

42 James, 2001, p42. Young was a contemporary of Smith and a writer on agriculture and politics who was influenced by the French Revolution.

43 James, 1938a, p311.

44 James, 2001, pp41-43; Anstey, 1975, pxxi. For more discussion of James’s achievements, see Richardson, 1985.

45 Williams, 1969, p50.

46 James, 1938a, p311.

47 James, 2001, p41.

48 James, 2001, p113. For more on the abolitionist movement in Britain, see Hochschild, 2005.

49 James, 1938b, p7. Clarkson was a leading abolitionist who helped found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade

50 Robinson, 1987, p124.

51 Williams, 2014, p21. San Domingo is one of the colonial names for Hispaniola, the island on which Haiti lies.

52 Darity, 2000, p149.

53 Darity, 2014, pxxi.

54 Ryan, 2012, p27.

55 Williams, 1969, pp52-53.

56 Brandon, 2017, pp317 and 324.

57 Williams, 2022, pp191-192.

58 Williams, 2022, p197.

59 Williams, 2022, p266.

60 Høgsbjerg, 2014, pp183-194.

61 James, 2001, pp69, 71 and 73.

62 James, 2001, p224. Cordeliers were members of the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which campaigned for universal male suffrage and direct democracy during the French Revolution. The Vyborg district was a centre of working-class activity and Bolshevik strength during the Russian Revolution.

63 Williams, 2022, p21.

64 Nesbitt, 2022, p29. See also Callinicos, 2009, p113; Callinicos, 2014, pp197-211.

65 Williams, 2014, p22.

66 Williams, 2014, p23.

67 Cliff, 1964.

68 Quoted in Anderson, 2010, p188.

69 Marx, 1847. See also Anderson, 2010, p83; Pradella, 2015; Foster, Holleman and Clark, 2020.

70 Williams, 2022, p182.

71 Blackburn, 1998, pp376-377.

72 Williams, 2022, p48.

73 Williams, 2022, p99.

74 Williams, 2022, p172.

75 Nesbitt, 2022, p20.

76 Nesbitt, 2022, p23.

77 Williams, 2022, p3.

78 Williams, 2022, p27.

79 Williams, 2022, p198.

80 James, 2001, p185.

81 Williams, 2022, p5.

82 Williams, 2022, pp16-17.

83 Engels, 1876.

84 Williams, 2022, pp4-5.

85 Williams, 2022, p96.

86 For James’s writings on environmental destruction, see Høgsbjerg, 2023.

87 Williams, 2022, p3. The quotation is from Margaret James’s Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution (Routledge, 1930).

88 Martin, 2004, pxvii.

89 Tomich, 2014, ppviii-ix.

90 Drescher, 1987, p2. For an important early edited collection dedicated to assessing Williams’s arguments, see Solow and Engerman, 1987.

91 Nesbitt, 2022, pp14-15.

92 Robinson, 1987, p128. There are parallels here with the recent reactionary backlash to the 1619 Project, a multimedia endeavour exploring the role of slavery in US history. Sadly, this project is less original than Capitalism and Slavery and lacks the historical and materialist underpinnings of Williams’s work.

93 Williams, 1994, p182. See also Blackburn, 2007.

94 Darity, 1988, p30.

95 Williams, 2022, p99.

96 Hall, Draper, McClelland and others, 2014, pp9-12. See also Beckles, 2013, pp100-108; Draper, 2013; Hall, 2014.

97 Look Lai, 1992, p178.

98 Williams, 1962.

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Transcending the Capitalism and Slavery Debate: Slavery and World Geographies of Accumulation

• Published: 23 August 2022
• Volume 52 , pages 677–709, ( 2023 )

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• Tâmis Parron   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1336-5247 1  

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The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or colonial contexts, an approach that depicts the nineteenth-century nexus between slavery and capitalism as a transhistorical one. Against this backdrop, this essay proposes that the rise and fall of slavery can be better understood by examining the changing material composition of capital as well as its equally changing cluster of global circuits. Based on critical value theory, it argues that industrialization consistently reshaped spatial and material relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering world geographies of accumulation that both fueled and challenged the reproduction of slave labor in the Americas.

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This literature is unfathomably large. Since my goal is to discuss conceptual assumptions in key authors, for a more comprehensive bibliographical overview I refer the reader to Connerman and Zeuske ( 2020 ).

Pro-Williams scholars were then making an analytical move that Latin American scholars had already made decades earlier, but without mentioning them probably due to the unequal exchange of knowledge within world academia (Cox 1987; Novais 1972 , 1979 ).

It would be worth examining to what extent these features also shape the agrarian capitalism approach laid out in the special issue “Capitalism and American Empire,” (Parisot, 2020 ), but this is beyond my scope here.

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Parron, T. Transcending the Capitalism and Slavery Debate: Slavery and World Geographies of Accumulation. Theor Soc 52 , 677–709 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09501-4

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Slavery Was Crucial for the Development of Capitalism

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Historian Robin Blackburn has completed a trilogy of books that provide a comprehensive Marxist account of slavery in the New World. He spoke to Jacobin about the intimate links between the slave systems in the Americas and the origins of capitalism.

Boiling House at the Sugar Plantation Asunción, Cuba, 1857. (Justo German Cantero / Wikimedia Commons)

Robin Blackburn, longtime editor of the New Left Review , is probably the foremost Marxist historian of New World slavery working today. In The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848 (1988) and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (1997), Blackburn charts the construction and revolutionary downfall of the slave systems of the colonial Atlantic.

These two volumes — complemented more recently by An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (2011), and The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (2013) — together comprise a comprehensive transnational account of what Blackburn’s newest book designates “the First Slavery.”

With The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888 (2024), the historian provides the long-awaited concluding volume to his chronological trilogy on racial slavery in the New World. Owen Dowling sat down with Robin Blackburn to discuss the book, his now-completed trilogy as a coherent whole, and what a Marxist perspective brings to the study of slavery, racism, and capitalism in global history.

What Made the Second Slavery Distinct

Can you give an introductory explanation of what is meant by the “Second Slavery”?

The Second Slavery is a concept that has been developed over the last ten years or so by historians of the Americas, especially of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States, Brazil, and Cuba. Slavery not only survived the Age of Revolution — 1776 to 1848 — but flourished, with slave-grown cotton, coffee, and sugar dominating the world market.

The European slave colonies in the Caribbean proved vulnerable to the slave revolts and upheavals of the revolutionary epoch. The leading colonial powers — Spain, Britain, and France — each tried to suppress the great slave uprising in Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1804, but without success. The French colony was eventually replaced by the independent black state of Haiti in 1804. This alarmed slaveholders throughout the Americas and persuaded Britain and the United States to end their open participation in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807.

However, Anglo-American merchants continued to supply huge quantities of “trade goods” — shackles, swords, implements, rum, tobacco, guns, ammunition — to exchange for captives on the African coast. This clandestine traffic carried off more than two million captives in the years up to 1860, as Sean Kelley has shown in his new book American Slavers (2023).

This initial species of “abolition” thus did not end the Atlantic traffic, let alone free the millions of slaves mobilized on the plantations. But it did disturb and discredit the slaveholders, obliging them to build a more fortified “Second Slavery.” Events in the Caribbean continued to have a double impact, inspiring antislavery campaigning but also stoking a proslavery backlash and encouraging an emergent doctrine of racial supremacy in the 1830s and ’40s.

These opposing ideologies pitted whites against blacks, the free against the enslaved, males against females, the African-born against the American-born. But they also informed interracial coalitions that appealed to nonslaveholding whites and free people of color.

Britain’s largest slave colony, Jamaica, was the scene of a major revolt in 1831–32 that was shortly followed by slave emancipation in 1833–38 and “immediatist” antislavery societies. Jamaica was the most valuable British colony, just as Saint-Domingue had been the most valuable French plantation regime. In both Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, slaves had accounted for something like 80 percent of the population, so they had massive numerical superiority — but it still took ten or fifteen years for the movements to achieve a qualified emancipation.

Why did Cuba, Brazil, and the United States stand apart from the debacle of the First Slavery? A key consideration was that the leading slaveholders offered the white majority a stake in the constitutional order large enough to produce and secure racial domination. Fear and privilege all helped to cement proslavery and consolidate the “Slave Power.” White privilege could include a horse, the vote, a gun, “freedom of the range,” patrols, militia, and plantation employment.

The supposedly “democratic” and republican regime of the United States managed to be even more unequal than the monarchical orders in Brazil and Cuba. The slaveholding order of the United States was also buttressed by constitutional provisions that notoriously counted the slaves as three-fifths of a free person. They also made it virtually impossible to end slavery by constitutional means. Combined with first-past-the-post electoral rules and patriarchal exclusion, this boosted the representation of slaveholders. The enslaved were not a majority and even freedmen rarely had the vote, so there was an important layer of white males to be flattered by gentlemanly demagogues like Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and Andrew Jackson.

The characteristic feature of the slaveholders of Cuba, Brazil, and the United States was that they had successfully established a mass racial regime of white domination as a buttress to the slave plantation regime. They also were globally rich and could buy in the best military equipment, but they could mobilize the white population in patrols and militias, and that was a sufficient guarantee of their power. These became the heartlands of the Second Slavery, the survivors of the Age of Revolution among the slave regimes of the New World.

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the institution of slavery, where it survived, seemed stronger than ever, an example of Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum that what doesn’t destroy you, makes you strong. The US victory over Mexico in 1848 clearly showed where power lay in the hemisphere. The South boasted more millionaires than the North, and exports of slave produce comprised 70 percent of the national total. The expansion of the American “Slave Power” was impressive but not entirely reassuring in that it was in some ways better exploited by the new capitalism of the North and West.

In what critical ways did the “Second Slavery” of the postrevolutionary nineteenth century differ from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “First Slavery”?

The slaveholders of the First Slavery were colonials, absentees, and émigrés; those of the Second Slavery reveled in their sovereignty and supplied leadership to an armed citizenry. They constituted the Slave Power. They supplied a more far-reaching mobilization of race and capital, a stronger — more perfected — regime of race and capital, and therefore it’s all the more curious that it risked everything by hazarding secession from the United States. The slaveholders were dealt a strong hand but played it badly.

There were also important economic innovations, which I explore in The Reckoning , including a new “Anglo-Saxon” credit regime that answered a problem that all the regimes of slavery encountered: a shortage of credit for the plantations. Any agricultural entrepreneur faces all sorts of problems to do with microbes, pests, fire, flood, and climate extremes. Under the First Slavery, there had been a recurrent credit famine.

Planters needed considerable resources in order to produce the next year’s crop; to buy provisions, equipment, seeds, and manure — also reserves to bridge adversity or to profit from a good opportunity (such as a neighbor’s bankruptcy). So slaveholders often wanted extra loans. One particularly important financial change was the lifting of the so-called Latin or Roman ban on using slaves as collateral. This prohibition had long survived because it enabled the estate owner to survive and prosper, but at the expense of a reduced rate of colonial growth.

The larger merchants, bankers, and creditors lusted over an end to the ban. Dutch entrepreneurs had tried to shake it off in early and mid-seventeenth-century Brazil, but it was not until 1732 that the British government formally ended its own ban. The Colonial Debts Act of that year set the scene for a dramatic century of growth in the British islands and enclaves. It was something that proved to really unlock the credit system under the Second Slavery. The planters of the United States inherited from their former master this key to unlocking the prodigious potential of the slave plantations.

Slavery’s Expansion and the Domination of Capital

In The Making of New World Slavery , you discuss the ways something beginning to approximate a kind of capitalist rationality was worked out through and against older, “baroque” ways of organizing the plantation. By the time of the Age of Revolution, there came almost a crisis point, where lots of those older systems fell away in the face of some kind of bourgeois-revolutionary process or other. Picking up on your point about the perfecting of the system of race and capital under the Second Slavery, does the removal of that prior fetter on using slaves as collateral then represent the culmination of a dynamic whereby these nineteenth-century plantations were now properly integrated into the “commodity circuit,” whereas they were only “half-integrated” previously?

Yes, that’s a good summary of an important part of the argument. There was something conservative about the old regime, the Latin regime (really it comes from Roman law), which prohibited planters from taking on too much debt. Very often it’s thought that widespread debt among planters was a great sign of weakness. In a way my analysis — I’m getting part of this from John Clegg — is that on the contrary, this signified the vitality of the new plantation system.

The planters had already been allowed to use their future crop as collateral, but not their slave crew. Like the planter’s home and hearth, the slaves were protected from the vagaries of the market. Debt turbocharged the system, since the planters went out and borrowed up to the hilt. But capitalism has always been dogged by a trade cycle, boom and bust, panics: there was the great panic of 1819, and then 1837, and then 1857.

There is a great range of these credit crises: they create a bubble economy, and then the plantation is so good at burying its conservative defenses that it actually exposes itself to market crisis. There were always bound to be problems — terrible weather, pests, 101 things that can go wrong — but under the older conservative regime, the “Latin” regime, at least the planter still had his crew of slaves and his equipment and so forth.

You’ve written in previous books about the capacity of slave plantations, in times of hardship, to essentially retreat into the “natural economy” as a sort of shell under which to hide until market conditions improved. I assume that under the Second Slavery this wasn’t the case — if all of a planter’s slaves were now, legally, collateral assets, he couldn’t just retreat during hard times into being a sort of serf-lord, since his slave crews would just be seized by the bank? Was there, then, an element of intra-ruling-class contestation between the slaveholders and financial capitalists? Was finance seen, as well as being a boon to plantation expansion, as a threat to the patriarchal status of a slaveowner within the community, if his plantation and his slaves could be taken off of him by moneymen?

You are right to observe a narrowing of the planter’s options; for example, whether to retrench or to gamble on expansion. There was a special layer of “factors,” who were like financial advisers to the planter. The factor would live in the big trade centers, whereas the planter was on the plantation, where he wasn’t able to follow what the market was doing day by day, so the factor would oversee the timing of sales and charge a small commission.

Standing behind the factors were the banks and the big merchant houses. So there was an element of intraclass conflict — though only intraclass insofar as they were all under the regime of capital. In one sense, the planters and the merchants were a unified class, but in another they were a divided one, especially when things started going wrong.

John Clegg has carried out a thorough investigation of tens of thousands of foreclosures in South Carolina during the 1830s and ’40s in a 2018 article in Social Science History . It shows that, once the ban on collateralizing slaves had been overcome, there was a ready market in slaves (very positive from the slaveowners’ point of view): slaves could be quite quickly “turned” into capital to get rid of debt, and to transfer slave “assets” from less efficient producers to more efficient ones.

That gets back to your point about divisions within the ruling class: some of that division was a question of less efficient producers getting squeezed out by more efficient ones. Of course, what we are really talking about here is that a purer form of capital, a more dynamic form of capital, was supplanting a more conservative one.

Talking of the capacity of new credit relations to underwrite new waves of expansion, how important was settler colonialism to the new wave of plantation production under the Second Slavery?

European migration played a significant foundational role in the First Slavery, but free migrants tended to avoid the slave plantation zone because slaveowners were uncomfortable neighbors. Some immigrants secured employment on the plantations, but they often aspired to own their own farm. Others would migrate to the West or even North.

The role of settlers was strategic; in these slave regimes, it was really important that the social relations were not just between slaveholders on one hand and slaves on the other. There was a large population in Second Slavery countries who were neither slaveowners nor slaves: including farmers either unable to afford slaves or not desirous of owning them. These layers were able to provide some solidity and some guarantees or defenses to the slave regime.

But things could go wrong. The free people of color within this nonslaveowning populace could get very restive; they were denied the civic equality they naturally would have liked, and you got the development of associations and the emergence of antislavery forces in society. These included many free people of color, but also free whites, many of whom found the prospect of life side by side with slaveowners very unattractive. The settler element could become unstable under certain conditions, which included the economic crises.

Territorial expansion, entailing settler colonization, was probably a necessity for the Second Slavery in the United States, and for Cuban and Brazilian slavery, too. They were expanding and colonizing new territory the whole time, with new crops developing in new areas. Prior to 1790, there had been very little cotton produced in the United States, and that was mainly down on the coast, which wasn’t suitable for industrial uses.

The cotton that turned out to be important for Britain’s industrial revolution was a new Mexican variety that was best grown in the upland interior. Between 1790 and 1860, planters and merchants organized the forcible migration of nearly a million slaves from Virginia and the North to the South and Southwest. This notoriously entailed the breakup of slave families.

The “Indian presence” in these new territories remained quite significant well into the nineteenth century, in spite of the atrocious treatment of the indigenous peoples. They didn’t just disappear; they receded into the forests and mountainous areas, but they were still there. Resistant Indians and slave fugitives sometimes made common cause, as did Red Sticks and Seminoles.

In a way, indigenous resistance unfortunately helped to “toughen up” and racialize the slave regime by scaring the white settler colonists, who were frightened of “the Indians” as well as of “black insurrection” — of slave insurrection. The German Coast Insurrection of 1811 showed how slave plantations could foster a new type of class struggle.

It was really important to the slaveowners that white men had some motive to make them enlist in the patrols and the militias. As you can imagine, going out on patrol two or three times a week and sometimes being the target for black animosity, they needed reasons to support the planters. Fear of “the blacks” began to create a whole political culture as a buttress for the slaveowners — what we’re really talking about now is racial capitalism , which demanded a popular mobilization among whites to maintain it.

In that context, the fact that there was Indian resistance going on also helped to mobilize whites behind the existing slave regime. It’s very important not to blame the victims here, but it was of course essential for the slave system that the white settlers were mobilized in this way to defend the racial regime.

How important were the new forces of production yielded up by the industrial revolution, like steam power and railways and canals, to the technical side of the revolution in plantation production during the Second Slavery?

I would say very important. That’s part of the argument of the Second Slavery historians — for example, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery (2017) by Daniel Rood supplies a vivid account of the industrialization of sugar production in Cuba and Louisiana, and for developing new markets in Rio de Janeiro. The sugar planters with their “vacuum pans” drew upon, and contributed to, the chemical revolution. By the 1840s, US planters had invested in over a thousand steamboats, Cuban sugar lords owned over 350 ultramodern sugar mills, and Brazilian railways brought coffee grown in the interior to Santos and Rio de Janeiro.

In The Making , you chart the genealogy of antiblack racialization throughout the centuries. How did the ideology of racial slavery change during the Second Slavery period? I ask partly with a mind to the abolitionist challenge during the Age of Revolution, which you explore in The Overthrow .

I think there was a strand of abolitionism going back to the American Revolution, often expressed by those with a Quaker background. Emancipation in 1780 in Pennsylvania reflected this impulse at a time when the independence war was still ongoing. Often it was those influenced by the Quakers, rather than Quakers themselves, who acted.

Those who adopted the patriot ideology with its watchwords celebrating liberty could sometimes be shamed into supporting particular abolitionist measures. In New England, Brazil, and Spain, those who called themselves liberals could support “free womb” laws that freed children born to slave mothers once they reached twenty-five years of age.

The exclusion of slaves from the US northwest by the Ordinance of 1787 was a different phenomenon, expressive of hostility to blacks whether free or enslaved. While the racial order of the First Slavery had been based on racial domination, that of the Second Slavery was based on racial exclusion.

In terms of the subjectivity of enslavement as a laborer on these plantations, was that experience one of an intensification of the work regime under the Second Slavery?

The answer is that there was an intensification, with refinements of gang labor and task labor both playing a part. There is some dispute about its characteristics, but I think the evidence shows there was a fourfold increase in the per-capita productivity of slave-grown cotton, which was fairly dramatic over a half century from 1803 to 1861. That’s now accepted by different sides of the debates.

Edward Baptist argues that widespread adoption of torture was responsible for this productivity leap. His view is not found in all historians of the Second Slavery. James Oakes , an outstanding analyst of the slave regime, has an interesting discussion of Baptist’s book in the journal International Labor and Working-Class History from 2016. He queries whether large advances in labor productivity can be explained by just one variable.

Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode contend that this productivity increase was all down to better seeds and a new type of short-staple cotton. This was certainly what the manufacturers wanted in Manchester and the English industrializing districts — to get their hands on as much of this new type of cotton as they could, because it was adaptable to the industrial system. Cotton was also good because it was not so easily attacked by pests.

It is widely accepted that there was a fourfold increase in the productivity of slave labor between 1803 and 1861. During this time, the area dominated by slavery actually grew very considerably, and it was the new and more desirable upland cotton that was demanded by the textile manufacturers. The increase in the productivity of labor really came from their leaving the coastal district, which was not suited for the good type of cotton, to the new territories. As I have noted, nearly a million slaves were sold from the more northerly states down to the Mississippi basin and Georgia.

You could say the move was down to three considerations: firstly, the adoption of better varieties of cotton; secondly, the movement of slaves from the low to the highly fertile soil of the upland regions; and thirdly, the intensification of gang and task labor. These factors could very well have contributed. Each depended on the powers and ability of the slaveowner to control and direct his labor force. Moreover, each may have led to extreme violence when the slaveowner found himself being obstructed by an unwilling slave community.

In your conclusion to The Making , you have a long chapter where you relitigate the thesis of Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and offer your own assessment of the significance of colonial slavery for the inception of primitive accumulation, capital accumulation, and ultimately industrialization in Britain — broadly coming down on the position that it did play a consequential role. With British industrialization, and specifically the mechanization of cotton spinning and then weaving in Lancashire providing a substantial fillip for the nineteenth-century expansion of plantation cotton in the Americas, was this a dynamic in which the First Slavery had a significant role in engendering the British industrial revolution, which then reciprocally played an important role in creating the conditions for the Second Slavery?

That’s very much a position I would take. There has been a shift since the publication of The Making . I’m not claiming it came about as a result of the book’s publication, but I did begin to supply new evidence for this role, along with at least a dozen other historians. I think one would say now, and others have said, that supporters of the Williams thesis have the better of the argument at the moment.

What really seems to have been decisive is that the British merchants and manufacturers had a monopoly of the new Atlantic markets. It really was the British Atlantic Empire, the informal as much as the formal one, that supplied outlets as well as inputs. The empire of free trade was highly complementary to British industrialization. The victory of the American Revolution may have been bad for the self-regard of the British, but actually it didn’t do them much economic damage. The United States remained an ideal commercial partner for industrializing Britain, because it supplied both raw cotton and the market that British industrial development required.

Of course there was no industrial revolution as such in the United States up to about 1840, and then the country did start to industrialize — belatedly compared with the British. It remained awkward that the governments of the Second Slavery were so intimately involved with a supposedly pariah institution.

Antislavery Resistance

What was the significance of the nineteenth-century US radical abolitionist tradition in bringing about the terminal crisis of the Second Slavery in that country?

The US slaveholders really seemed to be in an impregnable position in 1860. The United States was the richest state in the New World, and it was richer than many European states. Property was sacred, and the slaves were property. The so-called Free States were prepared to see the continuation of slavery — all they wanted to stop was the expansion of slavery at their expense. I think that what drove the southern slaveholders to revolt was fear of insurrection, and fear in particular of white politicians who couldn’t be trusted with the defense of slavery.

The antislavery movement created enough unrest among their slaves to prey on the lurid imagination of the slaveholders, with the Underground Railroad being a keen source of concern. The political and financial “panic” of the late 1850s brought matters to a head. The significance of John Brown ’s intervention at Harpers Ferry, itself a key development, seemed all the greater coming on top of the collapse of slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1848, the whole preceding antislavery agitation, and (above all) the actions of the fugitive slaves.

British colonial slavery had been considerably weakened in the 1820s and ’30s when there seemed to be slave revolt in the Caribbean, combined with the pressure of the Reform movement and the antislavery movement outside Parliament. In The Overthrow I give an account of this process, which I think is important because even the most radical black nationalist accounts — I’m thinking of the otherwise excellent 1619 Project — really deny any significant role to the abolitionist movements . I don’t think it is at all plausible to argue that slave emancipation could have happened without those antislavery agitations, without the Antislavery Society, without the tireless lecturing of Frederick Douglass, without the Underground Railroad, without the slave narratives, without the Civil War and without Reconstruction.

Undoubtedly the antislavery campaigners were often very moderate and patronizing — they weren’t as abolitionist as they thought they were. Their opposition to slavery was stronger than their opposition to racism, and they were not uncompromising in supporting all forms of black resistance. These limits were egregious.

However, the abolitionists gave a platform to black writers and lecturers, and some of them were very radical, such as the Secret Six or those meeting and training with John Brown. Frederick Douglass was a towering figure, of course, in developing the antislavery movement. He was backed by Gerrit Smith, an immensely wealthy and quite revolutionary figure. All things considered, the slaveholders weren’t just panicking needlessly — they had some solid grounds for it.

You write in your conclusion: “The defeat of the slaveholders in the US Civil War was the decisive event in the overthrow of the Second Slavery, just as the Haitian Revolution and British slave emancipation has spelled the end of the colonial slave regimes.” Could you elaborate a little about the wider continental significance of the defeat of the Confederacy for post-1865 abolition in Cuba and Brazil?

The victory of the North and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) led fairly quickly to free womb laws, first in Spanish Cuba (1870) and then in Brazil (1871). Slave emancipation proper was delayed by nearly two decades. Slavery only survived thanks to the greed of the planters and the feebleness of the Spanish state.

The slave regime was associated with a political order that was no longer capable of defending itself. In the case of Cuba in particular, there was a national liberation movement that was sufficiently strong to cause huge losses to the Spanish colonial power, and eventually slavery was abolished by both the rebels and the colonial power. By 1886, it was finished.

Events in Cuba between 1868 and the 1880s, the so-called Thirty Years’ War, were interwoven with antislavery themes. If you look at the soldiers in the rebel army, the mambises , about half of them were African or people of African descent. This was not just the rank and file, but also the generals. About half the generals in the Cuban liberation army, men like Antonio Maceo and his comrades, were people of mixed race or of African origin.

After an armistice that was not accepted by Maceo and his followers, the rebellion broke out again in 1895. The United States invaded Cuba during the ensuing war, worried that the island’s fate would be decided by armed blacks and men of color. Former abolitionists agitated for the withdrawal of the US occupying forces and respect for a Cuban popular assembly.

Slavery in Brazil was eventually suppressed in 1888, and it really collapsed thanks to an implosion of the monarchy itself, which had become too implicated on both sides of the question — it was too close to slavery for the radicals and the republicans, and it was too close to abolitionism for the slavocrats. The coherence of the slave regime was destroyed just as the colonial regime in Cuba had been destroyed.

My latest volume, The Reckoning , registers how slave agency emerges during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The battle between the North and the South was sufficiently bitter that Lincoln and the Republicans feared in 1864 that the slaveholders could still win — even if there was this compromise solution, which would leave something like slavery.

Half a century ago, slave emancipation was seen to have emerged from above as a sort of national blessing. Now we are far more aware of the crucial contribution of the slaves and former slaves. But we are also more aware of the glaring limits and flaws of the postemancipation societies, and of the perpetuation of racial oppression in them.

Writing Slavery’s History

I’d like to ask now about your own scholarly background and political commitments, and how you got into the study of colonial slavery. In his conclusion to Street Fighting Years back in 1987, Tariq Ali wrote: “[Robin] Blackburn is completing his life’s work, a history of slavery in the New World and the forces that eventually swept it aside.” The following year, you published your first volume, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery . Is your trilogy on New World Slavery — now concluded with The Reckoning — your life’s work? How did you find your way to it?

I chose New World Slavery because it struck me as something very dramatic and different from British politics, which seemed quite parochial and stale, with never any real change. We developed in the New Left Review ( NLR ) an analysis of the stupefying consequences of Britain’s peculiar historical development. I got interested in the Cuban Revolution, initially through a newspaper description of a general strike there in May 1958.

I joined the London New Left Club , which met in the Marquee Club in Oxford Street every Tuesday, and in which Stuart Hall , the first editor of the NLR , was involved. I can remember we had a game of cricket, with very small sides: a dozen or so people from Tribune on the one hand and from the New Left Review on the other. I got thirty-five runs, which I was very pleased with.

Somehow or other I’d got involved with the Hands Off Cuba movement, and I actually went to Cuba in December 1961. I then produced, together with Perry Anderson , a special issue of the student magazine New University that featured Jean-Paul Sartre on his visit to Cuba and his interview with Fidel Castro. I was to go to Cuba on another three or four occasions in the ’60s, and it was a sort of radicalizing experience for me.

It’s not that we didn’t see any problems in the Cuban Revolution: it was quite clear that there were serious problems, but there were also fresh perspectives. At any rate, I met Che Guevara on that occasion; I actually worked for a market research outfit, Cuban Foreign Trade Enterprises, a branch of the Cuba Foreign Ministry. This was a time of vigorous debate in Cuba. My minister, Alberto Mora, articulated a critique of Che’s industrial strategy, but cordial and comradely relations were maintained. The Winter 2024 issue of New Politics has a special feature on these debates.

I also encountered historians in Cuba, notably Manuel Moreno Fraginals, and was very struck by a national culture that had powerful African elements, notably in Cuban music and painting. I met Wifredo Lam and Fernando Ortiz — a cultural anthropologist, but someone who had also studied tobacco and sugar. That was intellectually quite exciting. I also worked with Fernando Martínez Heredia, who became editor of a magazine called Pensamiento Crítico (Critical Thought). He was head of the Department of Philosophy at Havana University, and he was in his twenties. NLR ran an interview with him after his death in 2017.

Among the people that I got involved with at this time was C. L. R. James , the brilliant Trinidadian historian and writer. James came to Cuba in 1968 for the Congress of the Intellectuals, and of course he was a hero of mine. I had first been introduced to him by Orlando Patterson , my Jamaican colleague at the London School of Economics, and I was enthralled by The Black Jacobins . So there was a sort of intellectual depth to studying Cuban history.

Obviously this was partly a question of looking at the effects of the history of slavery creating a political culture with a powerful racist component. The work of W. E. B. Du Bois was obviously of great importance, including his idea of the “general strike” during the American Civil War. The current of what you might call “fugitive slave insurrectionism” was a powerful force that emerged in country after country in the slave colonies.

Would you then say that you took a Cuban route into becoming a historian of New World Slavery?

I think that’s true, yes. And it’s a bit curious that it’s only with this last volume, The Reckoning , that the material on Cuba comes out strongly.

In your conclusion to The Overthrow , back in 1988, you wrote that you had devised plans for a sequel exploring the material that now appears in your new book, but your next volume in fact proved to be The Making , which went back in history and covered the political economy of the prior construction of New World Slavery instead of moving forward chronologically to the Second Slavery. You explain that The Making and The Overthrow in fact were initially conceived as one manuscript, and that the late Mike Davis had an important influence upon you in splitting the work into two separate volumes. What was the importance of the NLR environment for writing this collection of volumes as you did?

The NLR certainly supplied a very supportive environment, and people around it had an involvement. What Mike Davis in particular opened up for me was the radical history of the Americas, and especially of the United States. He was very generous in commenting on work that one had done and making strategic suggestions and giving advice.

You’re quite correct in saying that he suggested splitting the manuscript in two. But what was curious is that he also suggested that the first part chronologically should become the second part, while the second part should become the first. Specifically with Mike, you often got a radical twist of the argument of some sort. Verso ’s Haymarket Series , edited by “the two Mikes” — Davis and Sprinker — has powerfully contributed to reshaping US history.

With The Reckoning ’s publication, you have now finished a complete history, going chronologically from the 1400s up to about 1900, of the rise, challenge to, reinvention of, and final decline of New World Slavery, from a quite rigorously Marxist historiographical perspective — which is an enormous achievement. What do you think is the importance of that tradition of history-writing for our understanding of this history of New World slavery today?

It’s certainly true that there’s now quite a solid coverage. I didn’t realize the work necessary on this topic was going to be quite so extended, although I’ve often been quite pleased at delay, because you learn more about what might have happened. There’s new research, and life itself somehow supplies ideas that fit the past.

Most recently, to give an example, take this business of the credit regime. The economic trouble since the financial crisis of the late 2000s has seen the emergence of derivative products and financialization, which is quite similar to the credit devices whose role I examine in The Reckoning .

I think there’s something about struggles around slavery that people find fascinating. Sometimes it may be that it’s a way of discrediting capitalism to say that part of the pressure of capitalist expansion will often turn out to involve primitive accumulation tendencies, whether that entails slavery or other forms of primitive accumulation — a rich concept developed by Marx.

I suppose there could come a time when these disputes really become just matters of historical interest. But look, for example, at the huge global impact of Black Lives Matter, and how the sight of a policeman kneeling on someone’s neck can have such a resonance in other societies that had slave colonies — France , Spain , Portugal , the Netherlands . I think there’s something there from the mechanisms of enslavement, which hasn’t been totally solved by historians, even though we have outstanding works by people like James Oakes and Daniel Rood.

This is a historical character who would have featured more in The Making than your latest book, but what did you make of the toppling into Bristol Harbor of the statue of Royal African Company slave trader Edward Colston back in 2020?

Personally I did quite like to see it. Some of my friends were saying that it didn’t really change anything very much and was a distraction. But I thought we need symbols and some sense of scale. We might now know more about the fate of slavery and the slave owners. Certainly the toppling of that statue brought to light the size and scope of Colston’s activities. I have myself been surprised — although I really should not be — by quite how much British society was dependent on the slave regime that it had built in the Americas.

In the conclusion to The Reckoning , you discuss the legacies and inheritances of the Second Slavery for the world that followed its collapse. You’ve argued that there was a reinvention of racial slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century to become the Second Slavery, but you impugn whether there can be said to have been any “Third Slavery” as such — though you do point to regimes like forced labor in the colonial Belgian Congo Free State as exemplary of its afterlives. What were the afterlives of the Second Slavery for the capitalist world in the twentieth century and beyond?

I think it’s been shown that capitalism, left to its own devices, will display a hunger for surplus value that will generate new forms of predatory exploitation of labor and wastage of natural resources, if it isn’t checked and combatted very skillfully. This is one reason why the varieties of capitalism need to be thoroughly and vigilantly investigated and analyzed.

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Funhouse Mirror

Christopher l. brown.

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A while ago ​ a row erupted in Brooklyn over the naming of a new basketball arena. In 2007 Barclays Bank agreed to pay $400 million over twenty years to sponsor what is now known as the Barclays Center. Politicians who opposed the project, and some who supported it, denounced the partnership because, they argued, Barclays had profited from the Atlantic slave trade, and therefore had no rightful place in a predominantly African American neighbourhood. ‘Barclays Bank has gained enormous profits from blood money obtained from the transatlantic slave trade, which is one of the worst crimes in the history of the world,’ a state assemblyman declared. ‘Brooklynites and New Yorkers of every race and religion should be concerned about their presence in our borough.’ The information on Barclays came from a book published in 1944: Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. ‘In 1756,’ Williams wrote, ‘there were 84 Quakers listed as members of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, among them the Barclay and Baring families.’ He had drawn, in turn, on a dissertation titled ‘The Political and Economic Relations of English and American Quakers, 1750-85,’ completed a decade earlier by Anne T. Gary, an American pursuing a doctorate in modern history at Oxford.

A Barclays publicist responded a few days later. ‘David Barclay formed a committee of London Quakers to oppose the slave trade, and later became involved with the committee in taking the Quaker anti-slave trade message nationwide within the United Kingdom.’ He belonged on the list of slavery’s opponents, not its defenders. ‘David Barclay’s position on slavery is shown in this instance,’ the publicist continued, ‘when, after calling in a debt in Jamaica, he became owner of a farm, which had, included in its operations, 32 slaves.’ He went from accidental slave owner to dedicated emancipator. ‘After unsuccessfully trying to free the slaves in Jamaica, David Barclay made arrangements for them to travel to Philadelphia where they were free.’

The bank’s statement was true, as far as it goes, but selective, misleading and therefore, in its own way, false. Barclay did liberate the enslaved men, women and children at Unity Valley Pen in 1795. He led a Quaker delegation to the House of Commons in the spring of 1783 that called for the abolition of the British slave trade. But he had come late to the anti-slavery gospel. In the middle decades of the 18th century, he built his fortune as a large-scale importer of Virginia tobacco, cultivated by slaves. In 1756 he was a member of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa that administered the British slave trade. There’s no evidence that Barclay invested directly in the traffic of captive Africans, but he evidently served as a creditor for plantation owners in the British colonies and was in this way, at minimum, financially committed to it. There are real but not necessarily meaningful moral distinctions between owning slaves and investing in those who do.

So Barclay’s record on slavery was mixed. He spent more than a decade discouraging Quaker activists in North America such as Anthony Benezet from bothering the British government with proposals to ban the slave trade, and led the 1783 Quaker campaign to Parliament only after he realised that anti-slavery enthusiasts within the Society of Friends would be happy to proceed without him. He was less a defender of slavery than an opponent of anti-slavery. Although he had denounced slavery in principle, he thought Quaker petitions to slice the artery of the empire’s labour supply would bring the religious society into disrepute. In fact, Barclay demonstrates the ambivalent, inconsistent and sometimes incoherent response to the question among British and American elites in the late 18th century: they found it easier to acknowledge the problem of slavery, as the historian David Brion Davis called it, than to decide what to do about it, or determine how to disentangle themselves from it. Barclay took ownership of his farm with 32 slaves in 1784, but it wasn’t until 1795 that he took the first steps to set them free, despite this being the decade when the British anti-slavery movement began to attract widespread public support. He was hardly a paragon of anti-slavery purpose.

Politicians are not historians. Nor are spokesmen for multi-billion-dollar international corporations. Neither side in the Barclays contretemps told more than a half-truth. But the purpose, of course, was less to get the history right than to get the history to do the right work. The imperatives of political rhetoric – to argue for or against this cause, or this project, or this person, or this point of view – are poorly served when faced with ambiguous figures such as Barclay, who, even in his own day, frustrated and confused both allies and opponents. It’s tempting to conclude that opposing anti-slavery is, as we might say today, to be functionally pro-slavery. When contemplating the interpretive possibilities, though, historians sometimes need to count higher than two. The late-life choices of a bank’s founder say little about the character of that bank a quarter of a millennium later. The charge of complicity suggests that in the age of plantation slavery there were ‘good banks’ and ‘bad banks’, and that Barclays may be identified as one of the ‘bad’ ones. But Barclays was neither unusually guilty nor unusually innocent. At the time, there was no such thing as a British bank that didn’t profit from slavery or have investments in human bondage in one form or another.

Institutional responses to involvement in slavery are now standard, and they rarely happen without research having been done. Participation in the slave trade has even been acknowledged at the highest levels of the British establishment: earlier this year the Church of England published a report on its ‘historic links to transatlantic chattel slavery’, and Buckingham Palace announced that it was supporting research to investigate the monarchy’s involvement. In the US it has become commonplace for institutions of higher education to investigate their ties to slavery. Typically, the initiative comes from within the university, driven by student and faculty research in the institution’s archives, though the most influential and consequential began with the demand made in 2003 by Brown University’s Ruth Simmons, the first president of an Ivy League school of African descent, to ‘tell the truth in all its complexity’. Institutional peer pressure comes into play as such studies become unexceptional. Increasingly, credit now accrues to institutions that uncover and report their ties to slavery, and stigma is attached to those which deny such ties ever existed, or insist they shouldn’t figure on its moral balance sheet, or that the ‘better’ aspects of the institution’s history compensate for the ‘worst’.

It’s in this context of discovering, recovering and acknowledging that Capitalism and Slavery has been republished by a British press for the first time since 1964, when an edition appeared from André Deutsch. Well-known to historians in Europe, West Africa and the Americas, and discussed endlessly by researchers and students for the last half century or more, the book has now appeared as a Penguin Modern Classic and, simultaneously, in a third edition, with new introductions, from the University of North Carolina Press, its original publisher. This is all to the good. The book deserves to be widely read, not least because it’s so enjoyable, with its memorable torrent of sarcasm, insight, wit, irreverence, authority, humour, ambition and vision. Tens of thousands of copies have been sold in the US, where it has never been out of print. That it has taken so long for another British edition to appear is astonishing yet not hard to explain. In 1937 Frederic Warburg brought out George Padmore’s Africa and World Peace and C.L.R. James’s World Revolution, 1917-36: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International ; both writers, like Williams, were from Trinidad, and both mentored Williams during the years he spent in Britain. But, though a radical, Warburg rejected the manuscript for Capitalism and Slavery because, he wrote in his autobiography, the book ‘challenged the great tradition’. What he objected to was Williams’s argument that Britain abolished the slave trade principally for economic rather than moral, humanitarian reasons. ‘I would never publish such a book,’ Warburg wrote.

The Penguin promotional material presents Capitalism and Slavery as a ‘landmark’, which it is, but it would be even more correct to think of it as the progenitor of almost all of the questions, problems, arguments and interpretations that have come to inform the study of slavery, abolition and emancipation in the British Empire. It discusses the origins of human bondage in the Caribbean, the contribution that chattel slavery made to the 18th-century British economy, the political and economic consequences of American independence for the British West Indian colonies, the broad reassessment of the nation’s commercial interests in first half of the 19th century, and then the ways that those shifts figured in the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade and the overthrow of slavery in the British Empire in 1838. In the final chapter, ‘The Slaves and Slavery’, Williams anticipated more recent scholars in emphasising slave resistance in the British Caribbean as a factor in British emancipation. Like most of his peers and successors, Williams didn’t have a sense of what the subject would look like when the lives of enslaved women received the kind of scrutiny now on display in the work of historians like Jennifer L. Morgan, Marisa Fuentes, Natasha Lightfoot, Katherine Paugh, Shauna Sweeney and Sasha Turner, to name just six. The study of slavery has in some ways moved beyond Williams’s definition of the problems. Yet the influence of Capitalism and Slavery continues to grow. Citations tripled between 2007 and 2022. The book remains one of very few to offer a general interpretation of the rise and fall of slavery in the British Empire, and the only one, still, to focus on the question of economic interest, and what answers to that question might mean for the way the history of modern Britain is understood.

Williams makes his arguments in clear, aphoristic style. ‘Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial.’ ‘By 1750 there was hardly a trading or 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.’ ‘American independence destroyed the mercantile system and discredited the old regime … American independence was the first stage in the decline of the sugar colonies.’ ‘The reason for the attack was not only that the West Indian economic system was vicious but that it was also so unprofitable that for this reason alone its destruction was inevitable.’ ‘The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it. When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of the West Indian monopoly.’ ‘The rise and fall of mercantilism is the rise and fall of slavery.’

Inside the academy and without, commentators have often referred to the ‘Williams thesis’ without clarifying, and sometimes without acknowledging, that Capitalism and Slavery has several arguments, some of which have stood the test of time better than others. David Brion Davis pointed out in 2006 that most scholars no longer endorsed Williams’s explanation of British abolition and British emancipation. The Barclays’ spokesmen drew on this observation to suggest that Capitalism and Slavery is errant in its entirety, but of course a work of scholarship can be weak on some matters and strong on others. There are few if any history books published eighty years ago that remain the most current work on their subject. The lengthy debates about the Williams thesis establish its importance: sustained scrutiny provides evidence of impact.

T he book’s ​ impact was delayed. Most historians in American and British universities dismissed or ignored Capitalism and Slavery for at least a generation after its 1944 publication. Then, in the 1970s, when economic history was studied with new rigour and there was an increased confidence in counterfactual reasoning, several scholars rediscovered, disputed and denounced its key claims. By the early 1980s, just about every scholarly reference to Capitalism and Slavery conceded the power of its interpretations and then declared them wrong – that profits from slavery didn’t provide the capital for the Industrial Revolution and that abolition and emancipation didn’t result from economic decline. What followed was a two-decade detente, during the 1980s and 1990s, in which the significance of the book was acknowledged while support for its claims was avoided. This wasn’t true in all quarters. A small number of economic historians in the US – many African or of African descent – maintained that, on the key issues, Williams was more right than wrong. Developments at the turn of this century led a larger group of historians, some just emerging from their doctoral training, to take a second look. The flourishing of Atlantic history directed new attention to the Caribbean, while the new imperial history enriched our understanding of what empire meant to Britain from the mid-1600s to the 20th century. There emerged a new appreciation for the questions that Williams had asked and a growing interest in the answers that he offered, even if both needed reformulation and fresh research. The rise of the ‘new history of capitalism’ in the US and original research on the legacies of British slave ownership have made the whole field of capitalism and slavery a subject of study, though the book itself is more often honoured than closely read. Connecting the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery to the wealth of Europe and the US, to families, institutions and industries, has become the endeavour of countless historians.

Williams placed naming over shaming. In the first half of Capitalism and Slavery he identifies dozens of British merchants, bankers, industrialists and politicians who built fortunes through colonial slavery. These were not obscure individuals, then or since: many had entries in the Dictionary of National Biography . Williams took their names from printed primary sources and the historical scholarship available in the 1930s. But he refused to cast these men and their families as evildoers, or even as outliers. Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and excellent citizens’, as Williams put it. They founded charitable schools, hospitals, orphanages and libraries, making them ‘the leading humanitarians of their age’. Williams savoured the irony. But what most interested him about this juxtaposition is easier to miss. Can the best of any society overcome the moral norms of the times? Why would we – how could we – expect the merchants of Liverpool, Bristol and London to have refused their era’s imperatives, its incentives, its economic logics? Williams asked this question not to defend the past from judgment by the present, as some sometimes do defensively today. Instead, this refusal to emphasise the Atlantic slave trade as a sin served a crucial interpretative purpose. If there was no sin, then there was no redemption. What happened wasn’t a moral awakening. For morals had never been the question before the fall of colonial slavery, in the achievements of the anti-slavery movement, or, for that matter, what came after. The slave traders, in their own way, were humanitarians and the abolitionists, in their own way, were not.

Much has been made over the years about the pseudo-Marxist economic determinism of Capitalism and Slavery. But it’s not clear how much Williams cared about theories of history or historical sociology. Far more important to him was the point he wanted to make about Britain, the British Empire and, most of all, the funhouse mirror of ideological distortions that helped the British see themselves as philanthropists rather than profit-obsessed imperialists. There’s some evidence that Williams knew that his decline thesis was overstated, that he exaggerated for effect. But, even taking Williams at his word, commentators often miss his point. The thesis was an argument about abolitionists far more than abolition. It revealed the ‘saints’ as less worthy, more suspect, more hypocritical, less high-minded, less saintly than they believed themselves to be, and others had described them. The book’s penultimate chapter defrocks the high priests of the anti-slavery gospel. It presents Wilberforce as a kind of Mrs Jellyby, the patron saint of telescopic philanthropy – ‘Wilberforce was interested in the slave plantation rather than the mineshaft.’ At other times Williams casts Wilberforce as a more charming Bulstrode, full of ‘cant’, ‘spurious philanthropy’ and ‘lucrative humanity’.

The attack on Wilberforce was personal, and explicitly so. The insults are deliberate and considered: ‘with his effeminate face [he] appears small in stature. There is a certain smugness about the man, his life, his religion … as a leader, he was inept, addicted to moderation, compromise and delay.’ Williams held in contempt those historians who wrote about Wilberforce as though they knew his virtues. The so-over-it eyeroll is palpable when Williams cites Wilberforce’s biographer Reginald Coupland’s attempt to ventriloquise the evangelical leader. ‘What do you think sir, is the primary significance of your work, the lesson of the abolition of the slave system?’ Here is what Coupland had Wilberforce say: ‘It was God’s work. It signifies the triumph of his will over human selfishness. It teaches that no obstacle of interest or prejudice is irremovable by faith and prayer.’

It has always seemed to me that Coupland, rather than Wilberforce, was Williams’s real target. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that traces of the conflict survive in some fashion in the papers of Coupland or Williams’s doctoral advisor, Vincent Harlow, who neutered but didn’t suppress the 1938 dissertation that provided the groundwork for Capitalism and Slavery . Williams arrived at Oxford in 1932, and so was in his second year of study at the centenary of British emancipation, a moment of national celebration of the great humanitarian tradition and the empire as a force for progress and civilisation. The record of Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect provided much to criticise. ‘The abolitionists were not radicals. In their attitude to domestic problems they were reactionary.’ But Williams disliked their champions and those who claimed to inherit their legacy more than he did the abolitionists themselves. One sign of this is the praise Williams extends to some abolitionists – Thomas Clarkson, James Ramsay, James Stephen the father, and James Stephen the son – and not others.

C apitalism and Slavery ​ has very little to say about the anti-slavery movement itself. Williams praised its less compromised progenitors like Clarkson and Ramsay but wondered at the propaganda campaign that raised ‘anti-slavery sentiments almost to the status of a religion in England’. The book has no account of the politics that culminated in 1807 and 1833, and advances no theory of individual or collective action that could make sense of the public movement and its popularity. The study of the extra-Parliamentary campaign first became a subject of sustained study only fifty years ago, decades after the publication of Capitalism and Slavery . But Williams had spent more than enough time with the sources to appreciate the pressure that the abolitionists placed on Parliament. The exclusion of the anti-slavery movement from his analysis, therefore, was a choice and not an oversight. It can be explained, to some degree, by the less developed state of social and cultural history when Williams wrote. Politics, economics, institutions, ideas, exemplary lives: these were the stuff of history then. But Williams also didn’t regard abolitionism as his subject and showed little curiosity about it. As a consequence, he treated the mass movement as a given, if only to better focus on the questionable aims of the abolitionist elite. The simplistic, reductionist explanation of motives followed from his contempt. He judged it more important to say what British anti-slavery was not than what it was.

Principles provided a pretext for the pursuit of profit. Williams delighted in the circumstantial evidence that helped make this case. James Cropper of Manchester exemplified the compromised. He was an avid abolitionist who just happened to have massive investments in East India sugar, which was just then coming into competition with slave-produced sugar from the British Caribbean. Cropper wasn’t alone among the abolitionist leadership, Williams showed, in standing to benefit financially from abolition and emancipation. Capitalism and Slavery only scratched the surface of this subject, as recent work by Padraic Scanlan makes clear. But what mattered to Williams wasn’t so much individual motives as the more general point about economic interest. He called attention to the compromises, to the sometimes weak commitment to the cause among the abolitionist leadership, to the embrace of slave labour when it operated outside the British Empire. This was in Williams’s view inconsistent, incoherent and telling. What was really going on was an adjustment to economic realities paired with a fanaticism for the appearance of moral action. Few noticed then or since how much Williams absorbed and articulated the view of the pro-slavery lobby who, at times, attacked abolitionists by calling their motives and true goals into question. Strange bedfellows indeed. It was a sign of Williams’s animus against the ‘saints’. They deserved less credit than they claimed, and – here was one argumentative purpose of the decline thesis – perhaps none at all.

Among scholars, the humanitarian narrative never fully recovered. This may seem surprising given the decades-long resistance to Capitalism and Slavery in some quarters, and the stubborn power of uncritical popular histories. It remains striking how few biographies of William Wilberforce appeared after 1944. There were more books published about him in the century after British emancipation than in the eight decades since, even with the explosion of interest in British slavery and abolition over the last half-century – an interest that accelerated after the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 2007. The books on Wilberforce that appeared after 1944 more frequently took the form of apologetics than apotheosis. There were more than a few concerns that 2007 would be a ‘Wilberfest’, as sceptics put it, but the greater tendency was a focus on the movement itself – and its less compromised activists who more clearly align with contemporary tastes. Williams’s influence has proved strong.

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Vatican Document Casts Gender Change and Fluidity as Threat to Human Dignity

The statement is likely to be embraced by conservatives and stir consternation among L.G.B.T.Q. advocates who fear it will be used as a cudgel against transgender people.

By Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo

Reporting from Rome

The Vatican on Monday issued a new document approved by Pope Francis stating that the church believes that gender fluidity and transition surgery, as well as surrogacy, amount to affronts to human dignity.

The sex a person is assigned at birth, the document argued, was an “irrevocable gift” from God and “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks threatening the unique dignity the person has received from the moment of conception.” People who desire “a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes,” risk succumbing “to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.”

Regarding surrogacy, the document unequivocally stated the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition, whether the woman carrying a baby “is coerced into it or chooses to subject herself to it freely.” Surrogacy makes the child “a mere means subservient to the arbitrary gain or desire of others,” the Vatican said in the document, which also opposed in vitro fertilization.

The document was intended as a broad statement of the church’s view on human dignity, including the exploitation of the poor, migrants, women and vulnerable people. The Vatican acknowledged that it was touching on difficult issues, but said that in a time of great tumult, it was essential, and it hoped beneficial, for the church to restate its teachings on the centrality of human dignity.

Even if the church’s teachings on culture war issues that Francis has largely avoided are not necessarily new, their consolidation now was likely to be embraced by conservatives for their hard line against liberal ideas on gender and surrogacy.

The document, five years in the making, immediately generated deep consternation among advocates for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the church, who fear it will be used against transgender people. That was so, they said, even as the document warned of “unjust discrimination” in countries where transgender people are imprisoned or face aggression, violence and sometimes death.

“The Vatican is again supporting and propagating ideas that lead to real physical harm to transgender, nonbinary and other L.G.B.T.Q.+ people,” said Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based group that advocates for gay Catholics, adding that the Vatican’s defense of human dignity excluded “the segment of the human population who are transgender, nonbinary or gender nonconforming.”

He said it presented an outdated theology based on physical appearance alone and was blind to “the growing reality that a person’s gender includes the psychological, social and spiritual aspects naturally present in their lives.”

The document, he said, showed a “stunning lack of awareness of the actual lives of transgender and nonbinary people.” Its authors ignored the transgender people who shared their experiences with the church, Mr. DeBernardo said, “cavalierly,” and incorrectly, dismissing them as a purely Western phenomenon.

Though the document is a clear setback for L.G.B.T.Q. people and their supporters, the Vatican took pains to strike a balance between protecting personal human dignity and clearly stating church teaching, a tightrope Francis has tried to walk in his more than 11 years as pope.

Francis has made it a hallmark of his papacy to meet with gay and transgender Catholics and has made it his mission to broadcast a message for a more open, and less judgmental, church. Just months ago, Francis upset more conservative corners of his church by explicitly allowing L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics to receive blessings from priests and by allowing transgender people to be baptized and act as godparents .

But he has refused to budge on the church rules and doctrine that many gay and transgender Catholics feel have alienated them, revealing the limits of his push for inclusivity.

“In terms of pastoral consequences,” Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who leads the Vatican’s office on doctrine, said in a news conference Monday, “the principle of welcoming all is clear in the words of Pope Francis.”

Francis, he said, has repeatedly said that “all, all, all” must be welcomed. “Even those who don’t agree with what the church teaches and who make different choices from those that the church says in its doctrine, must be welcomed,” he said, including “those who think differently on these themes of sexuality.”

But Francis’ words were one thing, and church doctrine another, Cardinal Fernández made clear, drawing a distinction between the document, which he said was of high doctrinal importance, as opposed to the recent statement allowing blessings for same-sex Catholics. The church teaches that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”

In an echo of the tension between the substance of church law and Francis’ style of a papal inclusivity, Cardinal Fernández said on Monday that perhaps the “intrinsically disordered” language should be modified to better reflect that the church’s message that homosexual acts could not produce life.

“It’s a very strong expression and it requires explanation,” he said. “Maybe we could find an expression that is even clearer to understand what we want to say.”

Though receptive to gay and transgender followers, the pope has also consistently expressed concern about what he calls “ideological colonization,” the notion that wealthy nations arrogantly impose views — whether on gender or surrogacy — on people and religious traditions that do not necessarily agree with them. The document said “gender theory plays a central role” in that vision and that its “scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts.”

Using “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” language, the Vatican’s office on teaching and doctrine wrote that “it should be denounced as contrary to human dignity the fact that, in some places, not a few people are imprisoned, tortured, and even deprived of the good of life solely because of their sexual orientation.”

“At the same time,” it continued, “the church highlights the definite critical issues present in gender theory.”

On Monday, Cardinal Fernández also struggled to reconcile the two seemingly dissonant views.

“I am shocked having read a text from some Catholics who said, ‘Bless this military government of our country that created these laws against homosexuals,’” Cardinal Fernández said on Monday. “I wanted to die reading that.”

But he went on to say that the Vatican document was itself not a call for decriminalization, but an affirmation of what the church believed. “We shall see the consequences,” he said, adding that the church would then see how to respond.

In his presentation, Cardinal Fernández described the long process of the drafting of a document on human dignity, “Infinite Dignity,” which began in March 2019, to take into account the “latest developments on the subject in academia and the ambivalent ways in which the concept is understood today.”

In 2023, Francis sent the document back with instructions to “highlight topics closely connected to the theme of dignity, such as poverty, the situation of migrants, violence against women, human trafficking, war, and other themes.” Francis signed off on the document on March 25.

The long road, Cardinal Fernández wrote, “reflects the gravity” of the process.

In the document, the Vatican embraced the “clear progress in understanding human dignity,” pointing to the “desire to eradicate racism, slavery, and the marginalization of women, children, the sick, and people with disabilities.”

But it said the church also sees “grave violations of that dignity,” including abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, polygamy, torture, the exploitation of the poor and migrants, human trafficking and sex abuse, violence against women, capitalism’s inequality and terrorism.

The document expressed concern that eliminating sexual differences would undercut the family, and that a response “to what are at times understandable aspirations,” will become an absolute truth and ideology, and change how children are raised.

The document argued that changing sex put individualism before nature and that human dignity as a subject was often hijacked to “justify an arbitrary proliferation of new rights,” as if “the ability to express and realize every individual preference or subjective desire should be guaranteed.”

Cardinal Fernández on Monday said that a couple desperate to have a child should turn to adoption, rather than surrogacy or in vitro fertilization because those practices, he said, eroded human dignity writ large.

Individualistic thinking, the document argues, subjugates the universality of dignity to individual standards, concerned with “psycho-physical well-being” or “individual arbitrariness or social recognition.” By making dignity subjective, the Vatican argues, it becomes subject to “arbitrariness and power interests.”

Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief for The Times, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. More about Jason Horowitz

Elisabetta Povoledo is a reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years. More about Elisabetta Povoledo