Ever since Eric Williams published his book Capitalism and Slavery, which demonstrated to those more inclined to weigh evidence rather than ideology that slavery was a crucial prop to the Industrial Revolution, there has been a continual pushback. There is no surprise in that. The fiction that capitalism is a “natural” manifestation of “human nature” that dispassionately provides economic growth can’t be sustained if we look under the hood at all the violence that brought it about and sustains it.
So although a handful of mainstream historians don’t argue against the fundamental idea but quibble with the extent, many of them still frantically try to assert that the profits from the slave trade and products made with enslaved labor weren’t that much and didn’t amount to near enough accumulated capital to provide a boost to industrialization. These are so much ideological obfuscations. Williams proved his case well, and numerous historians, usually nonorthodox researchers willing to challenge the assumptions of capitalism, have built on his 1940s work.
The Industrial Revolution, centered in Britain after the British displaced the Dutch as the center of the growing world capitalist system, and London supplanted Amsterdam as the financial center of capitalism, surely rested on multiple foundations. No one reason can be pointed to as a sole cause. Armed force, for example, was an important motor in the supplanting of the United Provinces (as the Netherlands was then known) by the United Kingdom; the two countries fought three wars with the British winning. Britain, or at least England, had long ago developed commercialized agriculture and farmers dependent on markets, and a government dedicated to advancing commercial interests, with colonialism, naval power and inhuman laws designed to force people into becoming wage workers.
But the United Provinces did not develop an industrial base, remaining dependent on trade, nor did any other power develop as did Britain. What made the difference for the British? Expansion of business, creations of new manufacturing techniques and the development and adaptation of machinery can’t be done without access to capital. The accumulation of money, to put it another way; money only becomes capital if it can be invested. With the huge profits accrued from slave trade and further profits from products created with slave labor — tropical products grown in the Caribbean, with sugar in the forefront — there were unprecedented accumulations of capital that could be used to invest in machinery. Developing industrial capacities, thereby greatly increasing the amount that could be produced, would have been pointless unless there were large and growing markets for the surfeit of production, and slavery contributed to that growth as well.
More than one mythology is punctured in the latest contribution to setting the record straight when it comes to capitalism and slavery, Slavery in the British Empire and its Legacy in the Modern World by Stephen Cushion. So embedded was the concept of slave labor and the “property rights” that maintained it for centuries, that the British government handed out massive payments to slavers when slavery was finally abolished in the empire. How much? At the time, 1834, a total of £20 million was given as compensation for the freeing of the enslaved. (No compensation for the enslaved themselves, and they had to serve an addition four years of “apprenticeship” that was slavery under a new name.) That would be a lot of money even today but was a truly fantastic sum of money at the time. Dr. Cushion estimates that sum is equivalent to about £25 billion in today’s sterling!
To put that £20 million in some perspective, the average unskilled British laborer made perhaps £20 to £30 in a year and a skilled laborer might have made £70 to £90 per year. And some of the big banks that profited off the slave trade profited again when the compensation was paid. The money paid out by the government was raised by selling bonds to the Rothschild & Co. bank. That was quite a deal for the bank, because the bonds paid 3 percent interest and were not redeemed until 2015. The bank ultimately was paid more than five times in interest what it paid for the government bonds. The added government debt was in turn paid for by increasing the sales tax in everyday items of consumption, already the primary taxation.
The brutality of “scientific” management
But we have gotten ahead of our story. Widespread slavery under the Union Jack began in Barbados in the mid-17th century. The Barbados plantation owners had first used White indentured servants, many of whom were on the losing side of the English Civil War or Irish captured during Cromwell’s invasion and destruction of Ireland. The servant system required a steady stream of newcomers, given the high death toll from the brutal work of a sugar plantation, but once word got back home of the conditions awaiting across the Atlantic, the willingness of people, no matter how destitute, to sign up evaporated. Enslaving Africans, a trade already well in progress from other European powers, was the solution. The Royal Africa Company was given a monopoly on slave trading to British colonies. Caribbean plantation owners profited from this side, too, as they could invest their profits in slave ships, and British monarchs were investors as well.
The brutality of the work and the indifference to human life are well shown in the “instructions” a plantation owner wrote to provide “scientific management” of plantations — 20 percent of the enslaved laborers had to be replaced each year due to deaths. It was not only cheaper to buy new slaves rather than sustain slaves already in possession, the intention was to work the enslaved to death before they had to be supported in their old age.
.jpg)
An ideological system is necessary for such a system to be sustained for such a long period of time. The Church of England was a major prop, Dr. Cushion wrote. Evangelicals stressed that any enslaved persons converted to Christianity are not freed but remain enslaved. The church itself was the owner of plantations using enslaved labor; at one point it inherited a plantation worked by 315 slaves. That was no problem for church officials. Barbados ministers were instructed to read a newly passed act codifying slavery to all parishioners so that no free person could claim ignorance of the law. The baptism ritual for the converted enslaved made clear there would be no freedom for them while stressing they owe obedience. And when the Spanish granted a monopoly on slave trade to its colonies to Britain, Queen Anne received a cut. That was standard as all British monarchs held interests in slave trading until slavery was abolished.
As plantation owners returned to Britain returned home to build estates (while leaving managers in charge of the plantations) in the 18th into the early 19th century, more land was enclosed, forcing more people off the land and forcing the displaced to become laborers in manufacturing operations. A series of enclosure acts from 1750 to 1830 prioritized the remaining commons, without which small farmers could not remain viable. Almost all of the remaining 25 percent of British land not yet enclosed was privatized during those years. A particularly egregious example were the mass evictions put in motion by the Duchess of Sutherland, who from 1814 to 1820 had 15,000 people “systemically hunted and rooted out.” All villages were burnt and agricultural fields turned into pasturage. This was enforced by British soldiers. In all, more than 1,200 square miles were enclosed in just this one privatization. “The money to fund this clearing was deeply entwined with the business of slavery,” Dr. Cushion wrote. The duchess had inherited a large sum of money — the equivalent of £5.8 million or US$7.6 million in today’s money — from one grandfather who had interests in Jamaican plantations and the other grandfather who invested in Virginia tobacco grown with enslaved labor.
Colonial commerce, including the business of slavery, was “one of the driving forces of the capitalist economy from its earliest manifestation,” Slavery in the British Empire informs us. “Exports from Britain accounted for around half of all industrial production in the eighteenth century. Economic historian Joseph Inkori tells us that in 1770 the slave trade and the plantation economy furnished as much as 55 percent of gross fixed capital formation investment in Great Britain.” The increased rate of industrial growth was dependent on colonial purchasing power. The sugar industry, the center of economic activity in British Caribbean colonies, “was responsible for more than half the growth of English exports in the third quarter of the eighteenth century,” the time of the industrial takeoff. Much of the sugar produced in the Caribbean by enslaved labor was re-exported into Europe for additional big profits.
British manufacturers depended on enslaved labor
Dr. Cushion notes that initial investment needed to begin an industrial enterprise was relatively small, but large amounts of working capital or credit was needed to continue operations. In turn, considerable investment and government support was needed for the infrastructure that had to be built to enable the expansion of commerce, such as docks, canals, roads, harbors and warehouses. And because textiles were the most important commodity in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, the copious amounts of cotton produced by enslaved labor in the U.S. South was necessary. British manufacturers could not have done without it. “The combination of expropriation and exploitation has been characteristic of capitalism throughout its history,” Dr. Cushion notes. Although slavery originated long before capitalism, the system of plantation system “was geared to the mass production of commodities and flourished as a result of market forces. … Until it was abolished in Brazil in 1888, slavery was a central feature of the capitalist economy.”
Slavery in the British Empire spends a good amount of its text on the processes that brought about, first, the end of the slave trade in British colonies and then the end of slavery itself. The book details the slave rebellions, including major uprisings in Barbados, Guyana and Jamaica, that helped to focus minds and the grassroots abolitionist movement that was well ahead of the better-known elite movement that sought gradual reforms. Those elite reformers, led by William Wilberforce, believed that enslaved laborers could only be “ready” for freedom after many years of tutelage. Wilberforce was still calling only for a halt to the slave trade, not the institution itself, at a time when grassroots abolitionists were demanding immediate freedom for all enslaved. Dr. Cushion endorses Eric Williams’ thesis that the profitability of slavery was beginning to decline, upsetting the widely taught idea that a few “great men” acting out of Christian charity were responsible for the end of slavery. There were struggles between the plantation aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie; the latter saw no more need for protectionist legislation given their ability to sell to multiple markets while plantation profitability had rested on the British government’s trade restrictions.
The plantation owners, until an 1832 political reform, held disproportionate power in the British Parliament and constituted a formidable lobby. But as their power waned, plantations owners moved from arguing against a cessation of slave trading to arguing against a ban on slavery to demanding compensation for having to free their enslaved laborers. The large compensation they did secure enabled them to invest in new enterprises and infrastructure. One major bank, Baring Brothers, invested heavily in U.S. South cotton and even won a hefty commission for arranging the Louisiana Purchase that doubled the size of the United States.
At the same time as slavery came to an end in the British Empire, still harsher restrictions on working people were promulgated. That was not a coincidence. A poor law passed in 1834, the same year as mandatory slave manumission, made work mandatory on pain of being thrown into a workhouse. That same year, transportation to Australia was used to remove trade union organizers. Wilberforce, meanwhile, backed harsh new laws restricting free speech and assembly that were designed to stifle worker organizing. For the emancipated, once their “apprenticeship” was over, authorities passed laws setting wages at starvation levels, restricted voting to property owners, banned strikes and organizing, and prohibited emigration to ensure that plantation owners would have a ready source of cheap labor. A new form of tenancy that was similar to serfdom was also instituted. The result was widespread malnutrition for the freed workers, and women were paid half that of men to keep wages low; children had to work so the family could survive.
The book concludes with an attempt to calculate how much in wages was stolen from Caribbean enslaved laborers. Such a total can’t be done with precision, but the estimate here is that the total of unpaid wages across the British Caribbean colonies totals more than £1.2 billion, a sum that equals £2.5 trillion or US$3.2 trillion if we were to convert that total into today’s money. “The British bourgeoisie profited from Caribbean sugar slavery, from North American slave-picked cotton, from the colonization of Africa and Asia, from the expropriation of the English peasants from their common land, and from the genocide of Indigenous nations,” Dr. Cushion wrote. “They used that capital to develop a fossil fuel-based economy that is now the major factor in global warming, and threatens human existence in general and the Caribbean in particular.”
Slavery in the British Empire is not a book that sugar-coats the past. For a reader already familiar with this history, it serves as a good supplemental source of information. For the reader not familiar with this history, and who wishes to learn, Slavery in the British Empire provides a brisk, highly readable discussion of the central role of slavery in the creation of the Industrial Revolution, and of capitalism more generally. Given the relentless propaganda effort to convince us that capitalism is benign, natural and beneficial, Dr. Cushion provides a welcome, and needed, anecdote.
* Steve Cushion, Slavery in the British Empire and its Legacy in the Modern World [Monthly Review Press, 2025]
No comments:
Post a Comment