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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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Williams didn’t have access to modern databases that have documented in detail the enormous size of the transatlantic slave trade. Citing the evidence that was available to him, he said that in 1760 alone, 146 slave ships, with a capacity for 36,000 slaves, left British ports for Africa, and by 1771, “the number of ships had increased to 190 and the number of slaves to 47,000.” He continued: “The importation into Jamaica from 1700 to 1786 was 610,000 and it has been estimated that the total import of slaves into all the British colonies between 1680 and 1786 was over two million.”20

Williams’s account of the triangular trade was unsparing. “The purchase of slaves called for a business sense and shrewd discrimination,” he wrote. “An Angolan Negro was a proverb for worthlessness; Coromantines (Ashantis), from the Gold Coast, were good workers but too rebellious; Mandingoes (Senegal) were too prone to theft; the Eboes (Nigeria) were timid and despondent; the Pawpaws or Whydahs (Dahomey) were the most docile and best-disposed.”21 On arriving in the Caribbean, the African captives who had survived the often deadly Middle Passage were sold at auction to owners of plantations, particularly sugar plantations, some of which had hundreds of enslaved workers. Williams described how, on some of the islands, the rise of the plantations squeezed out colonialist farmers who operated on a smaller scale and caused the white population to decline. “King Sugar had begun his depredations,” Williams wrote, “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.”22

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Describing enslaved workers as proletarians captured the key point that, from an economic point of view, slavery and factory labor were alternative ways of obtaining large quantities of labor power. Adam Smith had argued that wage labor was the cheaper and more efficient option, but his argument begged the question of whether it was ever a feasible one for plantations in the Americas, where labor had to be imported from afar. It also downplayed the reality that, for a long time, slave-based plantation capitalism generated large profits. Williams described how in Barbados, one of the larger British colonies, the price of land skyrocketed with the development of the sugar industry, and enormous fortunes were made. The plantation owners dominated the island economies, and in their homeland they constituted a nouveau riche elite who flouted their wealth by building grand country houses such as Fonthill Mansion in Wilshire,23 which was owned by the Beckford family, and Bromley Hill Place in Kent, a property of the Longs.24

In describing the economic workings of the slave trade, Williams didn’t dwell on the boundless human misery and cruelty that underpinned it. But he also didn’t gloss over the deep-rooted racism of the slave traders and plantation owners that inured them to the terrible reality of their business. “The slave traders were among the leading humanitarians of their age,” he noted ironically. “John Cary, advocate of the slave trade, was conspicuous for his integrity and humanity and was the founder of a society known as the ‘Incorporation of the poor.’ … Brian Blundell of Liverpool … engaged in both the slave and West Indian trades, was for many years trustee, treasurer, chief patron and most active supporter of a charity school.”25 In another passage, Williams pointed out how “the blood of the Negro slaves reddened the Atlantic and both of its shores.”26 He went on to note archly: “Strange that an article like sugar, so sweet and necessary to human existence, should have occasioned such crimes and bloodshed!”

★ ★ ★

Other scholars, including the English historians Herman Merivale and V. T. Harlow and the Americans Charles McLean Andrews and Lowell J. Ragatz, had already written authoritatively about slavery and the Caribbean plantations. Williams referred to some of their works; indeed, he dedicated his book to Ragatz, a professor at George Washington University, noting his “monumental labors in this field.”27 But Williams went beyond earlier historians in addressing the economic impact of slavery and plantation capitalism on overall British economic development. Enslaved labor didn’t merely create great riches for individual colonialists, he argued; it played a key role in fostering the rise of industrial capitalism. This argument subsequently became known as the Williams Thesis.

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Williams didn’t claim that colonialism and slavery were the only factors that propelled the British economy forward: “But it must not be inferred that the triangular trade was solely and entirely responsible for the economic development,” he wrote. “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.”28 But Williams did hold that the triangular trade was a major accelerant of British economic growth, and he presented his argument in parts. He examined the triangular trade and sought to demonstrate how it boosted specific manufacturing industries in Britain, particularly the vital Lancashire cotton industry. Then he described how the profits generated by slavery and plantation capitalism filtered through the rest of the British economy and “fertilized” its development.

The argument began with the basics. “The slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured goods,” Williams wrote. “These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit, in exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home country. As the volume of the trade increased, the triangular trade was supplemented, but never supplanted, by a direct trade between home country and the West Indies.”29 Drawing on a pioneering survey of Britain’s trade balance carried out in 1776 by Sir Charles Whitworth, an English government official, he estimated that during the period from 1714 to 1773, the Caribbean accounted for about 20 percent of Britain’s imports and 12 percent of its overall foreign commerce.30 The American mainland, which included the slave colonies of the South, accounted for another 10 percent of foreign commerce. Britain’s trade relationship with India was probably bigger than the transatlantic trade, Williams conceded. “It is even probable that the profits from the slave trade were smaller than those made by the British

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East India Company,” he added. And yet he insisted, “these trades were far less important than the slave trade.”31

How so? The business model of the East India Company, Williams pointed out, consisted of using British gold and silver to buy Indian products—such as spices, silk, and cotton—which it then shipped to Britain and sold at a large markup. From “the mercantilist standpoint the India trade was a bad trade,” Williams wrote. “It drained Britain of bullion to buy unnecessary wares.”32 The triangular trade, on the other hand, created new markets for British manufactured goods and supplied Britain with important industrial raw materials, particularly cotton. To illustrate his argument, Williams described the cargo on one British slave ship that was bound for Africa in the year 1787:

Cotton and linen goods, silk handkerchiefs, coarse blue and red woolen cloths, scarlet cloth in grain, course and fine hats, worsted caps, guns, powder, shot, sabers, lead bars, iron bars, pewter basons, copper kettles and pans, iron pots, hardware of various kinds, earthen and glass ware, hair and gilt leather trunks, beads of various kinds, silver and gold rings and ornaments, paper, coarse and fine checks, linen ruffled shirts and caps, British and foreign spirits and tobacco.

This sundry assortment was typical of the slave trader’s cargo. Finery for Africans, household utensils, cloths of all kinds, iron and other metals, together with guns, handcuffs and fetters: the production of these stimulated capitalism, provided employment for British labor, and brought great profits to England.33

Among the direct beneficiaries of the triangular trade were the British port cities that served it, including Bristol, Glasgow, and Liverpool. Between 1700 and 1773, the population of Liverpool rose from 5,000 to 34,000.34 The city’s first slave ship departed for West Africa in 1709. By 1730, there were fifteen slavers, and by 1771 more than a hundred, Williams pointed out.35 He also identified some of the local beneficiaries from the triangular trade. Among them was John Gladstone, the chairman of Liverpool’s West India Association, a trade group for planters and merchants involved in the triangular trade, whose son, William Ewart Gladstone, would serve as Britain’s prime minister on four different occasions in the late nineteenth century. After starting out as a merchant, the elder Gladstone “through foreclosures, acquired large plantations in British Guiana and Jamaica,” Williams wrote. “The sugar and other produce which he sold on the Liverpool Exchange were grown on his own plantations and imported on his own ships. The fortune amassed by this means permitted him to open up trade connections with Russia, India and China and to make large and fortunate investments in land and property in Liverpool.”36

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Aside from the merchants and shipbuilders of the port cities, there were many other interests and regions in Britain that benefited from the triangular trade, Williams emphasized. In Bristol in 1799, he noted, there were twenty sugar refineries, and in London there were eighty.37 In the inland city of Birmingham and its surrounding areas, metals manufacturers exported a wide range of products to Africa, including cutlery, brass pans and kettles, iron bars (which the slave traders used to make chains and padlocks and branding irons), and guns. “The Birmingham guns of the eighteenth century were exchanged for men,” Williams wrote, “and it was a common saying that the price of a Negro was one Birmingham gun.”38 Some local businesses made specialized goods for the African market. Williams singled out the Cheadle Company, which manufactured the brass manelloes (rings) that were often used as currency to purchase slaves. Between 1734 and 1780, the firm’s “capital increased eleven times,” he pointed out.39

Building on these examples, Williams argued that the triangular trade had a pervasive impact on the British economy. “By 1750,” he wrote, “there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade.”40 These links weren’t confined to manufacturing and shipping. Williams also identified banks and other financial institutions that helped finance various aspects of the slave trade, including Lloyd’s of London, the famous insurance market. Williams described how in the market’s early existence, when it was little more than a coffeehouse in London’s Financial District frequented by merchants and shipowners, “many advertisements in the London Gazette about runaway slaves listed Lloyd’s as the place where they should be returned.”41 Later, as Lloyd’s established a virtual monopoly on marine insurance, it “insured slaves and slave ships, and became vitally interested in legal decisions as to what constituted ‘natural death’ and ‘perils of the sea,’” Williams noted.

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★ ★ ★

Williams wasn’t the first writer to point out that the slave trade and plantation capitalism enriched the colonizing countries and boosted their economies. In Black Jacobins, which was published six years before Capitalism and Slavery, James cited the growth of Nantes, France’s primary port serving the slave trade; Marseilles, which did a lot of trade with its Caribbean territories; and Bordeaux, which supplied brandy and wine to the colonies. “Nantes, Bordeaux and Marseilles were the chief centers of the maritime bourgeoisie, but Orleans, Dieppe, Berey-Paris, a dozen great towns, refined raw sugar and shared in the subsidiary industries,” James wrote. “A large part of the hides worked in France came from San Domingo. The flourishing cotton industry of Normandy drew its raw cotton in part from the West Indies, and in all its ramifications the cotton trade occupied the population of more than a hundred French towns.”42

Williams’s argument about the commercial impact of slavery echoed James’s analysis. His signature contribution was to expand it and apply it to the emergence of the world’s first industrial capitalist economy. The great engine of the British industrial revolution, of course, was the Lancashire cotton industry, and Williams insisted that slavery and the triangular trade played a significant role in its development. His argument had three components, and the first two were based on the elementary economic concepts of demand and supply.

In the slave-trading ports on the west coast of Africa, Williams noted, cottons and linens were among the goods most in demand, and Lancashire’s cotton manufacturers were more than happy to supply this market, where their wares competed with cheap cottons made on the Indian subcontinent. Lancashire cottons were also shipped to British colonies in the Caribbean and the Americas, where they were used to clothe the enslaved workers and for other purposes. Some of these items were transported on slave ships, via Africa. Others went directly across the Atlantic. “What the building of ships for the transport of slaves did for eighteenth century Liverpool, the manufacture of cotton goods for the purchases of slaves did for eighteenth century Manchester,” Williams wrote. “The first stimulus to the growth of Cottonopolis came from the African and West Indian markets.”43 In the forty years from 1739 to 1779, he pointed out, Manchester’s exports increased from £14,000 to £303,000. “Up to 1770 one-third of this export went to the slave coast, one-half to the American and West Indian colonies,” he added. “It was this tremendous dependence on the triangular trade that made Manchester.”44

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Having dealt with demand, Williams moved on to supply factors. To make cotton linens in large quantities, the cotton mills needed a large and reliable supply of raw cotton. They largely sourced this essential raw material from slave plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas. During the early eighteenth century, Williams pointed out, the West Indies supplied up to three-quarters of all the cotton imported to Britain, and in 1780 the share was still two-thirds.45 During the ensuing decades, he noted, the sourcing of cotton gradually shifted from the Caribbean to the American mainland.

In Lancashire, the application of water and then steam power to cotton spinning greatly increased the industry’s productive capacity and raised its demand for raw cotton. In the United States, in 1794, the Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney received a patent for his cotton gin, a mechanized device that enabled the rapid harvesting and cleaning of short staple cotton, which was much easier to grow than the traditional long staple variety grown in the Caribbean. Whitney’s invention enabled cotton plantations in the American South to undercut the prices of West Indian producers and produce in greater volume. The gradual eclipse of the Caribbean cotton producers by competitors on the American mainland would have major historical consequences for both regions. From the perspective of the Lancashire cotton industry, Williams emphasized, it simply represented a shift to a lower-cost foreign supplier. “When the cotton gin permitted the cultivation of the short-staple cotton by facilitating the task of cleaning, the center of gravity shifted from the islands to the mainland to meet the enormous demands of the new machinery in England,” he wrote.46

In 1807, under pressure from abolitionists led by the Yorkshire evangelical William Wilberforce, Parliament prohibited the slave trade inside the British Empire. But the new law didn’t free the enslaved or proscribe buying the goods they produced. Between 1784 and 1832, British imports of raw cotton rose from £11 million to £283 million.47 And by the end of that period, American cotton plantations were supplying threequarters of the raw cotton that the Lancashire mills relied on. “The Manchester capitalist from his mountain, like Moses on Pisgah, beheld the promised land,” Williams wrote. “The New World, thanks to Eli Whitney, had come, not for the last time, to the rescue of the Old.”48

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The third element of the Williams Thesis as it related to cotton manufacturing was to become a subject of enduring controversy. He claimed that the slave trade, directly and indirectly, also supplied much of the capital that financed the rise of British industry, particularly in Lancashire. Noting the proximity of Liverpool to Manchester—the two cities are only about thirty-five miles apart—he wrote:

It was only the capital accumulation of Liverpool which called the population of Lancashire into existence and stimulated the manufactures of Manchester. That capital accumulation came from the slave trade, whose importance was appreciated more by contemporaries than by later historians.49

After making this claim, Williams immediately qualified it, writing: “Between the cotton manufacturers of Manchester and the slave traders there were not the close connections that have already been noticed in the case of the shipbuilders of Liverpool.”50 But “two exceptional instances of such connections exist,” he went on: Sir William Fazackerly and Samuel Touchet, a pair of Manchester businessmen who “were both members of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa.”51 Williams noted that Touchet had a partnership, with his brothers, “in about twenty ships in the West Indian trade,” and the Hibberts, a family of Manchester merchants, “owned sugar plantations in Jamaica, and at one time supplied [cottons] to the African Company for the slave trade.”52

Extending his argument beyond Lancashire, Williams cited a number of other British industrialists who gained access to capital generated in the triangular trade. The most famous of them was the Scottish inventor James Watt, whose steam engines were one of the key innovations of the industrial revolution. “It was the capital accumulated from the West Indian trade that financed James Watt and the steam engine,” Williams wrote.53 Watt and

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Matthew Boulton, his partner in the famous engine maker Boulton and Watt, “received advances” from the finance house Lowe, Vere, Williams, and Jennings, which also provided credit to ships that plied the Caribbean trade, he explained.54 Williams also brought up the ironmonger Anthony Bacon, who cofounded a large ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. Bacon’s partner was a West Indian planter, and he himself had been involved in lucrative African ventures, “first victualling troops on the coast and then supplying seasoned and able Negroes for government contracts in the West Indies.”55 Summarizing his argument, Williams wrote: “The triangular trade made an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development. The profits from this trade fertilized the entire productive system of the country.”56

★ ★ ★

The initial notices for Capitalism and Slavery were generally positive. A reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement called it an “admirably written, argued and original piece of work.” In the New York Herald Tribune, the American historian Henry Steele Commager said it was “the most penetrating and the most original monograph that has appeared in this field of history.” The Barbados Advocate hailed it as “nothing short of a masterpiece.”57 Williams was invited to speak at conferences in New York, Boston, Chicago, and other cities. The magazine Foreign Affairs asked him to contribute an article on Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

In some economics and economic history departments, the reaction to Capitalism and Slavery was more skeptical. In 1948 T. S. Ashton of the University of Manchester published a widely read account of the British industrial revolution that emphasized the role of technological advances, rapid population growth, and cultural changes: it didn’t mention slavery at all. During the 1970s, a new generation of quantitatively minded economic historians queried some of Williams’s arguments, particularly his claim that profits from the slave trade helped to finance the development of the Lancashire mills. These scholars pointed out that many of the key technical innovations in the cotton industry—including Richard Arkwright’s water frame, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule, and Edmund Cartwright’s power loom—were the creations of mechanical tinkerers who had little, if any, outside funding. Furthermore, the early Lancashire cotton mills, where the new inventions were put to use, were small by modern standards, and they didn’t need much, if any, external financing, because they generated large profits. “Ploughback of the high profits to be earned in the new sectors enabled successful firms to expand their physical scale of production as rapidly as they wished without recourse to sources of finance outside their immediate circle of family, friends and close business colleagues,” Larry Neal, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote in a 1994 survey of business finance during the industrial revolution.58

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Other economic historians challenged Williams’s broader claim that profits from the triangular trade “fertilized” the entire British economy. In a 1972 paper, Stanley Engerman of the University of Rochester estimated that in 1770 the entire profits of the British slave trade amounted to just 0.54 percent of British national income and less than 10 percent of industrial capital investment. “Even under some implausible assumptions, the aggregate contribution of slave trade profits to the financing of British capital formation in the eighteenth century could not be so large as to bear weight as the, or a, major contributing factor,” Engerman wrote. “Its role was positive in that there were some profits, and these might have led to some new investment in industrial activities, but relative to total capital formation, this was of a relatively minor magnitude.”59 Patrick O’Brien, an economic historian who was then at Oxford University, expanded the critique beyond slavery to all aspects of European colonialism, challenging the notion that it played a major role in the overall pattern of European growth. This pattern could be explained “mainly by reference to endogenous forces,” such as technology, native resources, and intra-European trade, O’Brien wrote in a 1982 article in The Economic History Review. O’Brien concluded that “the periphery was peripheral.”60

Coincidentally or not, these dismissals of the Williams Thesis came during a period in which neoclassical economics was extending its intellectual hegemony throughout many fields of economics, including economic history. More recently, there has been a radical reappraisal of the role of colonialism and slavery in Western economic development. It began, funnily enough, with a paper by Engerman and O’Brien, published at the start of the 1990s, that pointed out that between 1700 and 1773, colonial markets accounted for about 95 percent of the growth in British goods exports.61 The two scholars emphasized that the slave trade itself accounted for only a small portion of all Britain’s colonial trade, but their findings appeared to call into question O’Brien’s prior claim that the periphery was unimportant. Subsequent research further undermined it. In a 2015 paper, the American economist Ronald Findlay and the Irish economic historian Kevin H. O’Rourke found that during the eighteenth century, Britain’s longdistance trade was growing twice as fast as national income. The two scholars concluded: “The colonial trade was undoubtedly a major driving force of Britain’s overall economic growth.”62

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