In 1944, Caribbean historian Eric Williams wrote a book that appalled many British historians. His work, Capitalism and Slavery, charged that the praise given to British abolitionists had been misguided and overblown. Williams argues against historians such as Reginald Coupland, author of The British Anti-Slavery Movement (1933), who contended that the abolition movement in England in the late 18th and early 19th century was, first and foremost, a humanitarian crusade. Williams attempts to debunk this myth by showing that the rise of the British abolition movement coincided with the fall from preeminence of the slave trade and its importance to the British Empire.
The British West Indies, in the mid-18th century enjoyed a monopoly in the sugar trade. However, in the late18th century, as the Industrial Revolution took place in Britain, laissez faire began to gain more credence among British industrialists. Industries such as woollen, cotton, and metallurgy, which once supported the slave trade, denounced it and other restrictions such as tariffs. British capitalists no longer saw the importance of the slave trade and, in 1807, the British government abolished the slave trade. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.
Historians, Humanitarian Rhetoric and the Abolition of Slavery
Instead of focusing on the humanitarian rhetoric of abolitionists, Williams looks at the the contribution of the slave trade to the development of British capitalism. He suggests that the anti-slavery movement was a group response of the middle-class to a decline of the West India interest on one hand, and a change in the needs of an increasingly industrialized society in which they lived on the other. He argues that the campaign for abolition was inextricably linked with the middle-class campaign for free trade. The work attempts to place in historical perspective the relationship between early capitalism as exemplified by Great Britain, and the black slave trade, black slavery, and the great colonial trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
Williams accuses previous scholars of having a narrow ideology and not studying the facts before them in an extensive manner. He writes of preceding scholars, “While material has accumulated and books have been written about the period which preceded the Industrial Revolution, the world-wide and interrelated nature of the commerce of that period, its direct effect upon the development of the Industrial Revolution, and the heritage which it has left even upon the civilization of today have not anywhere been placed in compact and yet comprehensive perspective” (pg. vii).
Williams’ analysis offers, in neo-Marxian terms, the first general explanation of the rise and fall of European colonial slavery with recourse to only one major variable. Its focus on long-term economic development afforded the possibility of moving beyond the narrative of abolition in single cases around the world, such as the Smith and Wilberforce-led movement in England, to a general causal explanation of the destruction of slave systems throughout the world during the nineteenth century.
By identifying economic agencies of social change at every juncture in the process, Williams also dispenses with the humanitarian reasoning for the end of the slave trade in 1807. Wherever the humanitarian school had seen a crusade of saints against ruthless degradation, Williams sees the invisible hand of capitalism. The “disinterested” forces of abolition are shown to be the ideological cover for another, more powerful force.
Growing Industrialization Fuels Abolition
Williams argues that from the time the of the American War of Independence onward, the traditional role and privileged position of the British West Indies in the supply of tropical produce, and especially sugar, was being increasingly questioned in Britain. The British islands could not compete on the European market with the French Caribbean islands, especially the extremely fertile San Domingo, and it became clearer every year that the natural links of the expanding British economy were with countries outside the system of imperial protection.
British Prime Minister William Pitt wanted to revert the loss of the European market to San Domingo by an international abolition of the slave trade which would ruin the still expanding foreign West Indian sugar islands, which would pave the way for the domination of the sugar market by British East Indian sugar. When the San Domingo planters, out of fear of Jacobinism, white and black, offered the island to Britain, Pitt’s zeal for abolition dried up and abolitionists could avail nothing.
During the Napoleonic Wars, there was an overproduction of sugar in relation to available markets and the post-war years saw the growth of rival, low-cost producers (Brazil, Cuba, and Mauritius). At the same time, many of the traditional supporters of the old system of imperial protection were deserting the West Indian interest. As a result, overproduction in 1807 demanded abolition just as overproduction in 1833 demanded emancipation. The time period also saw the growth of free-trade convictions. Williams shows that between 1815 and 1833, the British West Indies became relatively less important as a market for British exports.
Britain’s domestic industrial revolution produced a new, hostile set of economic interests. They determined the fate of the failing slave systems in a direct and economically logical way. Once the balance sheet was properly drawn, slavery was shown to have lost its economic underpinnings before any successful assault was launched against it.
Williams states that the West Indians were attacked not because they were distasteful as slaveholders, but because they were dangerous allies of those opposed to the creation of the economic conditions required by a modern industrialized state. The moral arguments of the abolitionists were thus superficial. While Capitalism and Slavery was heavily attacked when it was first published in 1944, the book has changed the way that most scholars looked at abolition in the British Empire.
Unlike historians before Williams, historians of the second half of the 20th century, although they did not always agree with the Williams’ thesis, would take economics into account when studying the subject (p. vii).
Gregory Morgan - Gregory Morgan is a writer who currently lives in Hattiesburg, Missississppi. He is interested in a vast array of topics. His favorite ...
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