Millennie Al wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 2:53 am
Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 11:08 am
A book on the economics of slavery and the foundational role that wealth generated posted in the Industrial Revolution is finally being published, 80 years after it was written, having been suppressed by white snowflakes who prefer to tell the tale of abolition as if it were simply the gradual refinement of white folks' moral sensibilities.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... shed-in-uk
Did you read that article all the way to the end? It says:
However, the text – which is still in print in America and has been translated into nine different languages and published all over the world – has been inaccessible and out of print in this country for years.
It was published in 1944 in America and seem to have been widely read and discussed. As to being unavailable in the UK, that was clearly in the dark ages before Amazon when obtaining a book from abroad was so difficult. In reality, this Giardian article is merely a disguised advertisement for a new edition. This is not some highly dramatic revelation following 80 years of suppression - not least because it was published in the UK in 1966 and reviewd in the TLS - but merely a commercial decision.
The Graun went back and corrected the article to make clear that in fact the book was in fact published in Britain in the 1960s by a major publishing house, and had several reprints. But it did go out of print for a long time. So I bought it and read it. It's very readable, at least to economic history nerds like me.
A key point for me, which made the course of Williams' argument compelling to me, and which doesn't come out in the Graun review, is the following.
Slave-powered sugar plantations were set up in the British West Indies (BWI), the first large scale slave-powered agriculture for export in the world. These plantations initially made a huge amount of money. The sugar was largely sent to Britain, where it was refined and then exported to the world. BWI was the wealthiest corner of the world for a time. But these were small mountainous islands, which merely had a first-mover advantage in the sugar plantation market, in part reinforced by British restrictive trade practices, and soon exhausted their soil. It took quite a while, but eventually sugar was being produced at half the cost by slave-powered plantations in Cuba, Brazil, Hispaniola (especially the French end, now Haiti), etc, who had enough space for larger plantations and for crop rotation. It was also half the cost from India, which was not strictly slave labour, but there were other unpleasant forms of servitude routine in India. The British aristocracy got themselves heavily into West Indian sugar, and fabulously wealthy off it. And the planters sponsored many MPs at Westminster. So parliament granted the British West Indies a monopoly of the British market, which kept the West Indies going for some time longer, despite the large cost disadvantage.
But there were counter-interests wanting access to cheap sugar - British sugar refiners exporting to Europe, and representatives of the British consumer, and it eventually became unsupportable. Once the BWI lost their monopoly of the British sugar market, their sugar plantations collapsed. By this time the US was already independent. So Britain now had very little direct interest remaining in any profitable slave-powered plantations. It is noticeable that it was around this time that anti-slavery morality started to gain some traction in Britain.
Clearly Britain retained substantial economic interests in slavery even after the economic collapse of the BWI:
- British slave ships were the suppliers of about 90% of slaves to all the colonies of the New World - Portuguese, Spanish, French, the USA.
- Britain refined slave-produced sugar from Brazil, Cuba, etc, and exported it to Europe.
- The British textile industry, the massive engine of the British economy in the 19th century, depended substantially on slave-produced cotton from the USA.
- And in general, a lot of slave-produced tropical products consumed in Britain too.
Williams documents how all of these economic factors and vested interests were introduced into the Westminster parliamentary debates over slavery, and how that influenced the staged limitations on slavery. For example, in 1807 the slave trade was abolished. But it didn't abolish slavery in the British Empire: that came with the 1833 Act. Even that fell short of abolishing near-slavery forms of servitude in places like India. Also, as long as there was extensive demand for slaves in the other colonies of the New World, British slavers continued illegally to supply them. The Navy was sent to try and restrict this, but at great cost and rather little success, they eventually gave up.
The practice of economic history has moved on to advantage since Williams' time. There is not a single diagram or table in the book. Rather he sets out his numerical data in text in paragraphs. Better modern practice would put it in tables and graphs and maps. He also fails to set out his arguments as clearly as a modern text might. Nevertheless it is a compelling book to read, and brings a huge amount of research and sources together. It certainly dispels the view that Britain ended slavery solely on grounds of morality, but rather economic factors were very present in the debate and outcomes.