By Dr. Eric Williamsโ
Capitalism and Slavery covers the economic history of sugar and slavery into the 19th century and discusses the decline of Caribbean sugar plantations from 1823.
Capitalism and Slavery is a classic that has been able to withstand the test of time. Despite being written more than 70 years ago.
In 1938, a brilliant young Black scholar at Oxford University wrote a thesis on the economic history of British empire and challenged a claim about slavery that had been defining Britainโs role in the world for more than a century.
But when Eric Williams โ who would later become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago โ sought to publish his โmind-blowingโ thesis on capitalism and slavery in Britain, he was shunned by publishers and accused of undermining the humanitarian motivation for Britainโs Slavery Abolition Act.
Now, 84 years after his work was rejected in the UK, and 78 years after it was first published in America, where it became a highly influential anti-colonial text, Williamsโs book, Capitalism and Slavery, will finally be published in Britain by a mainstream British publisher.
Slavery, Williams argues, was abolished in much of the British empire in 1833 because doing so at that time was in Britainโs economic self-interest โ not because the British suddenly discovered a conscience.
โThe capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it,โ he writes. In the early 19th century, slave-owning sugar planters in the Caribbean British colonies enjoyed a monopoly on the supply of sugar to Britain, because of an imperial tax policy of protectionism. Williams argues: โWhen British capitalism depended on [sugar and cotton plantations in] the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly [on sugar] a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of West Indian monopoly.โ
The Industrial Revolution could not have happened without slavery โ Williams made the case for this in 1938.
It was all this wealth created by slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries that powered the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, Williams argued. And it was this economic change that meant the preferential sugar duties โ which artificially pushed up the price of sugar in the UK, a deliberate policy that had once so suited the many wealthy British families involved in the slave trade โ came to be seen by 19th-century industrialists as an โunpopularโ barrier to free trade, low factory wages and global domination.
The book, to be published by Penguin Modern Classics on 24 February, also traces the emergence of the slave trade in the 16th century when the demand for labour exceeded the number of white convicts and poor, white, indentured servants willing to work the land cheaply. โA racial twist has been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery,โ he writes.
Williams submitted his manuscript to the most โrevolutionaryโ publisher he could find in 1930s Britain, Fredric Warburg, who had published Hitlerโs Mein Kampf in 1925 and would later go on to publish George Orwellโs Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It was rejected out of hand. Any suggestion that the slave trade and slavery were abolished for economic and not humanitarian reasons ran โcontrary to the British traditionโ, Warburg told him, adding: โI would never publish such a book.โ
One reason the book still has the power to shock is because, to this day, British historians still do not take the arguments in Williamsโs book seriously, according to Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University and author of The New Age of Empire. โThe orthodoxy of the history of the Industrial Revolution is that slavery wasnโt important. If you go to most universities, most academics will say that and theyโll dismiss the book โ because they just cannot accept that the Industrial Revolution could not have happened without slavery. Itโs that simple. You cannot have one without the other, which this book made the case for in 1938. And itโs still being ignored.โ
Capitalism and Slavery continued to be spurned by British publishers until 1966, when a small university press gave it a very limited print run here.
However, the text โ which is still in print in America and has been translated into nine different languages and published all over the world โ has been inaccessible and out of print in this country for years. โItโs good that the bookโs being published by a major publisher, but itโs kind of an indictment that itโs taken more than 80 years,โ said Andrews. โI hope people read it and itโs nice itโs available. But I think it will probably just get ignored in Britain, the way it has been, largely, in the past.โ
Dr. Eric Williamsโ โCapitalism and Slaveryโ finally published in UK eighty years later added by The Caribbean Camera Inc. on January 28, 2022
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