The Slave Trade and the Industrial Revolution

Writers: Julia Bard and David Rosenberg

Introduction | Triangular trade | Did slavery finance British industry? | Booming cities and new institutions | Abolition – moral conviction or economic self-interest? | Conclusion | Find out more

Abolition – moral conviction or economic self-interest?

Williams' attention to economic detail punctured the comforting myth that despite the immorality of slavery, Britain could at least celebrate those determined individuals who campaigned for abolition. He shows how the new industrial economy and mechanised efficiency in Britain rendered the plantation system relatively less efficient and profitable.

Abolitionists' seal from the 1780s. However, not until increased production required a mass wage-earning market, did an end to slavery became an economic, rather than simply moral necessity. LP Pics

The mass-production of goods in the new factories craved expanding markets: consumers with purchasing power – factory workers who needed wages, rather than slaves who earned nothing. Therefore, despite the high moral tone of abolitionist campaigners like Wilberforce, Williams argued that the abolition of slavery was actually brought about by economic self-interest rather than a conviction that slavery was wrong.

Williams echoes a point made forcefully by another Trinidadian writer, CLR James, in 1938. James urged historians to ask: '[w]why it is man's conscience, which had slept peacefully for so many centuries, should awake just at the time that men began to see the unprofitableness of slavery as a method of production in the West Indian colonies?'

Later historians such as Adam Hochschild highlighted the series of slave revolts as another major factor in pushing emancipation through Parliament. Abolition, in any case, did not end British industry's involvement with slavery. Britain continued to import goods produced by slave labour in America for many decades after the Slavery Abolition Act came into force in 1834.

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