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

Conclusion

Eric Williams' book, Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944, remains both influential and controversial. Some historians have said that Williams' thesis does not explain why the slave trade ignited an industrial economy in Britain but not in other countries that were also deeply involved in the trade, like Spain and Portugal. Others have argued that only a small percentage of profits from slavery were directly invested as capital in the industrial revolution.

Most historians today, while drawing on Williams' important research and ideas, believe this is only part of a very complex story. The Industrial Revolution was also a response to internal factors. Rapid advances in the technology and economy of farming drove people off the land and into the cities, and created a labour-force for new factories.

Slavery increased the profits by a considerable margin but entrepreneurs also expanded the economy in their own right by ploughing back profits from production into their own industries in Britain. The debate on the precise percentage of profits from the slave trade that provided the capital for the machinery of the Industrial Revolution perhaps misses the point. Because whatever was invested stimulated considerable economic growth which was, in itself, a catalyst to an expansion of cities and regions that was unimaginable before European explorers reached the New World and began trading on such a huge scale in raw materials and humans.

The slave trade helped Britain become the 'workshop of the world' while reinforcing a racist view of Africans as fit only for menial and manual tasks. Today, when that 'workshop' struggles to compete with other industrial powers, many descendents of slaves remain impoverished and marginalised within Britain's once booming cities.

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