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

Did slavery finance British industry?

One of the most important 20th-century analysts of the slave trade was Eric Williams, a historian who later became Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. His thesis was that high profits from the slave trade provided the capital which made the Industrial Revolution possible.

Undoubtedly, the cities of Bristol and Liverpool grew rich on the triangular trade, as did many of the financial institutions which still dominate the City of London today.

By 1752, Liverpool, which had sent out its first recorded slave ship in 1700, had a fleet capable of carrying nearly 26,000 slaves, crowded together 'like books upon a shelf'. By the 1790s Liverpool accounted for 60% of the British trade in slaves. It was also the gateway for manufactured goods on their way to Africa, and for sugar, cotton and tobacco arriving from the slave plantations in the Caribbean and America.

Williams uses the example of the cotton industry to describe the impact of the wealth from slavery on changing economic conditions in Britain. The cotton gin mechanised the production of cloth so it could be made in factories more cheaply than by highly skilled and well paid spinners and weavers who worked in their own homes.

Raw cotton from slave plantations picked by unpaid labour, was imported from across the Atlantic to be transformed into cloth in Manchester's factories. Some was sold in Britain, but some, particularly brightly coloured Indian-type textiles, were loaded on to ships bound for Africa to be exchanged for slaves. By 1770 one third of Manchester textiles were sold to the African market.

Other industries and cities boomed on these profits. For example, Liverpool became a centre for building ships for the triangular trade. Liverpool MP Lord Penrhyn owned 600 slaves in Jamaica and used the profits from his plantations to establish the Welsh slate industry.

Birmingham's iron industry was in demand for manufacturing 'chains, handcuffs, and iron collars for the poor slaves', according to the 19th-century Birmingham historian, R K Dent.

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