Capitalism and Slavery review: How Britain became an industrial power

Capitalism and Slavery

Author: Eric Williams

ISBN-13: 978-0241548165

Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics

Guideline Price: £9.99

History has never been more important with Putin using distorted history to justify his war against Ukraine. This makes it all the more necessary to have reasoned, well-argued, books telling us what really happened in the past. Penguin could not have chosen a better time to reissue Eric Williams book.

Williams wrote it in 1938 as his Oxford University dissertation but six British publishers turned it down and he only found a publisher in the US in 1944 after agreeing to pay $700 to finance its publication. He had to borrow the money from West Indian friends but with the book earning royalties of only $272.80 he struggled to repay his benefactors.

Sugar plantations

The reason British publishers had rejected it was because Williams was challenging what was and remains the accepted view that racism led to slavery and that slavery played little role in the economic growth of Britain. Williams convincingly argues that the slave trade led to the belief in white supremacy and that it provided the money for Britain to become the first great industrial power. The capital provided by the work of the slaves on the West Indian sugar plantations financed James Watt and the steam engine and its various stages of development including the double stroke for Watt’s pistons. West Indian slavery was also the engine of British capitalism and, as Williams succinctly puts it, “The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it. When British capitalism depended on the West Indian monopoly [in sugar] they ignored slavery or defended it.”

Emancipation ‘blunder’

Nor, shows Williams, were all abolitionists motivated by high moral considerations, many wanted to end the slave trade for economic reasons and initially almost none of them wanted to emancipate the “Negro”. They eventually made emancipation their aim, but this did not go down well with many, with Disraeli saying that emancipation was the greatest blunder ever committed by the English people.

Williams, who went on to become the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago, marshals his facts with almost the same skills he showed as a public speaker and the book deserves to be called a classic.