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(More customer reviews)The transformation from subsistance society where everyone more or less consumed what they produced, to international capitalism required as a precondition the accumulation of capital. That is, some people had to be able to produce more than they consumed before they could have anything to invest.
Williams contribution to the literature of this transformation is to focus on the role of the slave trade. On the one hand, it provided a source of raw materials (human beings) which could be sold at a profit by traders, and then used to produce even more wealth by the buyers (slaveholders). This double accumulation of wealth went a long way toward allowing a few very wealthy people to accumulate capital, which coul;d then be invested in things like machinery.
At the same time, the slave trade provided an economic foundation for a large scale international trading network (the famous molasses, slave, rum triangle, later includeing cotton). Without this international network of shippers and merchants, the English (and later New England) cotton mills would not have had anywhere to sell their manufactured product (cotton cloth), nor a cheap source of cotton to use as raw materials.
Williams' ground breaking contirbution was to link all of this together, and argue that without the immoral slave trade, the industrial revolution, and thus capitalism as we know it, would not have happened. The inescapable conclusion is that since much of modern wealth was founded on slavery, some form of reparations is warranted.
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Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England.Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.
Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.
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