Capitalism and Slavery: a Critique

Abstract

HE unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.2 Whilst the mass of Englishmen probably continue to believe that Wilberforce and his Evangelical brethren secured the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in a manner wholly creditable to themselves and only a little less to their country, it would also seem that, at the scholarly level, the dictum of Lecky was only a slightly extreme form of the view commonly held until about the midway point of the present century. Prof. Coupland, in particular, had in the inter-war years substantially endorsed Lecky.3 Admittedly the West Indian writer, C. L. R. James, had argued in I 938 that Pitt's humanitarianism in the I 790's was, at best, subordinate to a global strategy aimed at breaking the monopoly of the continental market enjoyed by San Domingo sugar, and replacing it with British sugar.4 But this was an incidental theme in a work of Marxist historical interpretation, and it is doubtful if this minor strand attracted much attention. When in I944 Dr Eric Williams launched a frontal attack on the traditional view, it was the first major onslaught to be made in the English-speaking world. For the author of Capitalism and Slavery5 the perspectives of men like Coupland, C. M. MacInnes,6 and F. J. Klingberg7 were all wrong. The role of the humanitarians, the key figures in what amounted to a parade of virtue, had been seriously misunderstood and grossly exaggerated by men who have sacrificed scholarship to sentimentality and, like the scholastics of old, placed faith before reason and evidence.8 Positively, and in Williams's own words, Capitalism and Slavery was strictly an economic study of the role of Negro slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system.9 The immediate formal reception of the book was muted, doubtless because of the distractions of war time: no more than summary reviews appear to have been published. But in the following years the book came to gain considerable favour amongst historians, and also amongst many English-speaking West African intellectuals who saw it as a bed-rock statement of Afro-European relations before the colonial period. In the former case a sympathy with the growing cause of