The "Age of Discovery" from 1450 to 1650 ushered in a new age of world history based

on European mastery of ocean travel, increased migration, and economic, political, and

cultural expansion. The European exploration into the Caribbean region was not

arbitrary, and it was not representative of just the ideas of philanthropy and science as

often argued but it was a commercial venture intended to reap rewards. One can also note

that the period around 1492 was one which facilitated the movement of Europeans out

towards exploration. In 1450, the Portuguese and Spanish were already engaging in some

kind of slave trade. Historians often refer to the ‘Age of Discovery’ as the pioneer

Portuguese and Spanish long-distance maritime travels in search of alternative trade

routes to the West Indies, moved by the trade of gold, silver and spices. Black or African

slavery originated with the end of white slavery in 1453 and the widespread need for

labour, particularly in the new sugar producing settlements. The Europeans knew too that

getting Amerindian or indigenous labourers would be futile as they were thought to not

be capable of doing the work especially in agriculture where as, the Africans possessed

the skills. As a result of this, many scholars cited that the African Slave trade affected the

economic growth of the British Economy and thus facilitated the by propelling of

industrialization.

In the fourteenth century the African slave trade was referred as the Transatlantic Slave

Trade as it involved Europe, the Americas and Africa. The slave trade was part of the

triangular Atlantic trade, which was probably the most important and profitable trading

route in the world. Ships from Europe would carry a cargo of manufactured trade goods

to Africa. They would exchange the trade goods for slaves which they would transport to

the Americas. In the Americas, they would sell the slaves and pick up a cargo of

agricultural products, often produced with slave labour, for Europe. The first side of the

triangle was the export of goods from Europe to Africa. A minority of African kings and

merchants took part in the trading of slaves from 1450 to about 1900 bodies of slaves.

Slaves were taken predominately from the Western coast and they were prisoners of war

that were sold to make slavery possible. For the slave, the African kings would receive a

variety of goods from Europe. Many of them were confronted with the dilemma of trade

with Europe or be slaves of Europe. This is because the slaves were exposed to new
diseases and also because of malnutrition. Five times the amount of slaves were

transported to the Americas compared to those transported to Europe. The third and final

part of the triangle was the return of goods to Europe from the Americas. The goods were

the products of slave-labour plantations and included cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses,

silver, rice and gold. The African slaves were placed to work hard in order to generate

wealth for the British Empire.

Dr. Eric Williams was considered to be a pioneer in his research, “Capitalism and

Slavery” which helped the world in understanding the Atlantic Slave Trade in Britain.

His thesis played an important role in weighing the benefits of the African Slave Trade

and noted that “Capitalism and Slavery” asserted that triangular trade was instrumental in

developing the capital used in launching Britain’s industrial revolution. Williams gave as

his evidence connections between slave traders or West Indian sugar planters and three

economic sectors crucial to the industrial revolution which were banking, heavy industry,

and insurance. Men like Boulton and Watt received advances from Lowe, Vere, Williams

and Jennings and had ships trading with the West Indies and used the profits to invest in

the steam engine; their desire was to have it speed up sugar processing. In Liverpool

especially, slave traders founded major banks or those associated with the trade. Men

who had accumulated their capital in the African trade in 1753 founded Heywood Bank.

Banks were also established in Manchester and Glasgow, both closely connected with the

cotton trade, and hence with slavery, and in Bristol and London, both competing with

Liverpool before the 1770’s for control of the slave trade. In heavy industry, some of the

capital, which supported metallurgical industries, came directly from the triangular trade.

Triangular trade was also associated with insurance companies. Williams’ thesis did not

rest solely on the contribution of slave trade capital. Other major contributors of the

triangular trade were the sugar colonies of the West Indies. According to Williams,

mercantilism stimulated industrial development.

The New World plantation system was a highly developed form of the slave mode of

production that, unlike ancient slavery, was integrated into and increasingly driven by a

growing capitalist world market. In Capitalism and slavery, Eric Williams argued that the

profits from New World slavery had significantly contributed to the ‘primitive
accumulation’ of capital that enabled the industrial revolution, especially in Britain.

However, by the end of the 18th century, the profitability of plantation slavery was in

decline and so was the slave system as a whole. This latter point is contested at least for

the period before the abolition of the slave trade. However, it was certainly in decline

relative to the overall development of British capitalism, which is Williams’ main point.

It had played a crucial role during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the process

of accumulation of capital, but became increasingly secondary and eventually marginal to

later development. There were now more profitable outlets in industry and commerce for

investments than in the dirty slave business.

At its high point towards the end of the eighteenth century the Atlantic triangular trade

supplied about one third of all European imports and could make up to 200 percent profit

on investments. In Britain a copper and brass industry was created along the Avon valley

to supply Bristol with quality metal goods to be traded for slaves in Africa. Similarly the

iron industries of the Severn valley did the same. Wealth poured into ports such as

Bristol, London, Liverpool and Glasgow, which provided more capital for investments

and credit to kick-start the industrial revolution. By 1770 ‘Britain’s colonial markets

absorbed 38% of her exports’. But it was during the last quarter of the eighteenth century

that industrial take-off occurred leading to a gradual relative decline in the importance of

the slave colonies. It was the existing dynamism of emergent British capitalism based on

wage labour that enabled Britain to become the dominant slaving nation. By the end of

the eighteenth century there were fifty factories in Manchester alone employing hundreds

even thousands of workers. Rapid industrialization required new larger markets and drew

in more and more capital investment, pushing the Atlantic trade system into relative

decline. British capitalism had outgrown the triangular trade.

Joseph Inikori in “Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in England,”

argued that from the mid-fourteenth through the mid-fifteenth centuries, population

growth was rapid enough that Britain could move towards a capitalist economy. He also

noted that not all workers were needed to grow food to sustain the population. By 1650,

the still-rapid population growth demanded employment outside of agriculture. The

growth of overseas trade provided that employment. Exports soon became the largest

contributors to the move towards a capitalist England. Inikori gives as an example the

change in manufactured “exports from 1700 to 1811”. In 1700 manufacturing, mining,

and “building made 18.5 million pounds, of which 3.8 million were exports and 14.7

million” were consumed at home. In 1811, the same three industries made “62.5 million

pounds, of which 28.2 million were exports and 34.3 million” were for home

consumption. This means that the percentage of mining, manufactured, and building

products that was exported rose from “20 percent to 45 percent” in the course of the

eighteenth century. These exports largely went to the West Indian colonies. Without

such a high rate of exports, industrialization would have been considerably slower.

Another scholar which noted the benefits of the slave trade to the British economy was

Blackburn. Blackburn in his study calculates that the total profits earned from the

Atlantic system are almost three million pounds. His upper “estimate was 4,336,000

pounds”. Blackburn goes on to say that there is reason to believe that re-investment of

these profits was quite high, between 30 and 50 percent. This meant that Atlantic System

profits could account for one-half to four-fifths of the gross fixed capital needed to

finance a major industrial undertaking. One major undertaking in this time was canal

building; merchants and bankers and manufacturers contributed 36 percent of the

finances used to build canals in eighteenth century. Those are the very people involved in

trade within the Atlantic. Blackburn has thus shown that the Atlantic system did have a

likely impact on financing the industrial revolution.

Blackburn used the framework of primitive accumulation to prove the import of the

Atlantic system to the Industrial Revolution. According to Marx, capitalism first required

a phase of “primitive accumulation,” a period in which people acquired capital, which

they were then able to invest. Adam Smith called this phase “previous accumulation.”

Blackburn believes the West Indies provided a state of “extended primitive

accumulation,” meaning the West Indies offered an opportunity to constantly acquire

capital to invest. This allowed Britain to produce more than its mainland population and

agricultural capabilities would allow. Blackburn cites Davis’ figures on exports by

location, finding that exports to the Atlantic colonies were 43 percent from 1784-86 and

57 percent from 1806-08. To further his argument, he cites Crafts’ newest numbers,

which show that the rise of exports contributed 56.3 percent of the total rise in industrial

output from 1700-60, and 46.2 percent from 1780-1800. This offers convincing evidence

of the importance of the Atlantic system in promoting the Industrial Revolution.

The slave trade was a big part of the British economy during 1700-1807. British ships

would sail to Western Africa and trade fine goods for slaves which would then be traded

in other parts of Southern and Northern America for items such as sugar, rum, tobacco

and cotton. All these things brought a massive increase to the British economy. Many

people benefited from the slave trade, many of these people would send items with

vessels over to Africa, and then months later would receive many valuable items that

came back with that same vessel. The main reason for this trading of slaves and other

items was for money, the profit that came back from a vessel was very high and this

cause many people to gravitate towards this.

Slavery was involved in some of the most profitable industries of the time where

according to Williams, ‘70%’ of the slaves brought to the new world were used to

produce sugar, the most labour intensive crop. The rest were employed harvesting coffee,

cotton, and tobacco, and in some cases in mining. The West Indian colonies of the

European powers were some of their most important possessions and they went to

extremes to protect and retain them. Another scholar used the example, in 1763, France

agreed to give the vast colony of New France in exchange for keeping the minute

Antillean island of Guadeloupe.

By far the most successful West Indian colonies in 1800 belonged to the United

Kingdom. After entering the sugar colony business late, British naval supremacy and

control over key islands such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados and the territory of

British Guiana gave it an important edge over all competitors; while many lost, some
made enormous fortunes, even by upper class standards. This advantage was reinforced

when France lost its most important colony, St. Dominique, to a slave revolt in 1791 and

supported revolts against its rival Britain, after the 1793 French revolution in the name of

liberty. The British islands produced the most sugar, and the British people quickly

became the largest consumers of sugar. West Indian sugar became ubiquitous as an

additive to Chinese tea. Products of American slave labour soon permeated every level of

British society with tobacco, coffee, and especially sugar all becoming indispensable

elements of daily life for all classes.

However, in 1972, Roger Anstey another known scholar begged to differ from Williams

and others when he published a response to Capitalism and Slavery in his book, The

Slave Trade and British Abolition. Anstey makes extensive use of economic calculations

in order to prove his argument that the slave trade did not have a major impact on the

industrial revolution. Anstey calculated that profits from the slave trade came to about

nine percent of the amount invested. In real money terms, this would be slightly over

nine million pounds total profit in the second half of the 17th century. The annual average

came to about 200,000 pounds. By 1800, the national ratio of investment to national

income was about seven percent; national income was about 180 million pounds, so

national investment was 12.6 million pounds per year. He suggested that if slave-trading

profits followed other investment tendencies, meaning seven percent was invested, the

slave trade profits that were invested ‘totalled 14,000 pounds per year, which is 0.11% of

the total national investment’.

Anstey continued by focusing in on industrial investments. Industrial investments

accounted for ‘about 20% of total national investments’ at this time slave trade

investments would have ‘accounted for .56% of all industrial investments’. Anstey

wanted the readers to assume that all slave trade profits were invested directly into

industrialism, they would have ‘accounted for 7.94% of the total’. According to Anstey,

these numbers soundly disprove Williams’ thesis that the triangular trade was the

springboard to industrialism.
Prior to and since the publication of Capitalism and Slavery, historians have given many

arguments for the uniqueness of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Many of these are linked

to the sometimes-called Agricultural Revolution, which started earlier and exponentially

increased the food available in Britain at a lower labor cost. Others feel it was the

abundance of coal that gave Britain’s its edge. Still others would look to the growth of

home markets to explain their position of wealth. It is impractical to ignore this matter of

slavery; British colonies were an obvious source of wealth at this time, and slaves made

the wealth in many of those colonies. One may never have the exact figures, nor may see

the intricate linkages, but it is obvious that, without slavery, the Industrial Revolution

would not have been the British advantage it was.

 Works Cited

Blackburn, Robin. "The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery." The

William and Mary Quarterly. 54.1 (1997): 65-102. Print.

Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988.

Print.

Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern,

1492-1800. London: Verso, 1997. Print.

Inikori, Joseph E. "Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism in England."

Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 17.4 (1987): 771-793. Print.

Williams, Eric E. Capitalism and Slavery: Eric Williams. Introduction by D. W. Brogan.

London: A. Deutsch, 1964. Print.