Slavery, Sugar, and Industrialization: A Student Primer
“The only group of clear gainers from the British trans-Atlantic slave trade, and even those gains were small, were the European consumers of sugar and tobacco and other plantation crops. They were given the chance to purchase dental decay and lung cancer at somewhat lower prices than would have been the case without the slave trade.” (Thomas and Bean 1974)
I. Introduction Since Eric Williams wrote Capitalism and Slavery, and proposed that slavery had a fundamental effect on the Industrial Revolution, his statements have been at the center of academic debate. Multiple sides have been taken by historical economists on this debate, and the statement has since been dubbed the “Williams …show more content…
According to Barbara Solow, this link has been a historical precedent established by the earliest sugar production in Europe. Sugarcane, a native plant of the South Pacific, was brought to Europe from the South Pacific, through to Southeast Asia, brought west by the Arabs, and finally to Europe. Solow traces the roots of the sugar plantation, from its earliest incarnations in Italy, where it first tied itself to the institution of Western slavery. She argues that the institution of slavery made the colonial sugar plantations possible, as waiting for a population to voluntarily immigrate would have been economically unfeasible. There is no limiting factor of production in the setup of a plantation. This “sugar-slave complex”, as Barbara Solow describes it, spread to Madeira, the Canaries, the West African island, eventually to the Americas, starting with Brazil and ultimately making its way up into the Caribbean. With this “sugar-slave complex” went resources, capital, and ships, which produced the first trans-Atlantic trade system. This trade system was fundamental in developing a flow of “labor, capital, manufactures, sugar, raw materials, shipping, banking and insurance”. By fundamentally changing the structure and flow of money they create new opportunities to be exploited by this opening of resources. Because of this, the opening of transatlantic trade not only …show more content…
Has there been a conspiracy of silence, or have they a sound intellectual foundation for ignoring the Williams hypothesis? Or has it simply been a more innocent oversight among a group of scholars so passionately engaged in supporting or debunking one another’s pet explanations for the rise of British industry that they failed to consider explanations put forward by others outside their loop? … A blanket of scholarly silence, a cloak of historical invisibility, has been laid by these disputants over the causes of British industrialization and over the significance of the slave trade and the slave plantations. But it is not a golden silence, for it has served only to obscure the richer and brutal story of how the modern world took shape, ‘small’ import and export ratios and nonmonopoly profits
“The only group of clear gainers from the British trans-Atlantic slave trade, and even those gains were small, were the European consumers of sugar and tobacco and other plantation crops. They were given the chance to purchase dental decay and lung cancer at somewhat lower prices than would have been the case without the slave trade.” (Thomas and Bean 1974)
I. Introduction Since Eric Williams wrote Capitalism and Slavery, and proposed that slavery had a fundamental effect on the Industrial Revolution, his statements have been at the center of academic debate. Multiple sides have been taken by historical economists on this debate, and the statement has since been dubbed the “Williams …show more content…
According to Barbara Solow, this link has been a historical precedent established by the earliest sugar production in Europe. Sugarcane, a native plant of the South Pacific, was brought to Europe from the South Pacific, through to Southeast Asia, brought west by the Arabs, and finally to Europe. Solow traces the roots of the sugar plantation, from its earliest incarnations in Italy, where it first tied itself to the institution of Western slavery. She argues that the institution of slavery made the colonial sugar plantations possible, as waiting for a population to voluntarily immigrate would have been economically unfeasible. There is no limiting factor of production in the setup of a plantation. This “sugar-slave complex”, as Barbara Solow describes it, spread to Madeira, the Canaries, the West African island, eventually to the Americas, starting with Brazil and ultimately making its way up into the Caribbean. With this “sugar-slave complex” went resources, capital, and ships, which produced the first trans-Atlantic trade system. This trade system was fundamental in developing a flow of “labor, capital, manufactures, sugar, raw materials, shipping, banking and insurance”. By fundamentally changing the structure and flow of money they create new opportunities to be exploited by this opening of resources. Because of this, the opening of transatlantic trade not only …show more content…
Has there been a conspiracy of silence, or have they a sound intellectual foundation for ignoring the Williams hypothesis? Or has it simply been a more innocent oversight among a group of scholars so passionately engaged in supporting or debunking one another’s pet explanations for the rise of British industry that they failed to consider explanations put forward by others outside their loop? … A blanket of scholarly silence, a cloak of historical invisibility, has been laid by these disputants over the causes of British industrialization and over the significance of the slave trade and the slave plantations. But it is not a golden silence, for it has served only to obscure the richer and brutal story of how the modern world took shape, ‘small’ import and export ratios and nonmonopoly profits