Capitalism, Abolitionism, and Hegemony

Summary

Attention is turning once again to the almost simultaneous appearance of industrial capitalism and antislavery sentiment in Great Britain. Since the publication of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery, more than a generation ago, the relation between these two broad forces has provoked considerable debate. As Howard Temperley demonstrates in his essay in this volume, the issues have acquired high ideological voltage in the Third World as well as in Britain and the United States.

Williams and his many followers have sought to portray Britain's antislavery measures as economically-determined acts of national self-interest, cynically disguised as humanitarian triumphs. Roger Anstey, who led the way in undermining Williams's case for economic motivation, viewed Christianity's role in abolitionism as nothing less than “a saving event within the context of Salvation History.” While few of Williams's opponents have shared this explicit faith in slave emancipation as a step toward historical redemption, it has been difficult to find a middle ground that rejects Williams's cynical reductionism but that takes account of the realities of class power. A historian who scrutinizes the moral pretensions of the abolitionists or who observes, to borrow a phrase C. Vann Woodward has applied to the American Civil War, that West Indian emancipation enabled Britain to add an immense sum to the national “treasury of virtue” and to bank on it for “futures in moral credit,” runs the risk of being classified as a follower of Eric Williams. Yet national pride is especially dangerous and deceptive, as Reinhold Niebuhr reminded us, when it is based on the highest achievements of human history.