Capitalism and Slavery on the Islands: A Lesson from the Mainland

Summary

In selecting a title for his now-classic book, Williams chose to relate one of the most palpable realities of Western economic history to one of the slipperiest abstractions of the Western intellectual heritage. With a rather different set of specific concerns, the same association has been at the heart of the debate over slavery in the United States, for the past two decades if not longer. Aroused primarily by the analysis set forth by Genovese in The Political Economy of Slavery and subsequent works, the mainland discussion has focused on the social identity and economic motivations of the slaveholding classes. Historians of British abolition have been more concerned with the motives and politics of the abolitionists in relationship to industrial capitalism. But there is a bedrock economic question common to both histories: was abolition facilitated by a decline of the slave economy? On close examination, there are many other thought-provoking parallels between the West Indian and North American cases. Yet, with a few significant exceptions, they have been treated separately. This essay takes an unorthodox historical approach. It first sketches a reasonably well-developed analysis of capitalism and slavery for the American South in the nineteenth century, and then carries the suggestions formulated by this exercise back to the eighteenth-century British West Indies to see what light they shed on the earlier experience.

This essay does not concern itself with confirming or refuting the “Williams thesis.”