Introduction

Summary

The connections between slavery, Atlantic trade and the British economy between 1660 and 1800 are an appropriate subject for a book in this series, for Britain in the period under consideration witnessed the ‘Americanisation’ of overseas trade, the last years of a pre-industrial economy and the birth of the first industrial nation. British merchants, planters and politicians became more interested and involved in the growth of empire and transoceanic trade in the long eighteenth century. Gregory King's estimates of social structure showed that in 1688 England had a well-developed commercial sector consisting of merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, artisans and handicraftsmen – a more differentiated and extensive middling sector than in any other western European country (Mathias, 1983: 27). The existence of a strong commercial sector in the English economy by 1700 provided a strong platform for the impetus towards commerce with and settlement in far-flung territories. Overseas expansion was accompanied by the emergence and growth of plantation slave labour in North America and the Caribbean. As the British economy developed in the Hanoverian period, greater manufacturing and agricultural output was accompanied by a demographic upswing after c. 1740, technological improvements in coal and textiles and a burgeoning network of inland and overseas trade.