The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery

276 Pages·2014·2.11 MB·English

by  Eric Williams

The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian
Slave Trade and Slavery
WORLD SOCIAL CHANGE
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The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and
Slavery Eric Williams, edited by Dale W. Tomich, introduction by William
Darity Jr.
The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the
West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery
Eric Williams
Edited by Dale Tomich
With an Introduction by William Darity Jr.
A FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER BOOK
Rowman & Littlefield
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data Williams, Eric Eustace, 1911-1981.
The economic aspect of the abolition of the West Indian slave trade and slavery / Eric Williams ; edited by
Dale W. Tomich ; introduction by William Darity Jr.
pages cm. — (World social change)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-3139-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3140-5 (electronic) 1. Industries--Great
Britain—History. 2. Great Britain—Economic conditions. 3. Slave trade—Great Britain. I. Tomich, Dale
W., 1946-editor. II. Title.
HC254.5.W5 2014
382'.4409729—dc23
2013048228
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Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction
THE ECONOMIC ASPECT of the ABOLITION of the WEST INDIAN
SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY by Eric Williams, B.A.
Introduction
Part I: The Abolition of the Slave Trade
Chapter 1: The Impolicy of the Slave System
Chapter 2: The Superiority of the French West Indies
Chapter 3: East India Sugar
Chapter 4: The Attempt to Secure an International Abolition
Chapter 5: The West Indian Expeditions
Chapter 6: The Significance of the West Indian Expeditions
Chapter 7: The Abolition of the Slave Trade
Part II: The Abolition of Slavery
Chapter 8: The Abolitionists and Emancipation
Chapter 9: The Foreign Slave Trade
Chapter 10: East India Sugar
Chapter 11: The Distressed Areas
Chapter 12: The Industrialists and Emancipation
Epilogue
Appendix One: The “Influential Men”
Appendix Two: Ramsay as an Authority
Appendix Three: Select Documents Illustrating the Inter-Colonial Slave Trade
Bibliography
About the Authors
Preface
Dale Tomich
Distinguished West Indian historian and politician Eric Williams is perhaps best
known for his Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944. The book’s
enduring importance lies in its comprehensive, systematic, and forceful effort to
integrate the history of slavery and the history of capitalism into a unified
analytical account. Williams boldly argued for the importance of slavery for the
development of capitalism in Britain and for the role of industrial capitalism in
creating the conditions for the abolition of the slave trade and slave
emancipation. From within this framework, he counterposed economic motives
and economic development to the prevailing humanitarian interpretation of
British abolition. Capitalism and Slavery thus provides a critical account of
colonialism, mercantilism, and capitalism articulated from a Caribbean
perspective. Capitalism and Slavery remains a fundamental work of Caribbean
and Atlantic history and is widely cited nearly seventy years after its publication.
Beyond the study of history it has influenced international scholarship on
questions of dependency, development, and the world-economy in a variety of
disciplines. It is still a critical reference and continues to be the subject of
scholarly controversy today.
In recent years, the controversy around Capitalism and Slavery has crystallized
around what has come to be known as the “Williams debate.” This debate has
proven to be fertile ground for the new economic history. New economic
historians have engaged in a broad examination of the economy of the slave
trade and slavery and have interrogated the “Williams thesis” utilizing
neoclassical economic theory, new techniques of analysis, and new sources of
data made possible by the development of computer technology. They have
produced impressive results, and their work has reshaped the study of slavery
and economic history more generally. The consensus among the economic
historians appears to be that Williams is incorrect. Slavery and the slave trade
were profitable, and there was no economic impetus behind the abolition of the
slave trade. Ironically, by invalidating the economic argument, they have
resurrected the humanitarian argument and emphasize ideology and moral force
as the factors behind the abolition of slavery. These results have engendered new
controversy over the methods and techniques of the new economic history as
well as the results that it has produced. The rejection of Williams’s argument and
analysis is contested, even from within the ranks of the economic historians and
certainly from without.
It is against this background that the publication of The Economic Aspect of the
Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery assumes renewed
importance. The dissertation was defended at Oxford University in 1938.
William Darity in his introduction as well as other Williams scholars have
indicated the obstacles that Williams faced both in defending the dissertation and
in getting it published. Capitalism and Slavery only came into print six years
after the defense of the dissertation. For Williams, these were important years of
intellectual and political development, influenced particularly by his experiences
on the faculty at Howard University, further study of the entire Caribbean
region, and by his voyage to Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto
Rico in 1940. When it finally appeared, Capitalism and Slavery was very
different from the dissertation. This, of course, is not at all unusual, but in this
instance, the dissertation arguably gains rather than loses significance in relation
to the published work.
The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and
Slavery brings three things—otherwise unavailable—to the contemporary reader.
Firstly, its content is different from that of Capitalism and Slavery. It contains an
extended analysis of slave emancipation and other questions that are not
included in the later work. At the same time, none of the material concerning the
role of slavery in the emergence of capitalism appears in the dissertation.
Secondly, Williams’s arguments are developed in greater detail and are more
fully documented. The dissertation contains a wealth of information, insights,
and hypotheses that will at once allow us to reinterpret Capitalism and Slavery
and enrich current scholarship. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the
dissertation gives us access to the workshop of a master historian as he comes to
grips with the relation between slave abolition and emancipation, capitalist
development, and imperial politics. Using the tools of his day, he asks questions
and opens perspectives that are still pertinent and provocative. Indeed, his
conceptual and theoretical preoccupations have become more pertinent with the
passage of time.
The current “Williams debate,” under pressure from the methodological
assumptions and requirements of the new economic history, has subtly
transmuted the terms of the discussion. Economics, politics, and ideology are
increasingly separated from one another and treated as discrete and integral
“factors.” The “economy” is juxtaposed to “ideology” and “politics” while
“capitalism,” whatever we may wish to mean by it, is removed from
consideration. Williams’s subtle and complex argument is reduced to the
question of whether or not slavery was “profitable.” The Economic Aspect of the
Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery allows us to recuperate
Williams’s efforts to construct an adequate conceptual framework for historical
analysis. It forcefully reminds us that Williams understands capitalism as a
complex historical relation embedded in and operating through specific political
and social institutions and national and transnational geopolitical configurations.
Consequently, he regards change not as the linear movement of discrete factors
but as the outcome of the historically contingent and conjunctural relations and
the shifting content of interrelated economic, political, and social processes.
Williams is perhaps even more explicit in the dissertation than in the book that
the condition for the crises of the British colonial system and British West Indian
slavery were the American and Haitian revolutions and that the capitalist
restructuring of economy and politics developed within the framework of
transformations in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, the United States, and the East Indies. He
explores these issues more systematically and in greater detail in the dissertation
than in the book.
As William Darity reminds us, The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the
West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery has remained an obscure document despite
the prolonged and intense interest in the work of Eric Williams. It has been
difficult to obtain. Those who have been able to gain access to it have read it
through the optic of Capitalism and Slavery and mobilized it in the terms of the
current debate. The dissertation does, indeed, present the same argument as the
book as Darity insists, but it is a different work. The difference allows us to
rethink questions that we have presumed to be resolved and to develop fresh
questions, problems, and hypotheses. It offers the possibility of a much deeper
renewal for issues that have lost none of their urgency.
The present text was prepared on the basis of two typed manuscript versions of
the dissertation that are held at Eric Williams Memorial Collection Research
Library, Archives and Museum, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and
Tobago, West Indiana Collections and at the Green Library Special Collections,
Florida International University, one of which had undergone more thorough
copyediting. In the case of obvious misspellings or typographical errors, we have
compared the two texts, and made corrections; we have also maintained, to the
degree practical, much of the original formatting, but some idiosyncrasies (for