Two thousand pounds bought you two hundred acres of Barbadian cane fields, a mill and a hundred-odd slaves And within a few years, it returned an equal amount every year for the rest of your life. You were now amongst the richest men anywhere in the British Empire. The slave economy in the Caribbean wasn’t just a sideshow of empire – it was the empire.
That quote is from Simon Shama’s great TV documentary of the early 2000’s, A History Of Britain, and while it is specifically correct about the vital requirement of British sugar plantations in Barbados to have slaves, it also implicitly supports a great falsehood of the Left – and Sharma is very much of the Left – that slaves and commodities are what built the British Empire.
Actually no. They built huge fortunes for those few men who bought sugar plantations (and in America, tobacco and cotton plantations), but Empires are not built on commodities, otherwise New Zealand would playing gunboat diplomacy with the rest of the Pacific on the basis of our milk, wool and beef production.
You can stop laughing now.
This article takes a hard look at the claims about slavery as part of Britain’s global colonisation, specifically the claim that Britain only grew rich because of colonisation in general. I have to admit that it’s both funny and a mark of the greatness of Western civilisation, that the argument against this is being led by the likes of Kemi Badenoch (who I covered here and here), who is about as Black as it gets, whlle the responding whine to her in The Guardian comes from one Will Hutton, a White Lefty British journalist who’s whiter than Frosty the Snowman after he’s fallen into a vat of White-Out:
Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area. Yet if you believe “Imperial Measurement”, a report released last week from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the net economic impact of this vast empire on Britain was negligible, even negative.
Hutton is, to say the least, not an economic historian, and so does not even acknowledge the caveats of the economists and historians he quotes – such as Joel Mokyr, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson – when he argues that “slavery and sugar” made Britain rich, building her merchant fleets and trade:
- “We do not argue that slavery caused the industrial revolution. Neither do we suggest that slavery was necessary for the development of industrial capitalism in Britain. Even less does our study attempt to estimate that the gains from slavery contributed a particular percentage to Britain’s economic growth, GDP or capital formation in the eighteenth century” – Berg Hudson
- ‘It seems somehow tempting for those who do not have much sympathy for British capitalism to link it with imperialism and slavery’… ‘In the absence of West Indian slavery, Britain would have had to drink bitter tea, but it still would have had an Industrial Revolution, if perhaps at a marginally slower pace’ – Mokyr
So apparently Hutton didn’t read his own sources, which is entitrely predictable for a Lefty journalist writing in The Guardian – less so for a guy who is the former Principal of Hertford College at Oxford University.
But it often doesn’t matter as Lefty ideas are like zombies; undying concepts because they just seem correct, as the response to Hutton shows:
Mokyr is critical of the work of Eric Williams, another of the insecure foundations on which this false economic history of empire is based: the Williams thesis that slavery and sugar formed the basis of capital accumulation and industrialisation ‘had long been regarded as discredited’, he writes. He cites the work of Stanley Engerman, the American economic historian, who, in the 1970s, computed the total profits from the slave trade in 1770 as, at most, £342,000 out of total British GNP in that year of £166 million.
…
It may be objected that Joel Mokyr published this thirty years ago. But bad history keeps coming back to delude those who should know better. The Williams thesis was discredited in the 1970s but has re-emerged because it now suits a particular politicised view of the past.
Even when there is a ledge for Hutton to cling to it’s done without context. He shifts to the slave trade and cotton. But unlike slavery and sugar in Barbados, slavery and cotton was an American focus, while it was of huge importance to their cotton production, and while even Mokyr argues that the British cotton industry was dependent on America in the 19th century – he still does not argue that was vital to the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.
And even with cotton, Hutton and Mokyr, and their opposite debaters like Badenoch and the Institute of Economic Affairs, don’t mention the fact that the Confederates thought the same thing and were proven wrong at the time. They were convinced that the Union blockade would be broken by the British Royal Navy because of the pain caused to the British cotton industry. There was pain, but it was nowhere near enough in the already large, diverse and complex British economy to compel the British government to intervene in the American Civil War.
A similar point was made two hundred years ago about the Atlantic slave trade, and by a rather important participant in the debate about Britain abolishing it:
In 1804 Henry Brougham – who had just made contact with William Wilberforce and would later become a leading Whig politician – calculated in a pamphlet held aloft in approbation in the House of Commons by prime minister William Pitt the Younger, that the slave trade, three years before it was abolished, accounted for just 1/63rd of the total shipping tonnage in the empire and 1/23rd of the number of imperial seaman.
It takes a lot of determined ignorance to claim that slavery was essential to the creation and maintenance of the British Empire when the very people who abolished slavery two centuries earlier partly won their fight by proving that it was not.
But, as with the bullshit about Britain extracting $45 trillion from India to fuel her empire, the facts won’t stop the likes of Will Hutton repeating this claim again in the near future.
No Minister 
Slavery was a thing.
The WORLD Practiced it.
The British ended it in Europe and their Colonies at great cost in resource and man power, with no few British sailors giving their lives in shutting down the West African slavery trade.
I feel zero shame about Slavery, zero.
The facts are that Africans enslaved other Africans and sold them.
On Africas West Coast they sold them to European ships, though those close to the Sahel would also have been sold into the slave markets of North Africa after a difficult journey across desert
On Africas East Coast, Africans sold slaves to ships that took the slaves to Arabia, the Middle East and India.
The East Coast trade took far more slaves out of Africa than the West Coast trade.
The Left are hypocrites of the highest order on slavery anyway, as their fountainhead the CCCP practiced extensive slavery via political deportation to the Gulag system for decades. And the Gulag system of production only ended because it became uneconomic as Russia industralised massively during and post WWII
You can tell the Left is bereft of ideas for shaming when they try and recycle old worn out tropes, that have been debunked decades ago. But thats the Left for you bereft of sense and intelligence.
The British did indeed outlaw slavery over 200 years ago. William Wilberforce it was who was the driving force behind this bold advance in the feild of human rights as the industrial revolution kicked into high gear.
But of course slavery still exists, even in this country, where young Asian and to a lesser extent East european women are trafficked to satisfy the carnal lusts of kiwi men emascuated by the femism of kiwi women many of who have made being as unattractive as possible into a fine art.
This sheds a little light on why the birth rates of NZ along with the other nations of the west are in precipitous decline
Andrei. Slavery is illegal in NZ and has been since 1840 and the start of British sovereignty.
The human traffic that happens is illegal and gets prosecuted when uncovered. As recently as 2022 a Samoan man was convicted and sentenced:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/joseph-matamata-slavery-conviction-man-kept-as-slave-speaks-out-in-first-interview/EZAEHF3VY7SGFBHGP5K5X4WXQI/
As for your emasculated shot – whateva Andrei. The Mother Russias birth rates are declining and the great Russian people are slowly dying out just like the people you hate so much in the West
I don’t hate the West, Trev.
Au Contraire!
I admire the innovators, the forefathers of the modern West produced, William Wilberforce mentioned above being one, George Stephenson being another along with hundreds of others. What I hold in utter contempt is modernist Western thought that places a greater value on sophistry than real world practicalities
Which is why it is an f…ing tragedy that the degenrate descendants of those bold pioneers of raising humanity out of the muck have squandered their inheritance to the East, which they have.
This is correct. Slavery was a universal phenomenon. It’s even condoned (though not supported) in the Bible, since slavery was considered the best alternative for a group of foreigners captured in battle who were otherwise likely to kill you in ancient times. It is only illegal, and popularly immoral now, because one day a bunch of WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS decided/realized it’s not very Christian to force someone to work for you without compensation.
You’re welcome.
It’s also bizarre to have the industrial revolution tied to slavery, when even common sense suggests that this is ridiculous. The *whole point* of the industrial revolution was that MACHINES did the work for you, not slaves. It follows that this is why slavery was popular in the unindustrialized Southern States of the US, whereas the industrialized North had little need of slaves, and therefore favored abolition.
Although Ken Burns has increasingly revealed himself as knowing far less about history than his celebrated TV documentaries would imply I still love his breakthrough one about the American Civil War.
And there was one part in the very first episode where it was pointed out that slavery was slowly dying away even in the South in the early 19th century – but was then revived when the Cotton Gin was invented, enabling more cotton to be produced faster, thereby pushing demand for cotton growing and hence the demand for slaves to pick it, although they would no longer separate the cotton from the seeds.
I don’t know if anybody has ever dug into the economics of that situation, which goes against the standard economic argument of labour being replaced by capital in the form of machines. It looks like one machine made a massive change to one part of the production line, thereby increasing the demand further up the line, but that there was no machine that could pick cotton.