Slavery and the Rise of Capitalism

One of the structures that characterizes the modern Western world and separates it from medieval Europe is capitalism. A paramount and distinguishing feature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the capitalistic development that occurred within the transatlantic economy. Beginning in the late eighteenth century in Britain and then in other countries of the transatlantic world, industrialization became a major part of capitalistic enterprise in this economy. The first economic activity to be industrialized was the manufacture of textiles. This began in Britain during the 1780s and the 1790s, and that country's industrial expansion became strongly enmeshed within the transatlantic economy because the first textiles produced in British factories were made from a raw material—cotton—found within the transatlantic system but not in Britain. Similar economic transformations occurred in Belgium, France, and the northern part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, cotton shaped the course of history. In the introduction to an edited work that presents the writings and findings of numerous historians and marshals an array of statistics, Douglas Farnie and David Jeremy further assert, "Cotton goods conquered a world market and created the prototype of a world economy in the form of an Anglo-American-Asian economic symbiosis, pivoting around Lancashire…. The cotton mill epitomized the new factory system and became the supreme symbol of the Industrial Revolution" (2004, p. 3). Because the overwhelming preponderance of cotton used in textiles was picked by labor in bondage, historians have had to consider the following question: To what extent did slavery contribute to the rise of capitalism?

Before that question can be answered, the term capitalism must be addressed. In his global study, The World's History, Howard Spodek references Adam Smith and then defines capitalism as "an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and goods and services are exchanged according to levels of supply and demand in markets" (2006, p. 389). Using such a definition, De Lamar Jensen discerns the initial rise of capitalism in the towns of northern Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which he characterizes as presenting "a full-scale system of capitalism—that is, the private accumulation and employment of liquid wealth for the purpose of making further financial profits" (1992, pp. 91-95). Jensen is not untypical in finding the origin of capitalism in the Renaissance; many historians claim to have made the same discovery. It should be noted that the Renaissance, a cultural period of the later Middle Ages, occurred centuries before Europeans became heavily involved in the slave trade and slavery. Historians, such as Jensen and Lewis Spitz (1987), identify the capitalism of that era as merchant capitalism or financial capitalism. During the early modern period, Europeans using a merchant capitalism developed the transatlantic economy, in which the slave trade and slavery had a significant role. According to the historian Seymour Drescher, "the plantations were set up as pure agricultural factories" and "labor approached the status of a pure commodity." Further, the world market, only minimally affected by human sentiments, determined the nature of social relations (1977, p. 3). Many historians now accept that out of the eighteenth-century transatlantic economy, based on sugar and slaves, evolved modern industrial capitalism, which during the early nineteenth century was based on textiles and cotton.

Since the first publication of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, a shift in the historiography of the transatlantic world has occurred, although by the end of the twentieth century Drescher and others had seriously challenged certain key parts of Williams's interpretation. One of Williams's arguments, which is germane to this article, asserts that through most of the eighteenth century Britain's mercantilist empire promoted economic development within the metropolitan country, including the industrialization of textiles. Central to Britain's economic development were slaves: first as the primary commodity in the Middle Passage and secondly as unpaid laborers in Britain's colonies. Employing considerable evidence, Williams (1961) develops his argument in the following key chapters: "British Commerce and the Triangular Trade" (pp. 51-84), "British Industry and the Triangular Trade" (pp. 98-107), and "The Development of British Capitalism, 1783–1833" (pp. 126-153). Within these chapters Williams takes great efforts to develop the case that, up until the end of the eighteenth century, the slave trade, which Britain dominated in that century, was very profitable for the metropole. During that same period, Britain's sugar colonies were profitable for the metropole because the government created a monopoly for the West Indies planters through the use of high tariffs; often these planters returned to England very wealthy and invested in other enterprises there, including textiles. Many businesses within the metropolitan country—such as the makers of iron chains, the builders of slave ships, and the handloom weavers who made the clothes sold on the West African coast—benefited by being the core of Britain's extensive mercantilist empire. Williams traces the rise of prominent cities such as Liverpool, which was tied to the slave trade, and Manchester, which arose because of the textile factories, and asserts that with the end of the slave trade and the decline of the West Indies, Liverpool became the emporium to the world of textiles manufactured in Manchester (pp. 63 and 68). For Williams, this development epitomizes the emergence of Britain's new industrial capitalism from its earlier slave-centered economy.

Williams's hypothesis that during the eighteenth century "slavery had provided nothing less than the export demand and trade network for the British industrial revolution" (Drescher 1999, p. 364) ignited a significant scholarly controversy. According to Drescher (1999), the claim that slavery and the slave trade were the catalysts of British industrialization has the following problems: Profits from the slave trade were not inordinately large and, therefore, could not have been the major financial impetus for industrialization; economic historians have shown that Williams overstated the profits from the West Indies colonies; and historians of Britain's industrial revolution, such as Phyllis Deane and Eric Hobsbawn (b. 1917), consider other factors much more important causes of industrialization. In The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, Stanley Chapman (b. 1935) points out that Deane's use of eighteenth-century statistics have also been challenged. So, the consensus at the end of the twentieth century is that while Williams overestimated eighteenth-century profits, Deane and others at least slightly underestimated them. For Chapman and certain other historians, then, the key to the development of industrial capitalism is the "unique role of cotton" in the growth of Britain's economy, which was soon followed by comparable economic growth in other countries that developed a cotton-centered economy (1987, pp. 54-57). It follows, then, that if cotton had a unique role in the development of modern industrial capitalism, so too did slavery because, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of cotton used by Britain and other industrial capitalist countries was produced by slaves in the United States.

As Drescher (1999) notes in From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery, the two very different socioeconomic systems of industrial capitalism and plantation slavery, which still often relied on the slave trade, existed side by side during the nineteenth century. The analysis concerning the coexistence of these two socioeconomic systems can support an even stronger statement—that the two systems were mutually supportive of one another. Some statistics covering the decades from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century illustrate part of the relationship between the rise of industrial capitalism and slavery. From the period of 1781 to 1789, which is often considered the first decade of Britain's industrial takeoff, to the ten years between 1850 and 1859, which is the last decade of the antebellum period in U.S. history, British consumption of cotton increased by fifty-four times. Between 1781 and 1789 the annual mean amount consumed was 16.9 million pounds, whereas between 1850 and 1859 the annual mean amount was 927.9 million pounds. A table in Capital and the Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution shows that, through the first half of the nineteenth century, the increases through successive decades were regularly quite large (Shapiro 1967, p. 257). By the 1850s, moreover, 80 percent of the cotton imported into the country for use in British factories was from the United States (Yafa 2005, p. 130). It is ironic, then, that during the same period that Britain campaigned against the slave trade and emancipated slaves in its own empire, the British economy became heavily dependent on slave-produced cotton. A similar process occurred during the same period in the United States. In 1800 the value of the cotton crop was 1.83 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), but by 1860 it accounted for 6.52 percent. As for cotton manufactures, in 1800 they accounted for only 0.037 percent of the GDP, but by 1860 that figure had increased to 3.01 percent (Farnie 2004, p. 572). Again, it should be noted that these tremendous increases in the part of the economy connected to cotton were tied either directly or indirectly to slavery; in the case of the cotton crop the connection was direct, while in the case of the manufactured textiles it was indirect.

As the demand for cotton, whether slaved-produced or not, steadily increased during the nineteenth century, so too did the number of workers in bondage in the southern regions of the United States. Whereas in 1790 the number of American slaves was less than 700,000, all of whom lived along the Atlantic Coast, by 1860 the number of slaves had increased to almost 4 million (Franklin and Moss Jr. 2000, p. 139). Moreover, this population was spread throughout fifteen southern states and was also expanding into the western territories. While the southern plantations were, to a considerable extent, self-sufficient, they did have certain economic needs, many of which were provided by industrial capitalist economies. Northern mills supplied the material, called Negro cloth, for the clothes that the slaves wore, in addition to household furnishings—including silks, linens, furniture, teacups, and bed sheets—for the planters' families, which were shipped into the South through New York City from the northern states or from Europe. New York City was also the port of export for most of the South's cotton and loans to planters came from northern or English banks (Yafa 2005, pp. 112, 133, and 135). Without the manufactured products of and financial credit from the capitalist industrial economies of the North or of Britain, the slave-labor economy of the South would not have been able to operate. So, while the South shipped the cotton to the capitalist industrial economies that the slaves had produced, it received much in return. As one southerner put it, "From the rattle … of the child born in the South … to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North" (Yafa 2005, p. 164).

In conclusion, then, slavery did play a significant role in the rise of modern capitalism. First, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, key west European states, especially Britain, established mercantilist empires that laid the basis for the later development of industrial capitalism. Certain parts of these empires, such as the plantations in the Caribbean basin, were ruthlessly operated according to basic capitalistic principles; one of the results was the use of Africans as a labor commodity. The colonies in the Western Hemisphere and the African west coast were tied to metropolitan countries in Europe within a system of trade that promoted economic development and capital accumulation for the European country. For instance, the development of a large merchant fleet in Britain, both for direct trade with the West Indies and for the Middle Passage, provided the seamen and, on some occasions, the ships for Britain's navy. Britain's large navy first, during the eighteenth century, helped acquire new territories for an expanding empire, and then, during the nineteenth century, served to ensure the stable international relations that facilitated capitalistic enterprise, trade, and a global economy (Singleton 2004, pp. 59-69). Secondly, the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century that replaced the mercantile capitalism of the eighteenth century was centered on cotton, and for more than half of the nineteenth century the cotton crop that fed the factories of Manchester, England, and Lowell, Massachusetts, was grown by slaves in the United States. For its part, Manchester developed during the nineteenth century into an economic zone comprised of many industries, providing employment for 4.75 million persons in a 500-squaremile area of Lancashire County. The many industries of Lancashire were all subsidiary to Manchester's textile industries, which employed 700,000 operatives (Farnie 2004, pp. 561-562). Finally, much of the cotton—up to 80 percent of which was imported during the mid-nineteenth century—was produced within the institution of slavery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chapman, Stanley D. The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution. 2nd ed. Houndmills, U.K.; Basingstoke, U.K.; Hampshire, U.K.: Macmillan, 1987.

Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.

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Farnie, Douglas A., and David J. Jeremy, eds. The Fiber That Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

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Singleton, John. "The Lancashire Cotton Industry, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1700–1960." In The Fiber That Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s, ed. Douglas A. Farney and David J. Jeremy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Spitz, Lewis W. The Renaissance and Reformation Movements. St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1987.

Spodek, Howard. The World's History. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961.

Yafa, Stephen. Big Cotton: How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map. New York: Viking, 2005.

                                        George Sochan