Did Britain get rich because of slavery?
Did Britain get rich because of slavery?
The claim that it did is probably the most widely repeated and absurd claim in the reparations debate.
It goes like this:
The British Empire was built on slavery.
The Industrial Revolution was funded by the profits of the plantation system.
Without the forced labour of enslaved Africans, Britain would not have become the dominant global power it did.
The wealth extracted from the Caribbean financed everything that followed.
The claim draws directly from Eric Williams’s 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, which argued that the profits of the slave trade and the plantation system were the primary source of capital that financed the British Industrial Revolution.
Eric Williams was a serious and distinguished historian who later became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. His work was a genuine contribution to a historiography that had largely ignored the economic dimensions of slavery. The Caribbean was genuinely enormously valuable. At the height of the sugar trade, some Caribbean islands generated more revenue per acre than any territory on earth. The sums flowing back to Britain were substantial by any measure.
Of course, there is a ‘but’.
The case against Williams was made most thoroughly by Patrick O’Brien, who estimated that slave trade profits represented between one and two percent of British national income at their peak. Seymour Drescher and Stanley Engerman reached similar conclusions. The profits were real but too small relative to the overall British economy to have been the decisive factor in industrialisation.
Britain was already the most economically sophisticated country in the world before its slave trade reached its height. The conditions that produced the Industrial Revolution, stable property rights, access to coal, a legal system that enforced contracts, a culture of practical engineering and scientific inquiry, and deep domestic capital markets, were all in place independently of slavery. The steam engine was not invented because of sugar profits. The canal network was not built on plantation money. The textile mills of Lancashire drew their capital from a far wider pool than Caribbean trade.
The fungibility argument also applies. Even if one accepts that specific slave profits funded specific industrial investments, removing those profits would not have prevented the Industrial Revolution. The return on industrial investment in eighteenth-century Britain was high enough to attract capital from many sources. The gap left by removing slave profits would have been filled by other available capital.
Finally, let’s look at the real-world experience of other slave-trading nations. Portugal transported approximately 5.8 million enslaved Africans, nearly twice as many as Britain, and remained one of Europe’s weakest economies through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spain built a vast slave-based colonial empire and did not industrialise. The Netherlands was heavily involved in the slave trade and in colonial commerce and industrialised later and more slowly than Britain. If slave profits were the engine of industrial development, the correlation should be visible across nations. It is not.
Please visit https://noreparations.uk/ and read the arguments and evidence for yourself.
Mark Griffin