Slavery, Indenture and the Development of British Industrial Capitalism

The paper addresses the central issue of the relationship between slavery and industrial capitalism. It does so by re-examining Eric Williams’s classic account and recent debates related to it on the one hand, and on the other, by challenging basic assumptions about capitalism as a closed market-wage labour-capital system. Taking a long-duration approach (from the mid eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century) to three key commodities – guns, sugar and cotton – the paper argues that British industrial capitalism drove the expansion of slavery and then other regimes of exploitation in a dynamic and interdependent relationship with the transformation of the metropolitan wage economy. The analysis is based on changing configurations of production-exchange-distribution-consumption for each of these three exemplary commodities. The British industrial revolution is thus characterized by its hybridity and heterogeneity, always combining varied regimes of exploitation: metropolitan wage labour, directly-owned British Caribbean and Mauritian slavery, and US Deep South slavery, each followed by varied transitions to indentured servitude or sharecropping. New and contrasting racialized orders of hierarchy and inequality emerged and were entrenched as a central feature of this epochal change, the legacies of which are only too present today.