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

By (author) Eric Williams Introduction by William Darity Edited by Dale W. Tomich

Publication date:

07 February 2014

Length of book:

278 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442231399

In his influential and widely debated Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams examined the relation of capitalism and slavery in the British West Indies. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, his study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that has set the tone for an entire field. Williams’s profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development and has been widely debated since the book’s initial publication in 1944. The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery now makes available in book form for the first time his dissertation, on which Capitalism and Slavery was based. The significant differences between his two works allow us to rethink questions that were considered resolved and to develop fresh problems and hypotheses. It offers the possibility of a much deeper reconsideration of issues that have lost none of their urgency—indeed, whose importance has increased.

Preface
Dale Tomich

Introduction: From the Dissertation to Capitalism and Slavery: Did Williams's Abolition Thesis Change?
William Darity Jr.

The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery
Eric Williams
Introduction
Part I
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
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 I: "The Influential Men"
Appendix II: Ramsay as an Authority
Appendix III: The Intercolonial Slave Trade
Bibliography

The fact that Williams’s previously hard to access doctoral thesis is now available to the general public will help to clarify important aspects of the ‘Williams Thesis’ and its genesis. . . . The route from dissertation to final text runs parallel to Williams’s trajectory from a young black student combating racism and imperial narratives at Oxford to the future prime minister of an independent nation. Apart from being an important historiographical document, Williams’s dissertation is therefore also a historical source in its own right. . . . [R]econsidering the ‘making of’ the Williams Thesis can have a profound impact on how we view its later interpretations and current relevance. . . . The Economic Aspect provides important insights into the genealogy of the Williams Thesis that are much harder to grasp from the more polemical, and more layered text of Capitalism and Slavery. . . . The publication of The Economic Aspect finally makes it possible for a wider audience to retrace Williams’s steps. In the process, we can start to disentangle Williams’s complicated relationship to the Oxford imperial historians, radical predecessors and contemporaries, and the emerging anti-colonial struggles of his day.