and probably for some time after. It was vital to imperial geopolitics, especially during the long Napoleonic Wars and during the conflagration of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s and 1800s. In addition, the British made several new acquisitions in the southern Caribbean and South America as a result of war between it and France and the Netherlands. Britain had good reason to covet Caribbean territory. The West Indies, despite a small economic dip during the American Revolution, remained a highly profitable part of the empire at least until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Indeed, some of Britain’s new acquisitions, notably Trinidad and what became British Guiana, formed a new frontier of high plantation profits for the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. The profitability of the plantations did not decline, despite Williams’ predictions, after the end of the American Revolution. The abolition of the slave trade, as Seymour Drescher argued in a famous intervention against a major plank of the Williams’ thesis, was not in the economic interests of Britain but was a variation of “econocide.” This abolition occurred in a period when planters were usually making good money from slavery. The one exception to this general tale of plantation prosperity from around 1790 is a short-term period of economic difficulty around 1805-7 which had, David Ryden tells us, a significant effect on the politics leading directly to the abolition of the slave trade. III Sven Beckert’s prize-winning global history of cotton presents a version of the Williams’ thesis that is stronger than anything Eric Williams considered. It has been a highly praised book, garnering the sort of laudatory reviews most authors can only dream about. The argument evades easy synopsis as it is a grand undertaking that covers a large range of topics and many countries, although it is decidedly United States-centric. Even critics
times when slavery was invisible in British and American history and where West Indian history (where slavery was always considered important) was relegated to a cul-de-sac of historical inquiry. Even the great Marxist historians celebrated by the New History of Capitalism movement shared this indifference to race, slavery and the Caribbean. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, showed little interest in the work of Eric Williams. Such lack of interest was unfortunate and is no longer defensible today. But we want to be careful not to redress the absence of slavery in accounts of the past by now overstating its importance. Slavery was important and so too were But their importance needs to be kept in perspective. We don’t want to adopt the attitude of pro-slavery spokesmen for the eighteenth-century West Indian interest or James Henry Hammond for antebellum cotton planters who made insistent claims for themselves and their value to Britain and America. It is not just New History of Capitalism historians and Eric Williams who trumpet how important slavery and slave-owning was to industrial Britain. Edward Long, the historian of Jamaica and a pro-planter voice, argued in 1774 that the sugar colonies were a source of immense wealth and power. After listing how many Britons relied on wealth from the West Indies, he argued that “we may from thence form a competent idea of the prodigious value of our sugar colonies, and a just conception of their immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of their mother country.” While we should be prepared to rethink our histories of the beginnings of industrial capitalism so that we find more space for enslaved people, we need to remember that our efforts may end up with us sharing space with some uncomfortable bedfellows.