Capitalism and Slavery

Capitalism and Slavery is the published version of the doctoral dissertation of Eric Williams, who was the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. It advances a number of theses on the impact of economic factors on the decline of slavery, specifically the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the British West Indies, from the second half of the 18th century. It also makes criticisms of the historiography of the British Empire of the period: in particular on the use of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 as a sort of moral pivot; but also directed against a historical school that saw the imperial constitutional history as a constant advance through legislation. It uses polemical asides for some personal attacks, notably on the Oxford historian Reginald Coupland. Seymour Drescher, a prominent critic among historians of some of the theses put forward in Capitalism and Slavery by Williams, wrote in 1987: "If one criterion of a classic is its ability to reorient our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept, Eric Williams's study supremely passes that test."^[1]

The applicability of the economic arguments, and specially in the form of so-called Ragatz–Williams decline theory, is a contentious matter to this day for historians, when it is used for the period around the American Revolutionary War. On the other hand detailed economic investigations of the effects of slavery on the British economy, in particular, the aftermath of abolition, and the commercial hinterland of the Atlantic trade, are a thriving research area. The historiography of the British Empire is still widely contested. Kenneth Morgan writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography evaluates Capitalism and Slavery as "perhaps the most influential book written in the twentieth century on the history of slavery".^[2]

It was published in the United States in 1944, but major publishers refused to have it published in Britain, on grounds including that it undermined the humanitarian motivation for Britain's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. In 1964 André Deutsch published it in Britain; it went through numerous reprintings to 1991,^[3] and was published in the first UK mass-market edition by Penguin Modern Classics in 2022,^[4] becoming a best-seller.^[5]