capitalism and slavery thesis

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 ...

The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it. When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of West Indian monopoly.

At its most basic, (and setting the question of semantics aside for a moment) the Williams thesis held that capitalism as an economic modality quickly replaced slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital from slavery that they needed in order to bankroll their industrial revolution. After providing the material foundation and the trade infrastructure that fueled Europe ...

Capitalism and Slavery. Eric Williams. UNC Press Books, Jun 30, 2014 - History - 307 pages. Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism ...

In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams also stressed the agency of the enslaved and their role in abolishing slavery—"the most dynamic and powerful" force, he argued, and one that has been ...

And on the basis of rigorous research, Williams offers the thesis that slavery, once established, effectively helped to sustain mercantile capitalism and launch industrial capitalism.

The book powerfully elucidates some fundamental truths about the development of capitalism—with a particular focus on British capitalism—and the connection of this new world system to slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, particularly in the Caribbean.

Slavery's history, and thus slavery's capitalism rested on institutional arrangements, the outcome of political struggles, and bureaucratic, administrative, legal and infrastructural capacities that were defined, negotiated, and constructed within national political spaces (12).

Eric Williams's book, Capitalism and Slavery, was first published in 1944. It was, and remains, of fundamental importance for the understanding of slavery in the British Caribbean and its relationship to the development of British capitalism. Directed against the bland imperiousness of those who wanted to explain the abolition of the slave ...

acclaimed work on slavery in Maryland14. What made the capitalist expansion of sla very in the antebellum South possible, for both the «new history of capitalism» and the historians of the «second slavery», was the enormous rise in the production of sou thern cotton, consequent to the demand especially from British textile mills. Scho lars have known this for many years, but now social and ...

Citation Eric Williams and Capitalism and Slavery: A Biographical and Historiographical Essay, in Barbara Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 317-345.

The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or ...

Eric Williams put the question most directly in his book Capitalism and Slavery, fi rst published in 1944. Slavery, he argued, depended on capitalist competition. An international capitalist market put slavery and freedom in competition, and slavery usually won. Cheap, slave-grown staples like cotton, sugar, and rice had economies of scale (lower costs per unit for pro-ducing larger quantities ...

First published in 1944, 'Capitalism and Slavery' is an investigation of the notorious relationship between the Atlantic slave trade and the emergence of European industrial capitalism from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later Heather Cateau,Selwyn H. H. Carrington,2000 Annotation Eleven papers from a conference, held at the U. of the West Indies in September 1996, which was dedicated to reexamining the issues ... Econocide Seymour Drescher,2010-08-30 In this classic analysis and refutation of Eric Williams's 1944 thesis, Seymour

In contrast to recent assertions of the centrality of slavery for US economic development, the article argues that part two of the Williams thesis applies with equal force to nineteenth-century America.

Capitalism and Slavery is a must read book and is the essential starting point for a new readership. It is a book that will hold the reader's attention, and presents a powerful analysis in a persuasive and easy to understand way. Reading it is a pleasure.

By GAVIN WRIGHT∗. British and American debates on the relationship between slavery and economic growth have had little interaction with each other. This article attempts intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage turns on the neglected part two of the 'Williams thesis': that slavery and the slave trade, once ...

For over a century now, historians of the United States have been wrestling with the relationship between capitalism and slavery. They've asked questions inquiring whether capitalism and slavery are compatible, what role slavery played in capitalist development, and probably most infamously: Is slavery capitalism? Given the booming popularity of histories of capitalism, the time is right for ...

Abstract. The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world histo-riography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital.

The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some mis...

When Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan stepped down on Wednesday, he became the latest in a growing line of unpopular leaders to cycle through a sclerotic political system that has faced ...