"Capitalism and Slavery" Eighty Years Later

Hilary McD Beckles

Eric Williams understood very well what he had done when he chose the title Capitalism and Slavery for his 1944 monograph. This was certainly the impression I gathered from one brief conversation we shared in 1978. I was a graduate student working on the ”Origins of Chattel Slavery,” the opening chapter of his book, and the context of his willingness to speak with me for 30 minutes. The book had recently “gone viral” after being dormant in development discourse for two decades.

The eruption of its reputation was associated with outrage in western scholarship. The rage was palpable. At a seminar I attended, a very eminent English scholar chastised Williams for having the audacity to argue that the magnificent, historic, industrial culture of Britain had its roots within the vile stench of slavery. I was taught as a student in the British academy by lecturers who shared this perspective and had become a targeted teenager for my willingness to support disagreement. I shared these personal experiences with Williams who responded that they will be saying these and such things long after his departure.

The effects of touching an exposed nerve whether in reality or metaphorically have always been the same. Discursive responses are painful, deeply divisive, emotional, and have a tendency to transcend the integrity of evidence laid out in the text. Capitalism and Slavery has had such seismic consequences for 80 years, and is projected to produce responses of this nature along the trajectory for at least another two decades. There has been no narrowing for the divide. It is assured that the chasm will be centennial, and that bellowings from below, and bombardment from above, will persist.

This generic gathering of scholars who contributed to the many conversations generated by Capitalism and Slavery, and whose work is corralled in this collection, might be keen to admit that intellectual passion was a crucial part of their participation. Each iteration of a stocktaking produces new insights but mostly unstable conclusions. That is the nature of a gift that keeps giving; all beneficiaries feel the temporariness of their calling, and the inevitable onward march of the discourse to the next moment. This 80th anniversary gathering is as special as those before, especially as it lays the foundation for those to follow.

I was there at Bellagio, Italy, in 1983, where Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman assembled the Capitalism and Slavery community to pronounce on the dead or alive status of the work. My invitation was defined under the category of “youth exposure.” The exchanges were robust, ameliorated I thought by the serene Alpine environment and lavish cuisine. I intervened with a narrative entitled “Down But Not Out: Capitalism and Slavery at 40.” Its message was as precise as I could offer: Capitalism and Slavery, I said, would survive the count, and could rise again to greet the next generation.

I did not intend to be hyperbolic, though that was how my thesis was received. I was surrounded by scholars whose brand identity within the discourse was globally respected. I merely wanted to emphasize that Capitalism and Slavery was a “scripture” of sorts, that would transcend its genesis to inspire and inflame generations coming to terms with the oppression associated with the rise and fall of imperial capitalism and racial colonialism. It was providing the evidentiary basis for an evolving consciousness on both sides of the political divide.

Williams did not intend for his work to be confined by the perimeters of academia. This was why it was radically modified from the dissertation manuscript that birthed it. He intended for it to give flame to the fire of anti-colonialism that had engulfed the Caribbean giving existential meaning to the movement of liberation. It was to inform the manifesto mission driving the region to get up and stand up against British imperial hegemony that was considered morally illegitimate and in every sense bankrupt. And until that struggle was won and settled, the intellectual stimulation it generated beyond and within scholarship would be sustained.

These excellent essays, then, are in this regard signposts along a journey, not across an unmarked territory, but to a discovery of truth that remains obscured and contested by political and pedagogical concerns.

Heather Cateau and Verene Shepherd

In 2024, Eric Williams’ seminal treatise Capitalism and Slavery celebrated 80 years since its publication in 1944. Williams elaborated the case that the system of African chattel enslavement and the sugar plantation system in the Caribbean were the bases of the accumulation of astounding profits in Britain and that this twin driver had led to the British industrial revolution. Moreover, he provided data to support this contention, which has become known as the “profitability thesis.” By extension, he implicated Britain in the underdevelopment of the Caribbean region and positioned this region as a major contributor to Britain’s development. The impact of the text can be likened to a historical eclipse that has shone light on critical areas of Caribbean history that had been kept in darkness. Unlike natural eclipses, Capitalism and Slavery continues to illuminate the way we see the world decades after it originally appeared. Today, the ideas, theories, and theses that originated in the book are being applied in ways that are both significant and relevant to our contemporary space. However, Capitalism and Slavery is much more than a book with impactful theories and theses. It has become the basis of a philosophical movement, albeit contentious, that has numerous dimensions. It is part of the struggle for meaningful decolonization; it is the basis of understanding approaches to development and underdevelopment; it is the foundation of the call for justice in a world where inequity and its impact on generations are increasingly visible. Therefore, the ghost of Williams continues to roam, haunting not only academic corridors but built landscapes and contemporary movements for reparative justice. This journey has spanned centuries and the research and scholarship have engaged a range of outstanding minds who specialize in history, economics, politics and activism.

In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many British economists and policy makers acknowledged the profitability of the colonies.1 Malachy Postlethwayt, Dalby Thomas, Thomas Macaulay and even Adam Smith all accepted trade and overseas colonies as major drivers of British economic growth. The more controversial matters were the relative benefits of mercantilism versus capitalism and the sectors of impact on the British economy. Thus, although the transatlantic trafficking in enslaved Africans and the chattel enslavement system were introduced under a mercantilist economic framework which was fast becoming outmoded, it was acknowledged that groups in Britain and dimensions of the economy had benefited. With the evolution of industrial and later financial capitalism by the early twentieth century perspectives evolved which depicted British economic growth as resulting from a framework which, although originating in a protectionist mercantilist philosophy, had become dependent on the workings of a global capitalist system. As early as 1938 CLR James’ Black Jacobins2 connected the enslaved population to capitalist developments in Europe, conceptualizing their role in economic development as well as social change through Marxist lens. James and Williams were both Trinidadians. James taught Williams in secondary school and became his mentor. A complicated relationship evolved which helped both men hone their perspectives and has been described as one of “intellectual symbiosis.”3 Williams’ seminal work Capitalism and Slavery further developed the nature of the economic connections of the region to Europe in general, and Britain in particular. He concluded that by the second half of the eighteenth century the global economic world had been transformed through African chattel enslavement and the enslaved were eventually “…stimulated to freedom by the development of the very wealth which their labour had created.”4 There were clear echoes of James’ approach in Black Jacobins. However, the focus on the liberation of the enslaved population was only a minor part of the final chapters of his work. The majority of the text established the role of economics in the entire course of African chattel enslavement from its origins to its dismantling; and developed the thesis that African chattel enslavement was introduced and perpetuated because of economic factors.