Most people have heard of the term
“wage slave” as part of the Marxist critique of capitalism, but the term is
generally understood as a metaphor to convey harsh working conditions
inadequately compensated. In recent years, however, the relevance of slavery to
capitalism, especially in its beginnings, has become ever more insistent. Thus
we have a sentence like this in a recent essay by economists Sven Beckert and
Seth Rockman:
America's
"take-off" in the 19th century wasn't in spite of slavery; it was
largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It
highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of
modern capitalism itself.
Their essay, “How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism,”
posted on Bloomberg View on February 24, 2014, provides fascinating details
about the roots of early American bankers and capitalists in either the slave
trade, southern plantations, or both. New York banker James B. Brown of Brown
Brothers & Co., for example, is reported to have had investments in the American
South exceeding $1.5 million, “a quarter of which was directly bound up in the
ownership of slave plantations.” Other bankers with links to southern slavery,
according to Rockman and Beckert, were the Biddles, the Barings and the
Rothschilds. But it was not just the United States version of capitalism that
owed its origins to the immense profits from slavery and the slave trade. Eric
Williams in 1944 wrote his seminal Capitalism
and Slavery (U of No. Carolina Press; access at https://archive.org/details/capitalismandsla033027mbp), a book that goes into great detail to demonstrate how much British
capitalism and the industrial revolution itself owed to the slave trade and
plantation slavery in the West Indies. Calling slavery “an economic institution
of the first importance,” Williams notes that “in modern times it [slavery]
provided the sugar for the tea and the coffee cups of the Western world. It
produced the cotton to serve as a base for modern capitalism” (5). And, like
the American bankers cited above, British bankers who were so crucial to the
financing of British industry often inherited their money from forebears who had
made it in the slave trade and/or plantation slavery. Thomas Leyland, for
example, became, in 1802 “senior partner in the banking firm of Clarkes and
Roscoe,” but he was “one of the most active slave traders in Liverpool and his
profits were immense” (99). Even more renowned is the British banking name of
Barclay. Williams points out that not only were “two members of this Quaker
family, David and Alexander…engaged in the slave trade in 1756,” but David
“actually owned a great plantation in Jamaica” (101). Moreover, Lloyd’s of
London, whose name is synonymous with great insurance endeavors, began as a
coffee house where runaway slaves could be returned. It then moved, like most
other insurance companies of the time, into insuring slaves and slave ships,
and one of its most “distinguished” chairmen was one Joseph Marryat, “a West
Indian planter” (104), which is to say, an owner/exploiter of slaves.
Williams
makes much of these West Indian sugar planters because they were not only the
jewel in the crown of British trade, but the source of much of the wealth that
fueled the subsequent industrial revolution in England. That wealth, of course,
derived from African slaves, both from their unpaid labor on huge sugar
plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and other British-owned Caribbean
islands, and from the profits made by slave traders who captured and
transported them to those islands to sell as slaves. British cities owed their
dramatic expansion to this slave trade: first Bristol, which “in the first nine
years of free trade…shipped 160,950 Negroes to the sugar plantations,” and then
Liverpool, “the greatest slave trading port in the Old World,” which between
1783 and 1793 alone shipped over 300,000 slaves valued at over 15 million
pounds in 878 ships for an “average annual profit” of “over 30%” (36). And the
most powerful institutions supported this trade: the British government itself,
the Catholic Church (Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans were involved in sugar
cultivation), and Quakers, as noted above in the case of Barclay’s bank. That
was because, of course, slavery made immense sums of money. West Indies
planters became some of the most conspicuously wealthy men in England,
returning to their homeland to buy huge estates where they could and did entertain
royalty. And the related industries involved in what is known as the
“triangular trade” (England supplied the exports and the ships; Africa the
human merchandise; the plantations the colonial raw materials) contributed even
more profits. According to Williams, the lucrative triangular trade worked as
follows:
The
slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured goods.
These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were
traded on the plantations, at another profit, in exchange for a cargo of
colonial produce to be taken back to the home country (51).
Again, the profits from this trade
were not only key to British wealth in the mercantilist 17th and 18th
centuries, they also provided the financial base for the subsequent
industrialization that England pioneered in the 19th. As Williams
notes: “The profits [i.e. from the slave trade] obtained provided one of the
main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the
Industrial Revolution” (52). And that industrialization consisted in large
part, early on, of cotton cloth and garment manufacture (Williams calls cotton
the “queen of the Industrial Revolution”). In the process, the wealth and
activity shifted from the trading port of Liverpool to the manufacturing center of Manchester,
otherwise known as ‘Cottonopolis.’
Of
course, cotton was the product par excellence of the American South, a fact
which made British industry dependent on a steady source of cotton from those
former colonies. This in turn meant that, despite the growing objections of
British abolitionists to the continuing slavery upon which American cotton
plantations depended, there was little chance that moral scruples would kill
the golden goose of slavery. Consider the numbers it took for England to clothe
the world:
The
first steam loom factory was built in Manchester in 1806. In 1835 there were
116,800 power looms in all Great Britain, all but 6% in the cotton
industry….The population employed by the industry rose from 350,000 in 1788 to
800,000 in 1806 (128).
So while England abolished its own
slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833—essentially because by that
time its West Indian sugar plantations had lost the sugar battle to cheaper
sugar from French islands like Saint Domingue and, increasingly, sugar plantations
in Asia—British manufacturers continued to depend on slavery in the newly
independent United States for the raw cotton critical to British cotton and clothing
industries. Nor did this hypocrisy go unnoticed. Williams cites an editorial in
the London Times from 1857 that says
it all:
We
know that for all mercantile purposes England is one of the States, and that,
in effect, we are partners with the Southern planter; we hold a bill of sale
over his goods and chattels, his live and dead stock, and take a lion’s share
in the profits of slavery…We fete Mrs. Stowe, cry over her book, and pray for
an anti-slavery president…but all this time we are clothing not only ourselves,
but all the world besides, with the very cotton picked and cleaned by ‘Uncle Tom’
and his fellow-sufferers. It is our trade. It is the great staple of British
industry. We are Mr. Legree’s agents for the manufacture and sale of his cotton
crops (176).
The Mrs. Stowe, of course, is Harriet
Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, and Mr. Legree the chief villain and torturer of slaves in that abolition-inciting
novel.
In
short, capitalism grew with slavery as its virtual progenitor, first in
providing immense profits from the 17th and 18th century West
Indian sugar plantations that depended on African slaves for their labor, and
second in providing the capital derived from those sugar plantations to finance
the industrial revolution, itself based in slave-grown U.S. cotton, that
undergirded the entire British Empire in the 19th Century. Williams
puts it thus: “The commercial capitalism of the 18th century
developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly.” More than
that, plantation slavery not only required constant renewing of its labor force
(hence the encouragement of slaves to reproduce), but also constant expansion
of the cultivated land—for the simple reason that slave-worked land wore out
astonishingly fast since slaves had no incentive to husband the soil they
worked. That legacy remains today in the tendency of capitalism to
‘externalize’ its costs, to expropriate life itself, and thus to lay waste to
the very resources upon which it and all economic activity depends.
This
is something to think about when we consider the critical role of capital in
our time. Capitalism, as Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century) has recently reminded us, eminently
involves inherited wealth. The fortunes in profits made in the slave trade and
the related slave plantations growing sugar, tobacco and cotton—fortunes
possible only via the gross exploitation of humans considered expendable,
commodifiable—not only provided that wealth initially, but literally constitute
the history and background, indeed the prime ingredient of early capitalism in
both England and the United States. As Balzac maintained, behind every great fortune, there is a great crime (his actual
words, in Pere Goriot: “The secret of
great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime…”) And the corollary
secret behind capitalism may well be said to be the buying and selling of living
human beings known as slavery.
Lawrence DiStasi
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