CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY - ERIC WILLIAMS

Yet another book I should have been asked to read in college. A stone cold classic from 1944, written by a guy who’d go on to be the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobego, that still would be seen as cutting edge and provocative in the modern world. This is the stronger version of the 1619 project, or it would be if it focused more on America. As he points out in the conclusion, the better title for this book would be “British Capitalism and Slavery” since the book really focuses on the Caribbean and the British involvement there. Not so much about Amerika or Haiti (there is lots of Haiti stuff as it relates to the British but not Haiti stuff by itself). The first part of the book gives a great, short rundown of the ways that slavery built racism, despite the fact that the story is told backwards in popular myth. Typically, we’re led to believe that YT Europeans were racist and monstrous, and they built the system of transatlantic slavery as an outgrowth of these beliefs. Williams shows how they built the system slowly over decades, first trying enslaved Native labor, then YT labor in quasi-slavery arrangements (indentured servitude, punishment for crimes), before landing on the idea of African slaves, who couldn’t convert to Christianity or do anything else to manumit, folks whose status was passed on to their children. This particular history and dynamic is covered deeper in other places, I'm pretty fond of Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery, but Williams gives a great and useful summary. There’s interesting stuff I’d never considered about how Australia is unique among the Euro settler-colonies in that it never sought to import slave labor and how this history played out, there’s a whole book there I’d love to read. Williams’ real insight is how slavery both builds capitalism and then is destroyed by it. As he puts it, the stage of mercantilism, which preceded capitalism and provided the basis (primitive accumulation in Marxism) from which capitalism grew, and, when conditions were right for true, free-trade capitalism, mercantilism and slavery were discarded. “The rise and fall of mercantilism is the rise and fall of slavery,” as he puts it. Which puts the British push for abolition in a less flattering light, it was less a moral reckoning, more of an economic realilty and a tool to fuck with rivals like Spain and France. Williams quotes the abolitionist James Cropper who points out that, “the efforts of benevolent men have been most successful when cooperating with natural causes.” This is such a useful little book to help show how social forms like slavery are transformed by economic conditions so if you want to study or think about them, it makes sense to ground your analysis in economics. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s interested in capitalism or slavery or even history. I’m going to have to look more into Williams himself, I don’t know anything about his rule of Trindad and Tobago, it seems amazing that someone could write something like this and then be president. W.E.B. DuBois was never up for the job here, if you know what I mean.