Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition

By Seymour Drescher

In this classic analysis and refutation of Eric Williams's 1944 thesis, Seymour Drescher argues that Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 resulted not from the diminishing value of slavery for Great Britain but instead from the British public's mobilization against the slave trade, which forced London to commit what Drescher terms "econocide." This action, he argues, was detrimental to Britain's economic interests at a time when British slavery was actually at the height of its potential.

Originally published in 1977, Drescher's work was instrumental in undermining the economic determinist interpretation of abolitionism that had dominated historical discourse for decades following World War II. For this second edition, which includes a foreword by David Brion Davis, Drescher has written a new preface, reflecting on the historiography of the British slave trade since this book's original publication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807899595

Seymour Drescher

Seymour Drescher is Distinguished University Professor of history and sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Book preview

Econocide

Econocide

British Slavery in the Era of Abolition

Seymour Drescher

SECOND EDITION

With a new preface by the author and a new foreword by David Brion Davis

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

First edition © 1977 The University of Pittsburgh Press

Second edition © 2010 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Both the initial research and the initial publication of this work were made possible in part through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency whose mission is to award grants to support education, scholarship, media programming, libraries, and museums.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition of this book as follows:

Drescher, Seymour.

     Econocide.

     Bibliography: p.

     Includes index

     1. Slavery in Great Britain—Anti-slavery movements. 2. Slavery in the

British West Indies. 3. Slave-trade—Great Britain. 4. Slave-trade—West Indies,

British.

I. Title.

HT1093.D7   301.44'93'0941   76-50887

ISBN 978-0-8078-3446-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8078-7179-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

paper 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

For Michael, Jonathan, and Karen

and

For Steven Heath Mitton

Contents

List of Tables

List of Figures

Foreword by David Brion Davis

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

1 The Decline Theory of Abolition

The Emergence of the Decline Theory

The Problem of Measuring Slavery

The Destruction Process

2 The 1770s as the Pivot of British Slavery

The Value of the West Indies

The Slave Trade

The Continental Colonies

3 The Protected Economy Before the French Slave Revolution

The British Caribbean in 1790

The Imperial Factor

French Sugar: The Most Amazing Phenomenon

4 The Unprotected Economy Before the French Slave Revolution

Slave Cotton and Laissez-faire Abolitionism

Slave Trading and Mercantilist Abolitionism

Prospects in 1790

5 The Growth of Slavery in the Era of British Supremacy

The Trade Network

The Slave Trade—Arrested Growth

Staple Production During the Caribbean Revolutions

6 The New Frontier and Abolition

The Ever-Receding Threshold of Saturation

Demerara and Abolition

Trinidad and Abolition

St. Vincent and Abolition

7 Economic Conjuncture and Abolition Bills, 1791–1806

1791–1792

1797–1802

1806

8 The Market Mechanism and Abolition

Overproduction

Overproduction and Abolition in 1807

The Laws of the Market and the Law of Abolition

9 Abolition and the Decline of British Slavery, 1808–1814

Decline in Disguise, 1808–1814

The Crossroads: 1814

10 Beyond Economic Interest

The Age of Slavery

Seeds of Destruction

Abolition and Evolving Economic Policy

The Elusive Enemies of Slavery

Beyond Elites

List of Abbreviations

Appendix I. Chronology

Appendix II. Estimating the Sugar, Coffee, and Slave Trades

Appendix III. The Relative Strength of Suggested Motives in the Votes of 1806–1807

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Tables

1. British West Indian Share of Total British Trade, 1713–1832 19

2. Non-European Shares of Total British Trade, 1713–1822 21

3. Non-European Shares of British Imports, 1713–1822 22

4. Non-European Shares of British Exports, 1713–1822 23

5. Estimated Value of the Annual Production of the British Empire, 1812 24

6. British Exports to Africa, 1749–1822 26

7. Average Annual Slave Exports by Britain, France, and Portugal, 1701–1807 27

8. Estimates of the Volume of the British Slave Trade, 1777–1807 28

9. National Shares of the Slave Exporters, 1761–1805 31

10. French and British Slave Populations, 1710–1814 34

11. Colonial Sources of North Atlantic Sugar Imports, 1770–1787 48

12. Sources of British Cotton Imports, 1786–1787 57

13. British Imports of West Indian Cotton, 1761–1805 57

14. West Indian Share of Selected British Exports, 1770–1806 69

15. The British Slave Trade, 1791–1805 72

16. Sources of North Atlantic Sugar Imports, 1787–180677

17. Shares of Sugar Exports to the North Atlantic, 1805–1806 78

18. Jamaican Slave Population, Coffee and Sugar Exports, 1783–1814 79

19. British Sugar Imports, 1761–1806 80

20. Sources of British Cotton, 1786–1805 84

21. Alternative Aggregation of British Cotton Sources, 1801–1805 86

22. British Coffee Imports from the British West Indies, 1761–1806 89

23. Average Annual Imports of Slaves Into British-Controlled Islands, April 1803 to April 1805 95

24. Sugar Imports to the North Atlantic, 1787–1806 127

25. British Sugar Imports and Reexports, 1798–1806 127

26. Annual Range of Variation in Imports with British Trading Partners 144

27. Annual Range of Variation in Exports with British Trading Partners 145

28. British Sugar Imports Before and After Abolition 146

29. Official Value of British Imports from the West Indies, 1805–1807 (1806) and 1810–1812 (1811) 147

30. Weight of British Imports from the West Indies, 1805–1807 (1806) and 1810–1812 (1811) 147

31. Slave Imports to Demerara, Trinidad, and Cuba, 1803–1804 and 1815–1819 173

32. Recorded Votes on Abolition, May 1806-February 1807 216

Figures

1. Average Annual Value of Exports and Reexports from England and Wales to the British West Indies 17

2. Average Annual Value of Imports Into England and Wales from the British West Indies 17

3. British West Indian Imports, 1722–1822 18

4. British West Indian Exports, 1722–1822 18

5. British West Indian Trade, 1722–1822 20

6. The British Slave Trade, 1780–1810 29

7. Average London Prices of British West Indian Muscovado Sugar, 1793–1812 77

8. Official Values of Cotton and Coffee Imports to Britain, 1772–1805 90

9. Total Sugar Production, 1790–1835: Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, Mauritius 150

Foreword

In 1933, when a global depression and Adolf Hitler's rise to power presaged the revival of massive human enslavement by the end of the decade, Great Britain staged a glorious celebration of the centenary of the nation's emancipation of colonial slaves. Attention focused on the great abolitionist leader William Wilberforce and on the theme that he and his fellow Saints had championed—a cause that had eventually led to the abolition of the very epitome of evil in most all of the world—dramatic evidence of the reality of moral progress in human history.

This extremely reassuring message, reinforced by such scholarly works as Sir Reginald Coupland's 1923 biography of Wilberforce, long dominated interpretations of British slave emancipation, which drew ultimately on Thomas Clarkson's classic history of Britain's earlier movement to abolish the slave trade. From the outset, there were critics, especially in France, Spain, Portugal, and the southern United States, who questioned Britain's motives and claimed that the humanitarian reformers were simply a front for darker forces. But we often eagerly accept theories that make us feel better about human nature and human prospects, and since so much human history is depressing to read, it is comforting to conclude that groups with wholly moral concerns and motivations were able to mobilize public opinion and outlaw an evil institution that had been accepted throughout the world for thousands of years.

Eric Williams, a Trinidadian descendant of slaves, encountered this self-congratulatory view of British antislavery and British imperialism when he attended Oxford in the 1930s and even studied with Coupland before receiving his D.Phil. in 1939. After moving to the United States and to Howard University (which he termed the Negro Oxford), and before becoming the twenty-five-year leader of Trinidad and Tobago, Williams transformed his doctoral dissertation into a devastating attack on the consensus that the British had transcended self-interest and abolished the slave trade and slavery out of a moral concern for humanity. Published in 1944, Capitalism and Slavery drew heavily on Lowell Joseph Ragatz's scholarly work of 1928, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833, and eventually became the starting point for virtually all studies of Caribbean slavery. While Seymour Drescher's Econocide is a full-scale refutation of Williams, Drescher could happily acknowledge in 1986, nine years after his book's publication, that "Capitalism and Slavery changed the way in which we view abolition precisely because it riveted attention on the context rather than on heroes."¹

Williams's principal arguments support two broad theses. First, he maintained that profits from the slave trade or from the New World plantation system as a whole provided most of the capital that financed the English Industrial Revolution. That thesis has now been wholly discredited by other scholars, despite the extraordinary economic importance of the Atlantic slave system.

Williams's second and most important thesis linked the rise of British abolitionism with an irreversible economic decline of the British West Indies, both as tropical producers and as importers of British goods, a decline that also tied in with Britain's decisive shift from mercantile to laissez-faire capitalism. In Drescher's words, The ‘disinterested’ forces of abolition were shown to be the ideological cover for another, more powerful force. As the colonies became encumbrances to emergent British capitalism [beginning with the American Revolution], the door was opened for the destruction of their inefficient, anachronistic economy.² Both Ragatz and Williams presented a picture of inefficient slave labor, white population loss, chronic indebtedness, soil exhaustion, and plantation bankruptcies. While Williams acknowledged that a brilliant band of abolitionists won fame by conducting what he termed one of the greatest propaganda movements of all time, he argued that in the broadest terms, slavery was doomed by the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism and free trade.

As Drescher shows, by the 1970s Williams's decline thesis had gained extremely wide acceptance, even among scholars who rejected this rigorous historical materialism in principle and his treatment of the abolitionists in particular.³ Since Drescher devotes some space in this regard to me, I should acknowledge that I was especially influenced by the statistics in Ragatz, even though the decline thesis weakened my emphasis on the importance of ideas, moral perceptions, and public opinion.⁴ Like Seymour, I was, then, delighted when our mutual friend Roger Anstey, deeply influenced by an early draft of Econocide, proved in 1975 that by every canon of national economic interest, 1806–1807 was the very worst time for Britain to abolish its slave trade. At that juncture in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain needed every export market outside of enemy control on which she could lay her hands. And Anstey showed that in the early nineteenth century the British West Indies’ share of Britain's total oceanic trade was higher than it had been at any time in the eighteenth century.⁵

Two years later Econocide presented massive empirical evidence, much of it from the same sources used by Williams and Ragatz, that abolition of the slave trade was comparable to committing suicide for a major part of Britain's economy. Loaded with statistical tables and organized like a lawyer's brief, Econocide totally destroyed the belief that the British slave system had declined in value before Parliament outlawed the slave trade. Using statistics on overseas trade, Drescher showed that the value of British West Indian exports to England and of imports into the West Indies from England increased sharply from the early 1780s to the end of the eighteenth century. Drescher also demonstrated that the British West Indies’ share of the total British overseas trade rose to high peaks in the early nineteenth century and did not begin a long-range decline until well after Parliament deprived the colonies of fresh supplies of African labor.

After assessing the profitability of the slave trade, which brought rewards of around 10 percent on investment, and the increasing value of the British West Indies, Drescher contended that the British slave system was expanding, not declining, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The 1807 abolition act came at a time when Britain not only led the world in plantation production but had the opportunity, thanks to naval power and the wartime conquests of Trinidad, Demerara, Berbice, and Essequibo, of nearly monopolizing the slave trade and gaining a preponderant share of the growing world market for sugar and coffee. Far from being old in some global sense—old soil, old habits, old techniques, as Ragatz and Williams maintained—Drescher affirmed that the British slave system was young… [and] it seemed so to contemporaries.⁶ As for the issue of soil exhaustion, complaints arose as early as the 1660s, and the erosion was never permanent. Plantation regions, like other farming regions, went through cycles of soil exhaustion and rejuvenation.

Drescher's repudiation of the decline thesis also helped to undermine an older and more deeply entrenched thesis regarding the backwardness, inefficiency, and obsolescence of slavery itself, a thesis that had been dramatically attacked three years earlier by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross. Our culture still contains much mythological residue based on the assumption that an immoral and flagrantly unjust system of labor could not possibly be congruent with long-term economic and material progress. This long-dominant mythology seemed to draw some confirmation from the fact that slavery was often associated with soil exhaustion, indebtedness, and low levels of literacy, urban growth, industry, and immigration. Drawing on Adam Smith's arguments on the superiority of free labor, or on Marxist stages of allegedly irreversible material progress, or on racist views that American slavery, while an anachronism, helped civilize so-called African savages and would have soon died out on its own without a needless Civil War, countless historians, novelists, politicians, and others totally misrepresented an institution that served as the crucial basis for New World settlement and expansion for over three centuries and that anticipated the efficiency and productivity of factory assembly lines while also leading the way to the first stage of a globalized economy.

Even in its first centuries, the Atlantic slave system foreshadowed many features of our modern global economy. For example, one sees international investment of capital in distant colonial regions, where the slave trade resulted in extremely low labor costs (or what we today might call outsourcing) to produce commodities for a transatlantic market. In recent decades historians and economists have reached a broad consensus that while the profitability of single export crops like cotton could discourage a more diversified economy, slave labor could still be efficient, productive, and adaptable to a variety of trades and occupations, ranging from mining and factory work to the technologically modernized, steam-powered Cuban sugar mills. Drescher's later work, combined with the research of Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, David Eltis, Rebecca Scott, Herbert Klein, and many others, has moved even beyond the now conventional view that black slave labor provided the foundation for the wealthiest and most dynamic New World economies from 1580 to 1800, a long period during which every white transatlantic immigrant was matched by nearly five involuntarily migrant African slaves.

There is now impressive evidence that the economic importance of slavery increased in the nineteenth century along with the soaring global demand for such consumer goods as sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cotton textiles. The slave trade hit its all-time peak toward the end of the 1700s and was certainly not declining in 1807 and 1808 when outlawed by Britain and the United States. Some 3 million Africans, or about one-fourth of the grand total exported, were shipped off to the Americas after 1807, despite the militant efforts of the British navy to suppress this mostly illegal commerce.

If free market conditions had prevailed (as increasing numbers of English leaders wished), if there had been no antislavery intervention by the British government, if the flow of African slaves to the New World had increased, labor costs on New World plantations would have fallen, and consumers would have paid much less for sugar, coffee, and cotton goods. British merchants could then have sold more manufactured goods in markets extending from Brazil and the West Indies to Africa itself. If economic motives had not been checked by powerful antislavery forces, the world would have become an even grimmer place. As David Eltis has insightfully observed, one can easily imagine the increasingly powerful British and American steam-driven merchant fleets, by the 1850s, expanding the flow of African slaves not only to Cuba and Brazil but to the American South, where a vigorous movement to reopen the slave trade claimed that the lowering of slave prices would make the institution more democratic. This Anglo-American expansion of the slave trade was prevented not by market forces but by a major transformation in Anglo-American public moral perception, spearheaded by a small group of abolitionist reformers.

Contrary to traditional dogma, and as many economists came to realize even by the 1820s, under most circumstances free labor was not cheaper or more productive than slave labor. In any event, a sufficient supply of free labor was never available. And as the British learned to their dismay after truly emancipating some 800,000 colonial slaves in 1838, free laborers were unwilling to accept the coercive plantation discipline and working conditions that made sugar production a highly profitable investment. One unexpected result of this emancipation was that Britain found it necessary to transport to the Caribbean hundreds of thousands of hardly free East Asian indentured workers who eventually replaced many of the emancipated blacks in such colonies as Trinidad and Guiana.

Britain's counterproductive, or as Drescher terms it, econocidal, destruction of its own slave trade and slave colonies, which had been the world's leading producers of sugar and coffee, provided an extra and enormous stimulus to the plantations of Cuba and Brazil and thus to the then illegal slave trade that supplied them with labor. In mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, black slavery proved to be highly compatible with urban life and virtually every urban trade and skill. In mid-nineteenth-century Cuba, black slaves were profitably employed in the most capital-intensive and highly mechanized sugar production. In both Cuba and Brazil, as Herbert Klein has shown, as late as the 1880s slaves were most heavily concentrated in the most dynamic regions of their respective societies on the eve of emancipation. I should add that in the American South, slaveholders effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to both mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacturing of textiles, iron, and other industrial products.

Moreover, as Sidney W. Mintz pointed out in 1986, there was a strong symbiotic relationship between New World slavery and industrial capitalism. Slave labor produced sugar and most of the other luxury goods that first reached a mass consumer market, particularly in England, and that therefore contributed to the labor incentives needed for English industrial work discipline.⁷ Britain's preeminent textile industry, the core of the Industrial Revolution, was wholly dependent on an expanding supply of cotton. Thanks in part to the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, most of Britain's cotton was produced by American slaves until the end of the American Civil War. Further, the dramatic drop in price for British manufactured goods reduced the cost of buying slaves on the African coast. While the price of slaves in Africa remained low and relatively stable during much of the nineteenth century—and virtually all of the slaves taken to the Americas were purchased with European and Asian commodities—the price of slaves continued to rise in the New World, in part because of the strong negative slave population growth rates, except in the United States, where the price of slaves soared even though the slave population doubled, tripled, and quadrupled by natural means.

The symbiosis between slavery and industrial capitalism is perhaps most vividly indicated by the fact that the illicit Atlantic slave trade to Cuba and Brazil depended on British capital, credit, insurance, and manufactured goods, including firearms, that were exchanged in Africa for slaves. As David Eltis convincingly argued in 1987, echoing the main theme of Econocide, For the Americas as well as for Britain at the outset of industrialization, there was a profound incompatibility between economic self-interest and antislavery policy.⁸ This point was well understood by most American politicians, even northerners like President Martin Van Buren. There is a subtle irony in the way that Eltis's neoclassical economic analysis exposes the pathological consequences of a worldview that subordinates all human relationships to free market choices and the supreme goal of achieving the largest national product. And here I should mention that the value of southern slaves in 1860 equaled 80 percent of the gross national product, or what today would be equivalent to $9.75 trillion. There were good reasons why, in 1860, two-thirds of the richest Americans lived in the slaveholding South.⁹

Since we now see such a fundamental contradiction between economic self-interest and the various national efforts to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade and to abolish or at least limit the expansion of racial slavery, how do we account for such counterproductive or econocidal policies? The humanitarian beliefs and goals of the abolitionists were hardly the principles and motives that could long guide the cost-conscious leaders of Britain, the world's most powerful and economically expansive nation. It should be emphasized that Drescher does not return to the naïve humanitarian thesis represented by Coupland and the imperial school that Williams attacked. He did make it clear that while Econocide was principally concerned with refuting the decline thesis, he hoped above all that his analysis would lay the groundwork for a fresh investigation of political abolition.¹⁰ Although a few critics searched for new ways to defend the decline thesis, most criticism and debate has centered on finding alternative explanations for the now surprising success of antislavery movements. Most of Drescher's subsequent work has addressed this issue, especially with respect to the mobilization of British public opinion, but we have no space here to summarize the ongoing historiography.

In an article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Williams's Capitalism and Slavery, Drescher noted that recent scholarship, taking a broader Atlantic perspective, had eroded the very idea of history as a series of discrete stages of interlocking economic, social, political, and ideological orders. While Williams's landmark book had focused attention on the relationships between slavery and capitalism, he and his generation had underestimated the astonishing adaptability of capitalism, which proved supremely agnostic and pluralistic in its ability to coexist, and to thrive, with a whole range of labor systems right through the abolitionist century after 1780.¹¹ One should now extend that period to the very present.

As a final fulfillment of the questions raised in Econocide, Drescher has now grasped the big picture in his monumental new work, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery.¹² By carrying the story of the perennial institution from the late Middle Ages to the millions of slave laborers in the Russian gulags and Nazi concentration camps, Drescher has shown that while slavery in its various forms can serve, when opposed, as a model for abolishing evil, it also seems to be irrevocable, with an amazing capacity to endure or suddenly resurrect, even in a seemingly progressive and civilized nation like twentieth-century Germany. If this profound history of human nature gives some cause for hope with regard to moral progress, it should also end complacency and put us on continual alert.

David Brion Davis

Notes

1 Seymour Drescher, "The Decline Thesis of British Slavery since Econocide," Slavery and Abolition 7 (May 1986), 21.

2 Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977), 5, 15.

3 Ibid., 6.

4 For my thesis regarding changing moral perceptions, and my move away from the decline thesis in response to Econocide and other works, see The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966; rev. ed., New York, 1988), 152–53.

5 Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London, 1975), 38–57, 321–425. Anstey acknowledged his indebtedness to Drescher on pp. 52 and 407.

6 Drescher, Econocide, 162–63.

7 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1986), passim.

8 David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 15.

9 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), 298. Of course the nation's economic structure was very different in 1860, and by today's standards the GNP was very small.

10 Drescher, Econocide, 8.

11 Seymour Drescher, "Capitalism and Slavery after Fifty Years," Slavery and Abolition 18 (December 1997), 213–14, 218, 220–21.

12 Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York, 2009).

Preface to the Second Edition

In 1944 the University of North Carolina Press published Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery. It thereby launched what Christopher Leslie Brown has called a prolonged controversy, perhaps one of the most complex in modern historical scholarship.¹ The debate had certainly not waned when the same press reissued Capitalism and Slavery on its fiftieth anniversary. It seems fitting that Econocide, which was published thirty-three years after Williams's classic work, should be reprinted by the University of North Carolina Press exactly thirty-three years after its own appearance in 1977. Econocide reopened the conversation about the most crucial paradigm shift in the history of slavery and abolition. Capitalism and Slavery had argued for the overwhelming influence of a particular economic transformation in the emergence and triumph of antislavery. Econocide offered a root-and-branch challenge to that interpretation. It highlighted moral and political calls to action that worked against powerful and hitherto unquestioned economic forces.

The debates that emerged from the juxtaposition of Capitalism and Slavery and Econocide have developed in many directions since 1977. Some historians have focused ever more insistently on what Econocide called the Ragatz-Williams decline thesis. As David Brion Davis notes in his Foreword, this thesis affirmed that the West Indies entered into an irreversible decline sometime between the end of the Seven Years War (1763) and the end of the War of American Independence (1783).² This decline thesis was nested with another thesis about the role of slavery in the development of capitalism. Williams posited a two-stage progression. In the first phase, lasting until the War of American Independence, the slave trade and slavery played a crucial role in the rise of British capitalism. The profits of the slave trade and slavery provided one of the main streams of capital that financed its industrial revolution. In the second phase, after 1783, the declining British slave system became a fetter on British growth, leading Britain first to abolition of the slave trade (1788–1807) and then to colonial slave emancipation (1823–1838). In Econocide, I focused on the period 1770–1823, when the slave trade became the primary target of metropolitan antislavery.

It is impossible, in a few brief pages, to do full justice to the nuanced scholarship that has directly or indirectly impinged upon the theme of West Indian economic decline.³ It seems fair to say, however, that most economic historians, viewing the British Atlantic slave system in terms of productivity, output, profitability, wealth, etc., have now concluded that the existing data does not comport with a decline beginning in the decades between the 1770s and the eve of British abolition of the slave trade in 1806–1807. In the summary words of David Richardson, Contrary to the assumptions of some historians, therefore, British abolitionism developed against a background of economic growth and prosperity, not stagnation, decline or crisis in Britain's slave colonies, with slave-owners enjoying wealth and lifestyles unimaginable to the huge majority of Britons.⁴ As for the British transatlantic slave trade, it continued to flourish in the two decades between the emergence of the British abolitionist movement in 1787 and the ending of the trade twenty years later. In short, in terms of the criteria employed by Williams as well as most economic historians thereafter, there is little evidence of the terminal decline of either the African or West Indian branches of British slavery in the generation before abolition.

Following Williams's lead, some historians continue the argument over the decline thesis within the boundaries of the eighteenth-century British West Indies as it existed before the French Revolution.⁵ One can also narrow the time frame of the decline. Even if a historian accepts the proposition that the long-term economic decline of British slavery did not begin after the Seven Years War (Ragatz) or the American Revolution (Williams and Carrington), other pivotal moments before abolition may suggest themselves. David Ryden, with Jamaica as his exemplar, identifies 1799 as the defining moment of British slavery's decline in the West Indies. In that year the upward surge in the price of tropical staples in the wake of the St. Domingue slave revolution (1791) came to an end. In this scenario the planters paid the price for their irrational exuberance of the 1790s with a seven-year glut. For Ryden, previous markers of vigor and expansion—increased production, exports, and imports; rising productivity and prices of slaves—are transformed into indicators of rising debt and catastrophic decline for planters. By the spring of 1806 general abolition was almost a foregone conclusion.⁶

By contrast, in another recent study Ahmed Reid finds that Williams's conclusion that economic considerations led to the demise of the slave trade is not sustainable.⁷ Studying data from the same island as Ryden, he comes to a radically different conclusion. Written explicitly as an antithesis to the proposition that Jamaica's plantation economy declined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Reid's work reveals a steady increase in Jamaican national income right up to the eve of abolition in 1805, climaxing a generation of phenomenal growth. Evidence of sugar's expansion is matched by other indicators of planter flexibility and diversification. From the eve of the St. Domingue revolution in 1791 to the year of abolition in 1807, Jamaican coffee exports rose by 400 percent. In the British slave colonies as a whole, a crop that had been only 6 percent as valuable as sugar in 1784–1786 was 36 percent as valuable in 1804–1806.

One of Econocide's distinctive approaches to the problem of abolition's triumph was to highlight the decline theory's relative neglect of British slavery's enormous new frontier at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By 1807 the British had acquired the major undeveloped Caribbean island of Trinidad. It also had reconquered, and made a firm decision to retain, the mainland colonies of Demerara and Berbice, where so much British capital had recently been invested. 1806 was also the year in which the British captured the Dutch slave colony in South Africa and the British government briefly contemplated retaining control of the Rio de la Plata, a gateway for commerce into Latin America.

David Eltis gave this perspective an enormous extension of breadth and analytic depth in Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. He expanded the history of the tension between the dynamic impact of the economics of the slave trade on all four continents bordering the Atlantic and the paradoxes and tensions entailed in dismantling the chains of wealth and power that depended upon an intercontinental trade in millions of human beings. He also cogently reflected on the enormous impact that the suppression of the transatlantic trade had on the peopling of the New World and the development of the Atlantic continents, as well as the moral and economic consequences of the trade's termination.⁸

There remains the perennial and still shorter-run economic explanation for the abolitions of the slave trade in 1806–1807. All historians agree that there was a deep crisis in the sugar market and a dismal price squeeze on planters beginning in mid-1806. Econocide argues, however, that overproduction is a misnomer for the situation. After 1799 European ports had been intermittently closed and reopened to all British domestic and imperial products by continental warfare and French expansion. The economic crisis of 1806–1807 affected the empire in general, not slave colonies in particular. The industries most often referred to as victims by opponents in the parliamentary debate over abolition of the foreign slave trade in the spring of 1806 were British shipping and British manufacturing. And the fundamental premise of the supporters of that bill was that British slavers were helping to expand the production of the wealth and expansion of foreign and conquered slave colonies by the introduction of more slaves. During the months just preceding the major debates on total abolition in January and February 1807 those who discussed the sugar glut attributed it to the closure of European ports, not Caribbean overproduction. The reason was to be found in the differential between sugar prices on the British and continental sides of the Channel.⁹

Econocide concluded that the West India interest and its slaving allies could no longer expend their energies on fighting the abolitionist threat to their long-run fate amidst the storm of immediate threats: continental closure in Europe, neutral carriers on the Atlantic, high duties on tropical products in the metropoles, and massive public hostility to the trade. For those intrigued by the causes of pivotal events in the history of the slave trade, accounting for the passage of British abolition in 1806–1807 remains a quest for the elusive balance between individual motives, collective perceptions, and the balance of political power.

Alternatives to Economic Decline

Perhaps the most interesting development that arose from Econocide's challenge to the decline thesis is that the field for alternative interpretations of abolition has clearly widened during the past three decades. It is now much easier to recognize that the economic trajectory of slavery in the British Empire was basically quite similar to its trajectory in other empires in the Atlantic world until terminated by political action. Almost every major imperial slave economy was viable, flexible, and dynamic when it came under sustained assault. A glance at the new Transatlantic Slave Trade Database dramatically makes the point.¹⁰ In Britain the climax of the first popular mobilization against the trade (1792) coincided with a record number of slaves disembarked in British colonial ports. Right down to the curtailment of the British slave trade to conquered and foreign colonies in 1805–1806, British slavers continued to rank as premier transporters of African captives. French colonial slave imports likewise peaked in 1790, on the eve of the great slave revolution in St. Domingue.

Spain's American slave imports reached their apogee in the late 1810s, just as abolition of the slave trade was being pressed upon a reluctant Spanish monarch by British threats and bribes. For fifty years thereafter, the ebb and flow of Spanish importations varied in accordance with the extent of pressure being brought to bear on authorities in the Caribbean and Spain. The Luso-Brazilian slave trade likewise reached its annual apogee just before the first Anglo-Brazilian abolition treaty came into force in 1830, and its all-time triennial peak in 1847–1849 on the eve of the final British naval mobilization against Brazilian slaving. The upward movement of slave prices in all of the major New World slave systems continued beyond abolition of the slave trade into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In one system after another the institution demonstrated its viability, flexibility, and durability until closed down by superior military, civil, or political pressure from without or within.¹¹

In the wake of the Anglo-American abolitions of 1807, the Latin American empires absorbed the overwhelming percentage of transatlantic enslaved Africans until the end of the trade. That situation, in turn, contributed to the relative cost-effectiveness of plantation slave production over its non–slave labor competitors in the Americas. Four decades of research seem to show that, from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the leading slave labor zones of the Americas constituted some of the most productive and wealth-producing economies on the face of the earth. The impacts on metropolitan economies varied. Portugal, the European empire with the greatest reliance on the slave trade and slavery in both America and Africa, had the lowest per capita gross domestic product of any imperial power from the beginning of its overseas slave empire to the end. In the Spanish orbit, where a New World slave empire lingered longest, slavery probably had more impact on European metropolitan industrialization.¹²

Contrasting the Williams scenario with those of Drescher and Eltis, a recent historian of the Iberian imperial abolitionist process finds the Drescher/ Eltis perspective to be a more fruitful starting point for understanding the relationship between slavery, abolition, and colonial independence in the age of the Ibero-American revolutions (1810–1830). Jeremy Adelman concludes that on the eve of their struggles for independence South Americans were sure that "the South Atlantic system and colonial political economies did depend on the survival of slavery. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—in the wake of both Haitian independence and British abolition of the slave trade—Latin American merchant capitalists at the center of their ruling cliques enjoyed more freedom to govern their economic affairs than ever before," and far more than their British counterparts in the Caribbean. So, once again, in the South as well as the North Atlantic, capitalist slavery reached its apogee just prior to the Spanish American Revolutionary Wars of Independence. Econocide's basic thesis thus fits Latin America quite well: as Adelman puts it, antislavery and economic self-interest were fundamentally at odds, and ultimately, "interests had to adjust to ideology—not the other way