The intellectual revolution that produced British economic dominance was directly opposed to the plantation model. Adam Smith, writing in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 as the Industrial Revolution was beginning, was explicitly critical of the slave trade and the plantation system. He argued on economic grounds that free labour was more productive than enslaved labour, and that the mercantile system that sustained the colonial trade was economically inefficient and harmful to Britain’s overall prosperity.
Smith’s argument was not merely moral. He was making an economic case that the constraints imposed by mercantilism, including the plantation economy, were holding back Britain’s productive potential. The free trade ideas that emerged from Smith and his successors shaped British economic policy in a direction that prioritised competition, market access, and productive efficiency over the extraction of colonial surplus.
The Corn Laws, the Navigation Acts, the colonial trade monopolies: all of these were dismantled in the nineteenth century as the free trade movement, inspired by Smith and developed by Ricardo, Cobden, and others, won the political argument. The economic philosophy that produced British commercial dominance was one that the plantation economy’s defenders explicitly opposed. You cannot simultaneously argue that slavery built the British economy and that the ideas that built the British economy were hostile to slavery.
