The intellectual foundation of the “empire built on slavery” argument is Eric Williams’s 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery. Williams was a serious historian and became the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. His argument was genuinely important and has been widely influential. It deserves to be engaged with seriously rather than dismissed.
Williams argued that the profits of the slave trade and the plantation system financed British industrialisation. He traced specific connections between Caribbean planters, slave traders, and the financing of early industrial enterprises. His argument was a corrective to a historiography that had largely ignored the economic dimensions of slavery, and in that respect it was valuable.
The problem is that the strong version of his thesis, that without slavery there would have been no Industrial Revolution, does not survive the scrutiny it has received from economic historians over the past eighty years. Scholars including Seymour Drescher, Patrick O’Brien, and Stanley Engerman have examined Williams’s specific claims and found them quantitatively insufficient to support the conclusion he drew. The profits were too small, the capital markets too broad, and the conditions for industrialisation too firmly in place independently for the slave trade to have been the decisive factor Williams claimed.
Williams wrote at a specific historical moment, in the context of decolonisation and Caribbean nationalism, and his argument served important political purposes in that context. But political importance and historical accuracy are different things, and the reparations campaign’s reliance on a thesis that has been substantially qualified by subsequent scholarship is a weakness in its historical foundation.
There is also a prior question that Williams does not fully address: where did the capital to invest in the slave trade come from in the first place? The merchants who financed slaving voyages and plantation ownership were already wealthy before they made those investments. Their capital came from existing trade, land, and financial activity. Williams traces what slave profits were invested in; he does not adequately reckon with the fact that slavery was itself funded by pre-existing wealth, and that this pre-existing wealth would have sought and found other profitable investments had the slave trade not existed.
