By the mid-nineteenth century, when British imperial power reached its greatest extent, the Caribbean colonies were a relatively minor part of a vastly larger economic and political picture. British dominance in India, East Asia, Africa, and the Pacific had almost nothing to do with Caribbean plantation profits. It was driven by industrial and military advantage developed through the Industrial Revolution, by the Royal Navy’s global reach, and by the legal and commercial infrastructure Britain had built over two centuries.
India alone, at the height of the British Raj, generated more revenue for the British state than all the Caribbean colonies combined. The East India Company’s commercial operations, and later the Crown’s administration of India, were built on a different economic foundation entirely: the extraction of agricultural surplus, the monopolisation of Indian textile trade, and the use of Indian tax revenues to fund military expansion across Asia.
The British presence in East Asia, in Africa, and in the Pacific was similarly driven by commercial and strategic interests that were largely independent of the plantation economy. The opium trade in China, the scramble for African territory in the late nineteenth century, the establishment of trading posts across the Pacific: none of these were financed primarily by sugar money. They were driven by the competitive dynamics of industrial capitalism and imperial rivalry among European powers.
An empire that had been built on slavery should have contracted when slavery was abolished. Instead it expanded. That is the clearest empirical evidence that slavery was not its foundation.
