times when slavery was invisible in British and American history and where West Indian history (where slavery was always considered important) was relegated to a cul-de-sac of historical inquiry. Even the great Marxist historians celebrated by the New History of Capitalism movement shared this indifference to race, slavery and the Caribbean. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, showed little interest in the work of Eric Williams. Such lack of interest was unfortunate and is no longer defensible today. But we want to be careful not to redress the absence of slavery in accounts of the past by now overstating its importance. Slavery was important and so too were But their importance needs to be kept in perspective. We don’t want to adopt the attitude of pro-slavery spokesmen for the eighteenth-century West Indian interest or James Henry Hammond for antebellum cotton planters who made insistent claims for themselves and their value to Britain and America. It is not just New History of Capitalism historians and Eric Williams who trumpet how important slavery and slave-owning was to industrial Britain. Edward Long, the historian of Jamaica and a pro-planter voice, argued in 1774 that the sugar colonies were a source of immense wealth and power. After listing how many Britons relied on wealth from the West Indies, he argued that may from thence form a competent “we idea of the prodigious value of our sugar colonies, and a just conception of their immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of their mother country.” While we should be prepared to rethink our histories of the beginnings of industrial capitalism so that we find more space for enslaved people, we need to remember that our efforts may end up with us sharing space with some uncomfortable bedfellows.
times when slavery was invisible in British and American history and where West Indian history (where slavery was always considered important) was relegated to a cul-de-sac of historical inquiry. Even the great Marxist historians celebrated by the New History of Capitalism movement shared this indifference to race, slavery and the Caribbean. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, showed little interest in the work of Eric Williams. Such lack of interest was unfortunate and is no longer defensible today. But we want to be careful not to redress the absence of slavery in accounts of the past by now overstating its importance. Slavery was important and so too were But their importance needs to be kept in perspective. We don’t want to adopt the attitude of pro-slavery spokesmen for the eighteenth-century West Indian interest or James Henry Hammond for antebellum cotton planters who made insistent claims for themselves and their value to Britain and America. It is not just New History of Capitalism historians and Eric Williams who trumpet how important slavery and slave-owning was to industrial Britain. Edward Long, the historian of Jamaica and a pro-planter voice, argued in 1774 that the sugar colonies were a source of immense wealth and power. After listing how many Britons relied on wealth from the West Indies, he argued that “we may from thence form a competent idea of the prodigious value of our sugar colonies, and a just conception of their immense importance to the grandeur and prosperity of their mother country.” While we should be prepared to rethink our histories of the beginnings of industrial capitalism so that we find more space for enslaved people, we need to remember that our efforts may end up with us sharing space with some uncomfortable bedfellows.
Slavery-and-British-Industrialisation.docx