Eric Williams on Adam Smith's philosophical Prophecy and Federalism.
In 1944 Eric Williams (1911-1981) published Capitalism & Slavery. This was based on his (1938) dissertation, The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery. I have not read the dissertation. So what follows is only based on his book. Williams explains the point of the book in the preface:
It is strictly an economic study of the role of Negro slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system. It is therefore first a study in English economic history and second in West Indian and Negro history. It is not a study of the institution of slavery but of the contribution of slavery to the development of British capitalism. (pp. vii-viii)
As the quote suggests, Williams is working with a developmental schema of capitalism that divides it into an “early” (p. vii) and mature phase. This schema is, in fact, introduced in the very first sentence of the “Preface.”* This schema evokes Marxian ideas, but Williams offers no source (and does not cite Marx or Sombart in the work).
So, it’s somewhat surprising that Adam Smith is the first political economist introduced by Williams (p. 4). Often, later in the book, Smith is used as a source on economic history (e.g., p. 53; p. 85.) But here Williams immediately uses Smith as his foil. Smith is quoted that “the prosperity of a new colony depends upon one simple economic factor "plenty of good land.” (In the endnote, Williams ads Smith’s qualification that this depends also on institutional/political arrangements.) Williams then suggests that there are, in fact, two kinds of colonies in order to get his own argument off the ground. This pattern — Smith as a foil which Williams then amends — is repeated in the book. As it turns out, Williams is a very thorough reader of Wealth of Nations, which he quotes from then recent reprint (1937) of the Cannan edition (that has a rather imperfect introduction by Max Lerner added to it).
However, Adam Smith also has a different role in Williams’ argument. And this is introduced on the very next page, where Smith is treated as “the intellectual champion of the industrial middle class with its new-found doctrine of freedom, later propagated the argument that it was, in general, pride and love of power in the master that led to slavery and that, in those countries where slaves were employed, free labor would be more profitable.” (p. 5-6) This is Smith as important intellectual exemplar of a certain perspective on his own time (e.g., p. 121).
Williams also engages in debate with Smith as the intellectual champion of the industrial middle class. So, Williams immediately engages in a kind of ideology critique in which Smith is accused of mistaking his own time for the conditions that allow universal generalization: “Adam Smith thereby treated as an abstract proposition what is a specific question of time, place, labor and soil.” (p. 6) Williams, then, is in historicizing dialogue with Smith.
Later, Smith is treated ahead of his time as a kind of philosophical prophet of the nineteenth century: only “Two eighteenth century economists condemned the expensiveness and inefficiency of slave labor Dean Tucker and Adam Smith, the warning tocsin, the trumpeter of the new age. The discordant notes went unheeded.” (p. 49) In particular, Smith is the prescient critic of mercantilism (p. 51), who understands the full significance of globalization (p. 51). In fact, on Williams’ insightful reading of Smith globalization vitalized mercantilism in ways that would have been impossible in a regional economy.
Smith as philosophical prophet of a new age and critic of mercantilism and its slave economy is rather central to Williams’ general argument (e.g., p. 138). And this version of Smith, in turn, is connected to the American experiment:
Two outstanding figures of the eighteenth century saw and, what was more, appreciated the irrepressible conflict: Adam Smith from his professorial chair, Thomas Jefferson on his plantation. Adam Smith denounced the folly and injustice which had first directed the project of establishing colonies in the New World. He opposed the whole system of monopoly, the keystone of the colonial arch, on the ground that it restricted the productive power of England as well as the colonies. (p. 107)
The irrepressible conflict is the one between mercantilism, which is a self-limiting political economy, an embrace of a closed society, and the growing globalization through limitless trade and growing production of the open society. (My phrasing is Popperian of which Williams could not have been aware, but it captures Williams’ reading of Smith.) What follows is a very fine appreciation of Smith’s critique of mercantilism.
The connection with Jefferson (who is much more of an agrarian republican than Smith is) may at first seem puzzling. But Jefferson’s writings (not his practice!) are mined for observations on the limitations of the slave economy (see p. 7 & 18). The meaning of the connection is explained in the subsequent paragraph (which is the final paragraph of chapter 5):
The Wealth of Nations was the philosophical antecedent of the American Revolution. Both were twin products of the same cause, the brake applied by the mercantile system on the development of the productive power of England and her colonies. Adam Smith's role was to berate intellectually "the mean and malignant expedients" of a system which the armies of George Washington dealt a mortal wound on the battlefields of America. (p. 107)
So, the book and the revolution of 1776 herald the defeat and decline of mercantilism. As Williams puts it later, “The rise and fall of mercantilism is the rise and fall of slavery.” (p. 136) To put the quoted passage in Marxian terms, they (the book and the American revolution) represent and are caused by the same social contradictions manifest in the age. This claim is repeated shortly thereafter:
The year 1776 marked the Declaration of Independence and the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Far from accentuating the value of the sugar islands, American independence marked the beginning of their uninterrupted decline, and it was a current saying at the time that the British ministry had lost not only thirteen colonies but eight islands as well. American independence destroyed the mercantile system and discredited the old regime. Coinciding with the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, it stimulated that growing feeling of disgust with the colonial system which Adam Smith was voicing and which rose to a veritable crescendo of denunciation at the height of the free trade. (p. 120)
Williams then shifts gears to explain the rise of the influence of Smith’s views in Brittain (p. 125ff). One important feature hereof was to treat the Empire not just in military perspective, or in terms of glory and grandeur, but also in terms of cost and profit (p. 125; see also the use of Cobden on Smith at p. 142). One way American independence changed the perspective on empire is that once independent, America’s trade with Britain exploded to mutual benefit (p. 125-126). Williams is quite clear on how the anti-imperialist arguments of Bright and Cobden are rooted in Smith.
So much for set up.
As Adom Getachew notes in her (2019) Worldmaking after Empire: the Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, after he had defended his dissertation, Williams becomes highly interested in debates over federalism within and as a means to decolonization (and making it a success) in the early 1940s which anticipates some of Nkrumah’s writings on the topic. Getachew quotes from a number of hitherto unpublished lectures and papers in addition to material in the public record. In 1943 Williams had organized a conference “Economic future of the Carribean.” (Getachew p. 111) She quite sensibly puts Williams in the context of more general upswing of interest in federalism of the age.**
According to Getachew Williams presents himself as “heirs to the tradition of 1776” (Getachew, p. 112) And Getachew quotes him as asserting that “political freedom predicates economic security and the removal of those economic fetters which restrict…full development and stunt their stature, in 1943 as they did in 1776.” (Getachew, p. 111.) In particular, “the spirit of 1776” is associated not with the Declaration of Independence, but with its culmination in federation.” (Getachew, p. 114)
This particular association did not surprise me given Williams’ evident close reading of Wealth of Nations which he connects with, as we have seen, the spirit of 1776 in Capitalism & Slavery. For as regular readers know, and I have repeatedly emphasized, the critique of mercantilism in Book IV and, then the general conclusion of Book V, in Wealth of Nations culminate in a rousing political and economic defense of federalism.
To be continued.
* “THE PRESENT STUDY is an attempt to place in historical perspective the relationship between early capitalism as exemplified by Great Britain, and the Negro slave trade, Negro slavery and the general colonial trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” (p. vii.)
**Williams’ views are publicly available to us in his Federation: Two Public Lectures. But these are from 1956. (Getachew quotes it, too.) There he treats Hamilton as a “West Indian.” (page two.) And is he engaged in a reading of the Federalist papers (as Getachew discusses).