On Eric Williams' Capitalism & Slavery and the history of liberalism
Recently, Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) re-alerted me to his essay in Dissent back in 2020 (here) co-authored with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) in which they (correctly) remind Michael Walzer of the meaning and intellectual origins of the concept racial capitalism. (Here is Walzer’s essay they are responding to; here is Walzer’s response to them.)
I tend to treat Dissent as a magazine that is important to my scholarly interests. (I may even still have a live subscription in order to read Arnold Kaufman’s essays.) But I don’t think of myself as belonging to “the democratic left,” or participating, as an insider, in Dissent’s discussions (which usually presuppose a ‘we’ I am uneasy with.) So, what follows is only obliquely connected to the exchange mentioned in the first paragraph.
But as it happens, I just re-read Eric Williams’ (1944) Capitalism and Slavery and admire it greatly.* It is conceptually clear and it is very carefully argued throughout. It is, in fact, one of the great studies in the role of unintended consequences in history. As Williams puts it in his conclusion, “Men, pursuing their interests, are rarely aware of the ultimate results of their activity.” (p. 199) The book is also scrupulously fair, and its moral scorekeeping is informed by a sober expectation of what is to be expected from humans under the best conditions. In fact, while it is incidental to his aims, it contains (recall) one of the best treatments of the liberal perspective on mercantilism that I have ever read. (To be frank: I am not such a fan of Cedric Robinson on precisely this issue.) And what follows is mostly designed to illustrate my admiration, but also to speak to the role of moral ideas in history.
In their essay Bright and Táíwò write, “Eric Williams’s 1944 classic Capitalism and Slavery argued for what economic historians now know as the “Williams thesis”: roughly, that the trans-Atlantic slave trade caused the development of both global racism and capitalism.” But they leave unclear how Williams argues this, and this is my interest. In what follows, I focus exclusively on the second issue.
Williams announces how the slave trade causes the development of capitalism in the preface: “Negro slavery and the slave trade [provided] the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system.” (p. xi) That is, Williams can explain the origin and timing of the Industrial Revolution in the concentrated capital accumulation provided by the profits derived from the violent Mercantile practices rooted in slavery and slave trade. For Williams this is so, even though these Mercantile practices came at an aggregate cost to consumers and growth. This accumulated capital could fund the capital outlays for the industrial revolution that underpins mature capitalism.
It’s important to Williams’ argument that Mercantilism is a system of economic and political/colonial relations. (As I have noted before (recall), Williams does not disguise his debt to Adam Smith, and this is, in fact, one of the key insights from Book IV of Wealth of Nations.) In particular, Mercantilism creates a number of triangular trades between Africa, the West Indian sugar (and cotton), islands, the American mainland, and great Brittain. As Williams notes through chapter 4, these profits don’t just create consumer spending on luxuries, but they also buy a self-reinforcing political influence (as brilliantly described by (recall) Coguano). It is the rents/profits of this systemic trade structure (underpinned by monopoly privilege and the violence of slavery) that is “one of the main streams of the accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution,” (p. 48; notice that the causal link is worded more carefully here than in the preface.)
As an aside, Williams offers the details of the mechanism between profit and capital investment in chapter 5. I am not wholly convinced by his story there. I fear that at least some of the details of his argument suggests that it is the British state’s military spending on protecting (the concentrated profits of) Mercantile interests that may well have played a decisive role to help fund the investments in steam power and its applications. And so lurking in the background here is the British financial revolution as ultimate cause to the rise of the forces that helped defeat mercantilism from within.
But assuming he is right about causation, there is also an important pay-off lurking here for moral philosophers and intellectuals on the nature of social moral improvement. And that’s my real interest in writing this digression. On Williams’ view developed in chapter 11, only once the Industrial Revolution gets going does the English material interests in free labor and the anti-monopolistic practices that can defeat pro-slavery interest substantially develop. There was no broad, socially powerful moral revolution without a prior change in material interests. Williams shows this, in fact, by looking at all the major abolitionists; all but Clarkson (who Williams really admires) had non-trivial interest in East India that could benefit from the demise of slavery in the West.
It’s important to see that Williams is not claiming that moral views are rooted conceptually in material interests. Nor is he claiming that all morality just is an ideology. Rather, his point is political and explanatory: moral humanitarianism does not change major political policy without there being material interests in society in the outcome. The point of Williams argument in chapters 8 and 9 is to show how rising industries were thwarted by mercantilism and British slave-holding monopolies (in sugar, especially), and so a viable political coalition that was imperfectly abolitionist in character came into being. Imperfect because it had little interest in combatting slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the American South, etc. (p. 174-183.)
If we step back. It’s not so surprising that I notice this feature of Williams’ argument. On my view the historic genius of liberalism is to combine, where possible, moral and material arguments to a common end. And this is what’s lost when politics is treated exclusively in ethical fashion; or exclusively as the play of power. This feature of liberalism is diagnosed and acknowledged by Williams (see especially his comments on Cobden on p. 135 & pp. 152-3 and Cobden’s debt to Smith).
But Williams also rightly notes the structural weakness of this stance: that when morality comes at a major cost liberals may recoil; Williams notes that Cobden and Bright drew back from international/foreign humanitarianism (p. 164) for that reason. My own view is that (recall) Cobden and Bright’s stance can be vindicated by principle and prudence in an uncertain world, but there is no doubt that Williams is right that the motive is pecuniary in character and the result not infrequently sordid.
*In fact, I re-read it after I wrote this recent Digression.
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