[‘Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was
that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave
traders were men of distinction: “worthy men, fathers of families
and excellent citizens”]
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FUNHOUSE MIRROR  
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Christopher L. Brown
December 15, 2023
London Review of Books
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_ ‘Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that
it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave
traders were men of distinction: “worthy men, fathers of families
and excellent citizens” _

The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840. National Portrait Gallery,
London, Painting by Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846)

 

Capitalism and Slavery 
by Eric Williams
[[link removed]].
_Penguin, 304 pp., £9.99, February 2022, 978 0 241 54816 5_

Awhile ago​ a row erupted in Brooklyn over the naming of a new
basketball arena. In 2007 Barclays Bank agreed to pay $400 million
over twenty years to sponsor what is now known as the Barclays Center.
Politicians who opposed the project, and some who supported it,
denounced the partnership because, they argued, Barclays had profited
from the Atlantic slave trade, and therefore had no rightful place in
a predominantly African American neighbourhood. ‘Barclays Bank has
gained enormous profits from blood money obtained from the
transatlantic slave trade, which is one of the worst crimes in the
history of the world,’ a state assemblyman declared. ‘Brooklynites
and New Yorkers of every race and religion should be concerned about
their presence in our borough.’ The information on Barclays came
from a book published in 1944: _Capitalism and Slavery_ by Eric
Williams. ‘In 1756,’ Williams wrote, ‘there were 84 Quakers
listed as members of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, among
them the Barclay and Baring families.’ He had drawn, in turn, on a
dissertation titled ‘The Political and Economic Relations of English
and American Quakers, 1750-85,’ completed a decade earlier by Anne
T. Gary, an American pursuing a doctorate in modern history at Oxford.

A Barclays publicist responded a few days later. ‘David Barclay
formed a committee of London Quakers to oppose the slave trade, and
later became involved with the committee in taking the Quaker
anti-slave trade message nationwide within the United Kingdom.’ He
belonged on the list of slavery’s opponents, not its defenders.
‘David Barclay’s position on slavery is shown in this instance,’
the publicist continued, ‘when, after calling in a debt in Jamaica,
he became owner of a farm, which had, included in its operations, 32
slaves.’ He went from accidental slave owner to dedicated
emancipator. ‘After unsuccessfully trying to free the slaves in
Jamaica, David Barclay made arrangements for them to travel to
Philadelphia where they were free.’

The bank’s statement was true, as far as it goes, but selective,
misleading and therefore, in its own way, false. Barclay did liberate
the enslaved men, women and children at Unity Valley Pen in 1795. He
led a Quaker delegation to the House of Commons in the spring of 1783
that called for the abolition of the British slave trade. But he had
come late to the anti-slavery gospel. In the middle decades of the
18th century, he built his fortune as a large-scale importer of
Virginia tobacco, cultivated by slaves. In 1756 he was a member of the
Company of Merchants Trading to Africa that administered the British
slave trade. There’s no evidence that Barclay invested directly in
the traffic of captive Africans, but he evidently served as a creditor
for plantation owners in the British colonies and was in this way, at
minimum, financially committed to it. There are real but not
necessarily meaningful moral distinctions between owning slaves and
investing in those who do.

So Barclay’s record on slavery was mixed. He spent more than a
decade discouraging Quaker activists in North America such as Anthony
Benezet from bothering the British government with proposals to ban
the slave trade, and led the 1783 Quaker campaign to Parliament only
after he realised that anti-slavery enthusiasts within the Society of
Friends would be happy to proceed without him. He was less a defender
of slavery than an opponent of anti-slavery. Although he had denounced
slavery in principle, he thought Quaker petitions to slice the artery
of the empire’s labour supply would bring the religious society into
disrepute. In fact, Barclay demonstrates the ambivalent, inconsistent
and sometimes incoherent response to the question among British and
American elites in the late 18th century: they found it easier to
acknowledge the problem of slavery, as the historian David Brion Davis
called it, than to decide what to do about it, or determine how to
disentangle themselves from it. Barclay took ownership of his farm
with 32 slaves in 1784, but it wasn’t until 1795 that he took the
first steps to set them free, despite this being the decade when the
British anti-slavery movement began to attract widespread public
support. He was hardly a paragon of anti-slavery purpose.

Politicians are not historians. Nor are spokesmen for
multi-billion-dollar international corporations. Neither side in the
Barclays contretemps told more than a half-truth. But the purpose, of
course, was less to get the history right than to get the history to
do the right work. The imperatives of political rhetoric – to argue
for or against this cause, or this project, or this person, or this
point of view – are poorly served when faced with ambiguous figures
such as Barclay, who, even in his own day, frustrated and confused
both allies and opponents. It’s tempting to conclude that opposing
anti-slavery is, as we might say today, to be functionally
pro-slavery. When contemplating the interpretive possibilities,
though, historians sometimes need to count higher than two. The
late-life choices of a bank’s founder say little about the character
of that bank a quarter of a millennium later. The charge of complicity
suggests that in the age of plantation slavery there were ‘good
banks’ and ‘bad banks’, and that Barclays may be identified as
one of the ‘bad’ ones. But Barclays was neither unusually guilty
nor unusually innocent. At the time, there was no such thing as a
British bank that didn’t profit from slavery or have investments in
human bondage in one form or another.

Institutional responses to involvement in slavery are now standard,
and they rarely happen without research having been done.
Participation in the slave trade has even been acknowledged at the
highest levels of the British establishment: earlier this year the
Church of England published a report on its ‘historic links to
transatlantic chattel slavery’, and Buckingham Palace announced that
it was supporting research to investigate the monarchy’s
involvement. In the US it has become commonplace for institutions of
higher education to investigate their ties to slavery. Typically, the
initiative comes from within the university, driven by student and
faculty research in the institution’s archives, though the most
influential and consequential began with the demand made in 2003 by
Brown University’s Ruth Simmons, the first president of an Ivy
League school of African descent, to ‘tell the truth in all its
complexity’. Institutional peer pressure comes into play as such
studies become unexceptional. Increasingly, credit now accrues to
institutions that uncover and report their ties to slavery, and stigma
is attached to those which deny such ties ever existed, or insist they
shouldn’t figure on its moral balance sheet, or that the
‘better’ aspects of the institution’s history compensate for the
‘worst’.

It’s in this context of discovering, recovering and acknowledging
that _Capitalism and Slavery_ has been republished by a British
press for the first time since 1964, when an edition appeared from
André Deutsch. Well-known to historians in Europe, West Africa and
the Americas, and discussed endlessly by researchers and students for
the last half century or more, the book has now appeared as a Penguin
Modern Classic and, simultaneously, in a third edition, with new
introductions, from the University of North Carolina Press, its
original publisher. This is all to the good. The book deserves to be
widely read, not least because it’s so enjoyable, with its memorable
torrent of sarcasm, insight, wit, irreverence, authority, humour,
ambition and vision. Tens of thousands of copies have been sold in
the US, where it has never been out of print. That it has taken so
long for another British edition to appear is astonishing yet not hard
to explain. In 1937 Frederic Warburg brought out George
Padmore’s _Africa and World Peace_ and C.L.R. James’s _World
Revolution, 1917-36: The Rise and Fall of the Communist
International_; both writers, like Williams, were from Trinidad, and
both mentored Williams during the years he spent in Britain. But,
though a radical, Warburg rejected the manuscript for _Capitalism and
Slavery_ because, he wrote in his autobiography, the book
‘challenged the great tradition’. What he objected to was
Williams’s argument that Britain abolished the slave trade
principally for economic rather than moral, humanitarian reasons. ‘I
would never publish such a book,’ Warburg wrote.

The Penguin promotional material presents _Capitalism and
Slavery_ as a ‘landmark’, which it is, but it would be even more
correct to think of it as the progenitor of almost all of the
questions, problems, arguments and interpretations that have come to
inform the study of slavery, abolition and emancipation in the British
Empire. It discusses the origins of human bondage in the Caribbean,
the contribution that chattel slavery made to the 18th-century British
economy, the political and economic consequences of American
independence for the British West Indian colonies, the broad
reassessment of the nation’s commercial interests in first half of
the 19th century, and then the ways that those shifts figured in the
1807 abolition of the British slave trade and the overthrow of slavery
in the British Empire in 1838. In the final chapter, ‘The Slaves and
Slavery’, Williams anticipated more recent scholars in emphasising
slave resistance in the British Caribbean as a factor in British
emancipation. Like most of his peers and successors, Williams didn’t
have a sense of what the subject would look like when the lives of
enslaved women received the kind of scrutiny now on display in the
work of historians like Jennifer L. Morgan, Marisa Fuentes, Natasha
Lightfoot, Katherine Paugh, Shauna Sweeney and Sasha Turner, to name
just six. The study of slavery has in some ways moved beyond
Williams’s definition of the problems. Yet the influence
of _Capitalism and Slavery_ continues to grow. Citations tripled
between 2007 and 2022. The book remains one of very few to offer a
general interpretation of the rise and fall of slavery in the British
Empire, and the only one, still, to focus on the question of economic
interest, and what answers to that question might mean for the way the
history of modern Britain is understood.

Williams makes his arguments in clear, aphoristic style. ‘Here,
then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not
racial.’ ‘By 1750 there was hardly a trading or manufacturing town
in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or
direct colonial trade.’ ‘The profits obtained provided one of the
main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed
the industrial revolution.’ ‘American independence destroyed the
mercantile system and discredited the old regime ... American
independence was the first stage in the decline of the sugar
colonies.’ ‘The reason for the attack was not only that the West
Indian economic system was vicious but that it was also so
unprofitable that for this reason alone its destruction was
inevitable.’ ‘The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian
slavery and then helped to destroy it. When British capitalism
depended on the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When
British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they
destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of
the West Indian monopoly.’ ‘The rise and fall of mercantilism is
the rise and fall of slavery.’

Inside the academy and without, commentators have often referred to
the ‘Williams thesis’ without clarifying, and sometimes without
acknowledging, that _Capitalism and Slavery_ has several arguments,
some of which have stood the test of time better than others. David
Brion Davis pointed out in 2006 that most scholars no longer endorsed
Williams’s explanation of British abolition and British
emancipation. The Barclays’ spokesmen drew on this observation to
suggest that _Capitalism and Slavery_ is errant in its entirety, but
of course a work of scholarship can be weak on some matters and strong
on others. There are few if any history books published eighty years
ago that remain the most current work on their subject. The lengthy
debates about the Williams thesis establish its importance: sustained
scrutiny provides evidence of impact.

The book’s​ impact was delayed. Most historians in American and
British universities dismissed or ignored _Capitalism and
Slavery_ for at least a generation after its 1944 publication. Then,
in the 1970s, when economic history was studied with new rigour and
there was an increased confidence in counterfactual reasoning, several
scholars rediscovered, disputed and denounced its key claims. By the
early 1980s, just about every scholarly reference to _Capitalism and
Slavery_ conceded the power of its interpretations and then declared
them wrong – that profits from slavery didn’t provide the capital
for the Industrial Revolution and that abolition and emancipation
didn’t result from economic decline. What followed was a two-decade
detente, during the 1980s and 1990s, in which the significance of the
book was acknowledged while support for its claims was avoided. This
wasn’t true in all quarters. A small number of economic historians
in the US – many African or of African descent – maintained
that, on the key issues, Williams was more right than wrong.
Developments at the turn of this century led a larger group of
historians, some just emerging from their doctoral training, to take a
second look. The flourishing of Atlantic history directed new
attention to the Caribbean, while the new imperial history enriched
our understanding of what empire meant to Britain from the mid-1600s
to the 20th century. There emerged a new appreciation for the
questions that Williams had asked and a growing interest in the
answers that he offered, even if both needed reformulation and fresh
research. The rise of the ‘new history of capitalism’ in
the US and original research on the legacies of British slave
ownership have made the whole field of capitalism and slavery a
subject of study, though the book itself is more often honoured than
closely read. Connecting the Atlantic slave trade and plantation
slavery to the wealth of Europe and the US, to families, institutions
and industries, has become the endeavour of countless historians.

Williams placed naming over shaming. In the first half of _Capitalism
and Slavery_ he identifies dozens of British merchants, bankers,
industrialists and politicians who built fortunes through colonial
slavery. These were not obscure individuals, then or since: many had
entries in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. Williams took
their names from printed primary sources and the historical
scholarship available in the 1930s. But he refused to cast these men
and their families as evildoers, or even as outliers. Perhaps the
greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no
shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of
distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and excellent
citizens’, as Williams put it. They founded charitable schools,
hospitals, orphanages and libraries, making them ‘the leading
humanitarians of their age’. Williams savoured the irony. But what
most interested him about this juxtaposition is easier to miss. Can
the best of any society overcome the moral norms of the times? Why
would we – how could we – expect the merchants of Liverpool,
Bristol and London to have refused their era’s imperatives, its
incentives, its economic logics? Williams asked this question not to
defend the past from judgment by the present, as some sometimes do
defensively today. Instead, this refusal to emphasise the Atlantic
slave trade as a sin served a crucial interpretative purpose. If there
was no sin, then there was no redemption. What happened wasn’t a
moral awakening. For morals had never been the question before the
fall of colonial slavery, in the achievements of the anti-slavery
movement, or, for that matter, what came after. The slave traders, in
their own way, were humanitarians and the abolitionists, in their own
way, were not.

Much has been made over the years about the pseudo-Marxist economic
determinism of _Capitalism and Slavery._ But it’s not clear how
much Williams cared about theories of history or historical sociology.
Far more important to him was the point he wanted to make about
Britain, the British Empire and, most of all, the funhouse mirror of
ideological distortions that helped the British see themselves as
philanthropists rather than profit-obsessed imperialists. There’s
some evidence that Williams knew that his decline thesis was
overstated, that he exaggerated for effect. But, even taking Williams
at his word, commentators often miss his point. The thesis was an
argument about abolitionists far more than abolition. It revealed the
‘saints’ as less worthy, more suspect, more hypocritical, less
high-minded, less saintly than they believed themselves to be, and
others had described them. The book’s penultimate chapter defrocks
the high priests of the anti-slavery gospel. It presents Wilberforce
as a kind of Mrs Jellyby, the patron saint of telescopic philanthropy
– ‘Wilberforce was interested in the slave plantation rather than
the mineshaft.’ At other times Williams casts Wilberforce as a more
charming Bulstrode, full of ‘cant’, ‘spurious philanthropy’
and ‘lucrative humanity’.

The attack on Wilberforce was personal, and explicitly so. The insults
are deliberate and considered: ‘with his effeminate face [he]
appears small in stature. There is a certain smugness about the man,
his life, his religion ... as a leader, he was inept, addicted to
moderation, compromise and delay.’ Williams held in contempt those
historians who wrote about Wilberforce as though they knew his
virtues. The so-over-it eyeroll is palpable when Williams cites
Wilberforce’s biographer Reginald Coupland’s attempt to
ventriloquise the evangelical leader. ‘What do you think sir, is the
primary significance of your work, the lesson of the abolition of the
slave system?’ Here is what Coupland had Wilberforce say: ‘It was
God’s work. It signifies the triumph of his will over human
selfishness. It teaches that no obstacle of interest or prejudice is
irremovable by faith and prayer.’

It has always seemed to me that Coupland, rather than Wilberforce, was
Williams’s real target. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that
traces of the conflict survive in some fashion in the papers of
Coupland or Williams’s doctoral advisor, Vincent Harlow, who
neutered but didn’t suppress the 1938 dissertation that provided the
groundwork for _Capitalism and Slavery_. Williams arrived at Oxford
in 1932, and so was in his second year of study at the centenary of
British emancipation, a moment of national celebration of the great
humanitarian tradition and the empire as a force for progress and
civilisation. The record of Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect provided
much to criticise. ‘The abolitionists were not radicals. In their
attitude to domestic problems they were reactionary.’ But Williams
disliked their champions and those who claimed to inherit their legacy
more than he did the abolitionists themselves. One sign of this is the
praise Williams extends to some abolitionists – Thomas Clarkson,
James Ramsay, James Stephen the father, and James Stephen the son –
and not others.

Capitalism and Slavery​ has very little to say about the
anti-slavery movement itself. Williams praised its less compromised
progenitors like Clarkson and Ramsay but wondered at the propaganda
campaign that raised ‘anti-slavery sentiments almost to the status
of a religion in England’. The book has no account of the politics
that culminated in 1807 and 1833, and advances no theory of individual
or collective action that could make sense of the public movement and
its popularity. The study of the extra-Parliamentary campaign first
became a subject of sustained study only fifty years ago, decades
after the publication of _Capitalism and Slavery_. But Williams had
spent more than enough time with the sources to appreciate the
pressure that the abolitionists placed on Parliament. The exclusion of
the anti-slavery movement from his analysis, therefore, was a choice
and not an oversight. It can be explained, to some degree, by the less
developed state of social and cultural history when Williams wrote.
Politics, economics, institutions, ideas, exemplary lives: these were
the stuff of history then. But Williams also didn’t regard
abolitionism as his subject and showed little curiosity about it. As a
consequence, he treated the mass movement as a given, if only to
better focus on the questionable aims of the abolitionist elite. The
simplistic, reductionist explanation of motives followed from his
contempt. He judged it more important to say what British anti-slavery
was not than what it was.

Principles provided a pretext for the pursuit of profit. Williams
delighted in the circumstantial evidence that helped make this case.
James Cropper of Manchester exemplified the compromised. He was an
avid abolitionist who just happened to have massive investments in
East India sugar, which was just then coming into competition with
slave-produced sugar from the British Caribbean. Cropper wasn’t
alone among the abolitionist leadership, Williams showed, in standing
to benefit financially from abolition and emancipation. _Capitalism
and Slavery_ only scratched the surface of this subject, as recent
work by Padraic Scanlan makes clear. But what mattered to Williams
wasn’t so much individual motives as the more general point about
economic interest. He called attention to the compromises, to the
sometimes weak commitment to the cause among the abolitionist
leadership, to the embrace of slave labour when it operated outside
the British Empire. This was in Williams’s view inconsistent,
incoherent and telling. What was really going on was an adjustment to
economic realities paired with a fanaticism for the appearance of
moral action. Few noticed then or since how much Williams absorbed and
articulated the view of the pro-slavery lobby who, at times, attacked
abolitionists by calling their motives and true goals into question.
Strange bedfellows indeed. It was a sign of Williams’s animus
against the ‘saints’. They deserved less credit than they claimed,
and – here was one argumentative purpose of the decline thesis –
perhaps none at all.

Among scholars, the humanitarian narrative never fully recovered. This
may seem surprising given the decades-long resistance to _Capitalism
and Slavery_ in some quarters, and the stubborn power of uncritical
popular histories. It remains striking how few biographies of William
Wilberforce appeared after 1944. There were more books published about
him in the century after British emancipation than in the eight
decades since, even with the explosion of interest in British slavery
and abolition over the last half-century – an interest that
accelerated after the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade
Act in 2007. The books on Wilberforce that appeared after 1944 more
frequently took the form of apologetics than apotheosis. There were
more than a few concerns that 2007 would be a ‘Wilberfest’, as
sceptics put it, but the greater tendency was a focus on the movement
itself – and its less compromised activists who more clearly align
with contemporary tastes. Williams’s influence has proved strong.

_CHRISTOPHER BROWN is a historian of Britain and the British empire,
principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with special
emphasis on the comparative history of slavery and abolition, and with
secondary interests in the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Age of
Revolutions.  His current research centers on the history of European
experience on the African coast at the height of the Atlantic slave
trade, and continues early commitments to the rise and fall of slavery
in the British Empire.  Published work has received prizes in four
distinct fields of study – American History, British History,
Atlantic History, and the history of Slavery, Abolition, and
Resistance.  Completed projects include Moral Capital: Foundations
of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press) and,
with Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: Classical Times to the Modern
Age (Yale University Press).  He has written as well for The
Nation, The New York Times, and the London Review of Books, among
other outlets.  _

_Brown came to Columbia University in 2007, after eight years on the
faculties of Rutgers University and The Johns Hopkins University.  At
Columbia, he has served as the Director of the Society of the Fellows
in the Humanities (2011-2017), Chair of the University-Wide Tenure
Review Advisory Committee (2014-2015), and as the inaugural Vice
Provost for Faculty Affairs (2015-2018).  At the graduate level, he
trains doctoral students in a wide range of fields, including the
British Empire to 1815, Early Modern Britain, Colonial America,
Atlantic History, and the Comparative History of Slavery in the
Americas.  In 2016 he received the Faculty Mentoring Award from the
University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for excellence in
supervising doctoral students during their years of graduate study. _

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