Atlantic Slavery and the Making of World Capitalism

Between roughly 1500 and 1866, European and American traders forcibly transported an estimated 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, of whom around 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage to be sold in the Americas. This traffic was not peripheral to the emergence of the modern world economy but, according to a long historiographical tradition beginning with Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), foundational to it: profits from slave-produced sugar, tobacco, and cotton financed the accumulation of capital, the growth of port cities like Liverpool and Bristol, marine insurance markets, and eventually industrial investment in Britain, even as abolitionist rhetoric later claimed that free labour and industrial capitalism had triumphed over an economically backward slave system.

Williams's thesis provoked sustained debate. Economic historians such as Seymour Drescher argued that British abolition in 1807 and 1833 occurred precisely when the slave economy was still highly profitable, undermining a purely economic-determinist account and pointing instead to the political power of an organised abolitionist movement, evangelical religion, and changing moral sensibilities. More recent 'New History of Capitalism' scholarship, notably Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told and Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, has revived and extended Williams's argument by showing quantitatively how enslaved labour's productivity on cotton plantations was driven upward through systematic violence, and how cotton capitalism linked Manchester's mills, New Orleans's slave markets, and Liverpool's banks into a single integrated global commodity chain.

The Atlantic system also depended on, and helped construct, a new racial ideology. Whereas earlier forms of slavery across Eurasia and Africa were rarely tied to a single somatic category, the scale and permanence of Atlantic chattel slavery required an elaborated racial hierarchy to justify hereditary, lifelong bondage of one group by another; historians such as Barbara Fields and Ibram X. Kendi have argued that racism as a systematic ideology was substantially produced by, rather than merely used to justify, the economic requirements of the plantation complex, reversing a common assumption that racism preceded and caused slavery.

Resistance was constant and took many forms: shipboard revolts during the Middle Passage, maroon communities of escaped enslaved people in Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil that negotiated de facto sovereignty with colonial powers, and the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the only successful slave revolution in history, which destroyed the wealthiest colony in the Americas and forced a fundamental reassessment of Enlightenment claims to universal liberty that had conspicuously excluded enslaved and colonised peoples. C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins remains the classic account situating Haiti within the wider Atlantic revolutionary age.

The legacy of Atlantic slavery persists in contemporary debates over reparations, the racial wealth gap in the Americas, and the global cotton and sugar commodity chains that succeeded it through indentured labour systems — including the large-scale export of Indian indentured workers to Caribbean, Mauritian, and Fijian sugar plantations after 1833, a system contemporaries and later historians have called a 'new system of slavery.'