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The Debate that Keeps on Going
Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution
What, if any, is the relationship between slavery and the industrial revolution? In other words, can we draw a line connecting, say, the slave trade or slavery in the Americas with the rise of the factory system in Great Britain? And, if so, how “thick” or “thin” is the connection?
This is not just an academic debate taken up by generations of scholars beginning with people like Eric Williams. The debate has also entered public culture. Unfortunately, it has produced a great deal of silliness. Some want to draw the line very thickly…A caused B. Others want to pretend there is no connection, that the Industrial Revolution emerged mostly endogenously, a sort of magic marriage of the Protestant Work Ethic and science and technology, and that slavery (there is often much confusion between the slave trade and plantation slavery). The two opposing schools, as it were, are not on speaking terms. Much is lost in the silence.
What I tried to accomplish in The Killing Age was to bring together exogenous and endogenous developments. In effect, what I tried to do is to take some of the insights from what is often called neo-institutionalism—associated with scholars like the economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson and the economic historian Joel Mokyr (all three awarded Nobel Prizes)—with scholars typically associated with left of center arguments on the economic consequences of slavery and the slave trade.
My approach bears some similarity to an edited book published more than forty years ago by the historian Barbara Solow, which revisited the Eric Williams thesis. That thesis, that slavery and the slave trade financed industry until contradictions emerged and, ergo, abolition occurred to maintain and expand industrial capitalism, is an example of drawing the line (too) thickly. Scholars like Fogel, Engerman, and Eltis attempted to dismantle the Williams. For them, Williams was, well, wrong. Slavery just wasn’t all that profitable and, anyway, the Industrial Revolution would have happened anyway. In other words, a line drawn so thinly it hardly exists.
Solow’s intervention, and one that helped inspire The Killing Age, was to examine how slavery shaped the course of British economic development. In effect, did slavery bend the curve and, if so, how and when.
Much of this work unfolded prior to the digital age. Williams wrote in the 1940s. The Solow volume was published in 1981. Today, however, we have access to new resources and new tools.
One such resource is a database that uses information on the compensation slave owners received from the government in 1833 with the ending of slavery in the British Caribbean (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/). Here, to take but one example, one can research families like the Gregs, mentioned in The Killing Age (303). The family is important because one of the biggest players in the industrial production of cotton. If one is looking for an industrial pioneer, people like Samuel Greg (actually, the family) is one of your guys. Here you can discover that Samuel’s son Thomas would be associated with two awards totaling a bit more than 5,000 pounds, or in the range of 600-700,000 pounds today. Not a massive sum of money, but not chump change either.
But what is incredibly clear is this leading industrial family was deeply involved in the plantation complex. Such as also the case with another family, the Hibberts. Or the Pennants. And there are others. In total, the government awarded slave owners about 20 million, upwards of 3 billion today….certainly not chump change! This database and other materials have led to some important discoveries that I incorporated into The Killing Age. Particularly important is Heblich, Redding & Voth, “Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution” (NBER WP 30451, 2022; updated versions circulate through 2023–2024). There are others, including from the Bank of England: Anson and Bennett, “The collection of slavery compensation, 1835-43.” And the 2023 “The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement Report).