[stone]

I've just seen the excellent https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0015gps/the-misadventures-of-romesh-ranganathan-series-3-1-sierra-leone . At one point Romesh relates how, as someone from the UK, he has benefited from the historical horrors of transatlantic slavery because supposedly the economic development of the UK was built on the wealth that created. I've heard that assertion elsewhere too. I'm guessing there are people on here clued up about this stuff and I'm keen to hear peoples' takes on this.

A half-arsed Google throws up stuff that I'm skeptical about. eg https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/industrialisation_article_01.shtml . One point made is that the industrial revolution was financed by merchant bankers who had become capitalised with wealth accumulated from the profits from slave trading. I had thought of financing of the UK industrial revolution as being an example of the miracle of endogenous credit creation. I thought most of the key innovators did not have access to formal centres of finance. Instead they started up using IOUs trusted by local suppliers etc (as explained in https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2013/02/ripple-or-bills-of-exchange-20.html ).

The other point made was that profits from slavery produced consumer demand that induced people to dream up industrialisation as a means to profit from fulfilling it. To me that seems more plausible. But I think the message from unpicking that is very different from my initial take from hearing assertions about slavery having financed our legacy of prosperity. Consumer demand may have come about in 1790 because slave merchants were employing lots of footmen and building stately homes and so pushing up wages etc. But the same economic mechanism could also kick-in if eg badly paid people were empowered to negotiate higher wages and become consumers.

The message from history Romesh seemed to be relating as he reflected on visiting a slave port in Liberia was that treating fellow humans terribly, whilst horrible, is something we shamefully have to accept as the cause of our current favourable situation. I'm really not sure at all whether that is the right take.

[andy popp]

Genuinely too busy to reply properly now, but there is no doubt that the slave trade and slave economies (and more broadly Empire and colonialism) contributed to historic patterns of British development and wealth accumulation. We can argue about the size of the effect and the mechanisms at work, but not about the basic fact that they did contribute. Importantly, this is not to argue that Britain couldn't have become wealthy without slavery. That may or may not be true but is irrelevant: the fact is that they were factors in the process as it unfolded. That is what historians are interested in studying. Secondly, no historians argue that the slave trade and slavery provide the sole necessary explanation for industrialisation and wealth accumulation.

[stone]

Thanks Andy, that makes a lot of sense.

I suppose it is the mechanism that I'm wondering about. I suppose the mechanism gives a clue as to what we might learn from history when thinking about current policy etc.

I'm also not at all sure about how intertwined "wealth accumulation" and "development" always are. Potentially, one set of people could become very wealthy but not contribute to development whilst a largely separate, economic and social group, living amongst them, did all of the development.

[spidermonkey09]

If you're interested in googling a bit more fruitfully, Alan Lester's work on slavery is particularly useful here. This is a recent blog post. https://alanlester.co.uk/blog/talking-about-slavery-and-responding-to-the-objections/

[teestub]

Stone, I feel it might be quite a tricky task to disentangle Empire and the associated subjugation and slavery, mercantilism, the associated growth in the strength of the navy, Pax Britannica and industrialisation in the UK!

[stone]

Stone, I feel it might be quite a tricky task to disentangle Empire and the associated subjugation and slavery, mercantilism, the associated growth in the strength of the navy, Pax Britannica and industrialisation in the UK!

But if the historical accounts of the key industrial innovators show them building the first mechanical looms etc entirely financed with locally drawn up bills of exchange, with no financial link to anyone involved in slavery, then that gives a quite different story than if slave merchants were angel  investors  in that sort of thing.

[teestub]

Edmund Cartwright got a grant for the government for the loom invention. It seems like you want to view this subject through a very narrow pinhole avoiding wider context?

[andy popp]

As teestub is saying, the topic is - unsurprisingly - far more complicated than you are suggesting. Most obviously (and importantly), the slave trade and slave economies were integrated into the British economy in far more ways than as sources for investment finance (moreover, Industrial Revolution was about much more than technological change and invention).

But even if we look at bills of exchange, which were very important, primarily as sources of working capital, they were inherently mobile and rarely stayed within local circuits of credit. In any case, all locations industrialising would have had individuals with links to slavery of one kind or another. Such people were not overwhelmingly concentrated in London or Liverpool.

[andy popp]

It's important to provide some context for why Romesh made such a programme and made such a claim (I haven't seen the programme).

The study of the historical links between slavery is not new. The foundational text is Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944 and recently republished by Penguin (as well as being an economic historian Williams was the first post-independence Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago). Some voices will claim that the so-called Williams thesis about the centrality of slavery to the development of British capitalism has been completely debunked - that isn't true. It has certainly been modified and qualified but it still carries much currency and the book is well worth reading. For a modern take see Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's recent (2023) Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution. Worth noting that the authors are hardly wild-eyed young critical race theorists. Both are among the most senior economic historians working in Britain today, with long and distinguished careers.

But their work does contribute to a new wave of scholarship that argues for a more critical view of Empire and colonialism and, in particular, a reassessment and reassertion of the importance of slavery to British economic history (there's a similar wave of new scholarship in the US). Jim has already pointed to Alan Lester as one important figure.

This new scholarship is meeting considerable reactionary resistance from a small but vocal group who seek to rehabilitate Empire and colonialism as forces for moral good and to diminish if not completely erase the economic significance of slavery (both the slave trade and plantation economies in the Caribbean and elsewhere). One way of arguing away the importance of slavery is build counterfactuals claiming that Britain would have got rich anyway (or that other slaving nations, e.g. Portugal, didn't get rich) but that is to wish away the brute fact that Britain did in fact get rich with slavery.

Most vocal and influential, because they have the ear of papers such as The Telegraph, are a group called History Reclaimed. Like Restore Trust, with whom they overlap, this group is very obscurely funded and linked to Tufton Street. Though the group contains some very distinguished (retired) historians none of them were specialists in the history of Empire or slavery. One of the most prominent among them, Nigel Biggar, is not a historian at all.

See this recent blog by Alan Lester dissecting how the group often engages in profound misuse of others' research: https://alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-west-africa-squadron-memorial-campaign-an-exercise-in-virtue-signalling-and-denial/

All this is to say that the topic is currently even more politicised than one might have expected. Apologies for the long and pompous post.

[seankenny]

This is a subject filed under "interesting and should read up on it someday" so, as much for myself as for Stone, I did a quick search to find a relevant paper with a literature review that would provide some suitable starting points. This 2023 paper "Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution" - https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/papers/SBIR_Paper.pdf - does that, how well I can't comment but I'm assuming it's up to scratch and it includes the two sources Andy gave above. It also gives a good insight as to how some quantitative estimates of the effects of slavery (or other events) can be calculated.

The paper attempts to assess the impact of slavery on the British economy up until abolition in 1833. The technical bits of the paper are complicated but the idea is standard in modern empirical economics. It's just a "natural experiment" - the authors have looked for a source of random variation that separates otherwise very similar slave traders, in order to isolate the causal effects of their slave trading activities. In this case that variation is time spent sailing across the Atlantic, as more time at sea tended to kill slaves and reduce the profitability of the venture. They then connect data about each voyage's backers to different parts of the UK and do a bunch of stuff to try and firm up casuality (excuse the handwaving explanation) and find:

"Using only data up to the 1830s, we show that exogenous increases in slavery wealth in the preceding period are strongly correlated with a lower agricultural employment share, a higher manufacturing employment share, more cotton mills, and higher property values at the time of abolition."

They then try estimate some aggregate effects on the entire British economy:

"We use the model to calculate a counterfactual in which we assume that Britain had no involvement in slavery. Comparing actual levels of economic activity in 1833 to those in this counterfactual, we find that slavery wealth raises national income by around 3.5 percent, which corresponds to a decade of growth in income per capita at the time. For the locations within Britain with the greatest involvement in slavery, total income increases by more than 40 percent. The model also suggests that slavery had important implications for the distribution of income: in the most exposed locations, capital owners’ income rises by more than 100 percent, and the income of landowners falls by around 7 percent. Workers, on average, benefit from the industrial development induced and accelerated by slave wealth.

"Our results do not suggest that slavery was essential for Britain’s industrialization; nor do they demonstrate that its effects were largely irrelevant. Instead, our quantitative results mark a middle ground, with slavery significantly accelerating growth and structural change at the height of the Indusrial Revolution. The largest impact, according to our model, is on
the geography of economic activity and the distribution of income, with towns and cities that are exposed to slave wealth growing faster. As a result, slavery wealth shifted the locus of economic activity to the North and West of the country, and it boosted the income of capitalists and workers at the expense of landowners."

I can think of some obvious criticisms, eg slave-trading and slaveholding might not be as linked as the authors claim, or that there are other obvious reasons for manufacturing industry to be based in the north and west of England which aren't accounted for in this model. It includes a counterfactual, economists love them but ymmv. There may well be more sophisticated criticisms of their approach but my econometric skills really aren't good enough to begin making those. And of course this is just one paper - but its findings of "important but not decisive" matched my priors, as the argument that slavery didn't cause industrialisation elsewhere carries a reasonable amount of weight for me.

If anyone is interested in the intellectual background of the kind of causal estimations occuring here, then maybe the Nobel acceptance speech of of Joshua Angrist, one of its key developers, might be worth a read: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/advanced-economicsciencesprize2021.pdf

Also Stone, if you're interested in modern policy implications, surely it would be better to read up on Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, all of which have become developed countries very recently?

[Fultonius]

It would be interesting to know how modern slavery affects economies in the present day. I'm guessing that will also be very difficult to unpick!

[stone]

Sean - thanks so much for that -awesome! It is so interesting that agricultural land-owners got poorer. That might I suppose have been due to a shortage of labour/higher wages. To me (I'm freely admitting my political bias) that could go along with the notion that simply paying workers better (eg by increasing bargaining power) can induce economic development and technological innovation. https://www.ft.com/content/b7ad1c68-59fb-11e2-b728-00144feab49a .

Andy -I take your point that there is a lot of nasty politics swirling around this whole subject. I want to stress that I utterly utterly detest slavery and colonialism. My questioning of the causal link between slavery and the industrial revolution doesn't indicate any sympathy for the slave traders etc. It seems to me that attributing industrialisation to slave trading is, if anything, crediting slave trading with something positive.

[andy popp]

I want to stress that I utterly utterly detest slavery and colonialism. My questioning of the causal link between slavery and the industrial revolution doesn't indicate any sympathy for the slave traders etc.

Sorry Stone, absolutely did want or mean to imply you had any sympathies at all with slavery and enslavers. That couldn't have been further from my mind. I was just giving general contemporary context for this debate who might be interested but not know all the ins and outs.

[stone]

It would be interesting to know how modern slavery affects economies in the present day. I'm guessing that will also be very difficult to unpick!

I wonder whether the consequence of modern slavery (in the form of eg agricultural labourers, car-washers, etc), might be opposite to the influx of money from slave trading in the 1800s. It removes the need to innovate in labour-saving innovation.

[stone]

Andy- I certainly didn't know all of that political context and it's great to get that from you.

[andy popp]

Funny coincidence, the journal I edit (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society) just - literally the last few minutes - received a new submission on the role of agents and merchants in the City of London in the payment of compensation to slaveowners following abolition in 1833. Just another way in which the City manage to monetise slavery.

On that compensation, I have a colleague doing excellent work on how payments were recycled into investments in the railways, then going through their first big boom.

[stone]

I guess my view of this hinges on what "investment" means. I always struggle with how the word "investment" has both the meaning of paying people to build factories, invent stuff, etc and also the very different meaning of buying financial securities in a secondary market. The second meaning sometimes just equates to using wealth to claim a stream of income that would be generated anyway but instead claimed by whoever else was holding that security. My impression is that such "investment" often does little or nothing to facilitate/induce the industry "invested in".