18.12.1997

Capitalism and slavery

This article is based on a speech given at Communist University ’97 by Robin Blackburn, author of ‘The making of New World slavery’

The title of this article is, of course, an echo of the famous book of the same name by Eric Williams, published in 1944.

There are not many books written 50 years ago that are still in print and still being vigourously debated - especially those written under a Marxist influence. Williams was a leader of the Trinidad national liberation struggle. Unfortunately, in his later life he became a rather reactionary prime minister, but that is another story. I take up and reconsider the themes of Capitalism and slavery in my own work.

There has been a tendency to deny the connection between capitalism and slavery on the part of bourgeois historians: that is why Williams’ book really stuck in their gullet - and they have been chewing over it ever since it was published. There have been attempts to debunk him, and I try in the long final chapter of my own book to show that the process of primitive accumulation did decisively depend upon exchanges with the slave plantations.

For me, and I think for most Marxists, the connection between capitalism and slavery is somewhat more surprising - and more problematic - than is assumed by Williams. He was, as I have said, influenced by Marx, but he was not really a Marxist: rather a nationalist in his formation and outlook. Though he did some wonderful research and writes eloquently, he never actually asked, ‘Where does capitalism come from in the first place?’ This is, of course, a question of prime importance for Marxists right from Volume 1 of Capital, through to the 1940s and ’50s with the debates around the ‘transition to capitalism’.

Many contended that the origins of this remarkable mode of production lie in the pre-colonial epoch; that Britain was already on the road to capitalism at the time of the plantation revolution in the 17th century, before the flourishing of the plantations in the 18th and 19th century. The forms of a capitalist agriculture had already been established, and you could argue therefore that the roots of capitalism go all the way back to the 15th, and certainly the 16th, century.

I think you could say that, although there are many standpoints represented here, all sides in the debates realise that slavery - in the sense of chattel slavery - had died out in western Europe at the time of the transition to capitalism in the 15th and 16th century.

One could almost say that a precondition for the development of capitalism was that there was a pool of formally free labour - formally free, because these labourers did have to sell their labour power in order to survive and in order to feed their family. They did have access to some means of production - to common lands: they might have a small plot, but it was not enough to make ends meet and to enable them to reproduce themselves. So they had to sell their labour power to the incipient capitalist farmers.

These were usually tenant farmers and they had so-called ‘improving leases’ which enabled them to invest in the means of production on their farms - this made it rational, in competition with one another, to engage in improvements, without being charged higher rates as a consequence. They had an incentive to innovate.

A feature of wage labour was that it was identifiable in the cost of production. The incentive to economise, to use improved means of production, was provided by the fact that each separate unit of labour had to be paid for. Previously the owners of serfs or slaves had an unlimited supply in terms of the control of labour time on their property.

Despite the emergence of these free labourers in the European countries - above all in England and some other parts of north-west Europe - these employers were not capitalists yet. You can see from the Statute of labourers - a vicious employers’ and landlords’ code - that there were intense class struggles. However, new structures were coming into being where capitalism and free labour could emerge.

This free labour did not necessarily have a capitalist sense of direction to begin with, but it acquired it; primarily because of the competitive relations between the different farmers and different landlords. The system worked - so free labour flourished.

It was not the capitalists who invented free labour; it was at least to some extent the struggles of the popular classes. Firstly, in collective forms, in episodes like the Peasants’ Revolt; and secondly, in the struggle of individual direct producers to improve their lot; in their propensity to flee
areas where they were held as serfs or unfree labourers; to go to the towns.

Towns throughout Europe were at this time beginning to adopt the ‘free air doctrine’. If you escaped to Bristol or Sheffield - or Bologna or Toulouse - for a year and a day, you became free.

As far as the municipalities were concerned, this was a good way of attracting labour into the cities - and they were able to defend this conquest against the few rules that existed. And gradually this notion of the free air doctrine was adopted on a more wide-scale basis. Thomas More’s Utopia refers to social conditions which are really those of an early capitalist country. He says that having lots of masterless men roaming the countryside is very inconvenient, especially when some of them are desperate. More proposes a vicious penal code, which is based on the approach of ‘three strikes and you’re a slave’ (the origin of that particular phrase). It is a fascinating book, but it also projects a very savage, dystopian image of a society prepared to use slavery as a sanction.

In fact, Protector Somerset in the mid-16th century tried to carry this through into law only a few years after Utopia was first translated into English. However, there was a huge outcry. Although there were some poor wretches convicted into slavery, the state found it very difficult to persuade employers to take them, to actually buy them - and the scheme had to be abandoned after about three years.

In France, Italy, Catalonia, and in quite a number of areas of north-west Europe, there was also resistance to slavery and enslavement. The free air doctrine was enshrined and in fact the epoch of the European colonisation of the Americas - which is what I am concerned with in my book - is an epoch of the origins of free labour.

I want to ask how it was possible, in a continent where we saw the beginnings of a revulsion against slavery and enslavement, for mass slavery to develop. Why was it that in the Caribbean and the Americas - and on the coast of Africa - the horrendous slave trade of the New World came into existence?

Beginning in the early 16th century and developing on a large scale between the 17th and 19th centuries, there were about 13 million slaves taken from the coasts of Africa and then transported to the New World. Only about 11 million survived - ie, at least 2 million died en route.

The slave plantations that were established began to produce sugar, tobacco, coffee, and other exotic goods that could not be cultivated in Europe. They became by the end of the 18th century the motor of the Atlantic trade, eventually supplying about a third of all European imports. How did one get from this period of agrarian capitalism without slavery to the massive plantation revolution?

Well, there were economic reasons behind the plantation revolution. It took place in the Caribbean and the Americas, where the native population had been wiped out or died from appalling epidemics. The first island the English captured, Barbados, did not have any population at all. Jamaica, seized from the Spanish in the 1650s, also had a small population.

It was militarily possible for the European powers to establish themselves in the Americas. In Africa the states were too strong and the disease and environment were too hostile to permit sizable colonies. Instead they had at most trading stations on the islands adjacent to the coastline.

The Americas are, in terms of sailing time, relatively accessible - they are actually closer to Europe than most of the West African coast. And they are much nearer than India or the Far East. So in terms of areas that are likely to have a natural advantage in supplying European markets, the Caribbean, Brazil and North America had definite advantages. But what they did not have was labour.

Now, the first wave of plantations - with products supplied and grown for Europe - were built through contract labour: émigré English or indentured labour. They were young men and a few women who, in effect, sold three or five years of their life and emigrated to Virginia or Barbados. In return for receiving a passage and a promise - usually of land - at the end of their term of service, they worked for free (or their keep) for the planter. The merchant supplied indentured labour to the planter and the planter supplied tobacco to the merchant.

This was an effective way of colonising the English-controlled territories - it helped to generate mass emigration on a scale other European states found hard to sustain. There was actually surplus labour in Britain, probably because of the developing agrarian capitalism and the consequent economy of labour in the English countryside. This led to an increase in population and an even greater growth of the productive forces.

But this early plantation revolution generated demand for new plantation products - the demand for tobacco was such that the planters could not satisfy it using indentured labour. There was also a falling off in the number of young people coming forward to sell themselves into service. This was largely because they heard that being an indentured servant had definite disadvantages: you could be chastised by your master; you might well die; you might be cheated of your freedom dues in one way or another. Added to this was the fact that the Civil War in England led to a greater assertion of civic and political rights.

So the number of indentured labourers began to decline in the middle of that century, though the practice did not cease entirely: they still numbered several thousands each year. But the planters needed an additional labour force. Some of them found they could buy slaves on the coast of Africa and transport them to the Caribbean. The Portuguese already had a flourishing slave trade, the Dutch interloped and the English got in on the act in a fairly short period of time.

In the beginning state initiative was not a critical factor in the growth of the slave system. In fact, the early Stuart and Commonwealth state was too distracted by conflict at home to have any really concerted policy. It was only when Cromwell and the Cromwellian Commonwealth went to war with Spain and seized some its colonies in the early 1650s that the state intervened.

With the state distracted in this period it was the Dutch merchants - and afterwards the so-called ‘new merchants’ of Bristol and London - who spotted that there was a burgeoning demand for tobacco, sugar and other exotic produce. There were huge amounts of money to be made if they could secure an independent source of supply.

In other words, it was something entirely different from the old spice trade, where supplies were bought from Asian producers. That was a costly operation - the spices had to be brought from far away and it was difficult to ensure real quantity. If they could establish plantations in the West Indies, then they could have an almost unlimited increase in output - if only they could find workers for the plantations. And they did find them - the slaves on the coast of Africa.

The colonists of the New World dreamed at one point of holding Indians in slavery - but that could not be sustained. It is virtually impossible to enslave people in their own country. They know the country better; they run away; they resist - as the Indians did. Also, the Indian populations as a whole were not inured to hours of toil in the fields - they had not yet experienced a really sustained neolithic revolution.

In that way they were unlike the Africans. Most African societies were more developed, had metal implements, had systematic agricultural labour and so were not hunter-
gatherers. Those who were did not make good slaves. Hunter-gatherers who were captured and transported to the Caribbean immediately ran away and were able to survive in the wild. The other, more developed African peoples, could not. As a result several subsistence-based, runaway slave communities were established containing quite large numbers of peoples.

The colonists began to organise their slaves in a new way. I referred to this as a plantation revolution and there is no doubt that, in terms of an analysis of the forces of production, mass slavery, as Marx said, represented a sort of anticipation of productive coordination. This kind of coercive labour could be said to anticipate industrial methods of production.

There is labour in gangs. There is integration of agriculture and industry. To some extent with tobacco, and to a great extent with sugar, there is processing of the crop. It was extremely important to process sugar immediately, during the harvest. At that time the harvest period for sugar was seven to eight months, and small factories - the sugar mills - were established in the fields (Incidentally, the word ‘plant’ - as in ‘industrial plant’ - comes from plantation. The early steel plants were called plantations - an echo of this anticipation.)

As slaves could not be bought cheaply, this was an expensive process. But merchants who could afford to establish a plantation immediately acquired a hugely profitable asset. They were able to obtain, as it were, monopoly rates: both through their control of access to the tropical and sub-tropical produce; and through their domination of this new productive enterprise - the plantation, with its coercive gang labour.

Also they began to introduce new elements - sugar mills, for example, by the mid-17th century were starting to use rollers with metal casings; metal implements (hoes, etc) were used for cutting and planting cane. There were equivalents of this for tobacco - though less industrialised - and later for coffee and cotton and a number of other plantation products.

There were other preconditions for the growth of this plantation system. The free air doctrine was limited by the fact that it was deeply ethnocentric by definition - the liberties of the free-born Englishman. That did not mean that the law permitted the import of slaves. In fact, the first protests against slavery in England were directed against the introduction of slaves (incidentally, the word ‘slave’ derives from ‘Slav’. There were large numbers of slaves in Eastern Europe of Slavish extraction, and a few were introduced to Britain). There was a general attempt, established by various judicial decisions and precedents, to deny the status of slaves if they landed in England.

However, this was not enshrined in legislation. Obviously, we are dealing with the modern state in embryonic form - the early Tudor absolutist state and the Commonwealth state. The idea of general legislation was only just developing. The consensus for the suppression of slavery was embodied only in isolated judgments and particular municipal traditions and customs.

The celebrated codifications of English law in the 1620s carried the assumption that slavery no longer existed. But the bible, translated into English for the first time, gave sanction to slavery. This was very important for the Puritans of course, who were therefore not inclined to question it. The bible seemed to suggest that the so-called sons of Ham can be enslavable. Noah is meant to have had three sons, one of whom committed a sin against patriarchy. Noah curses him and condemns all his children to be slaves.

This gave a license to slaveholding - at a time when it was very convenient economically for the new merchants, who specialised in the plantation revolution and were based in Virginia and Barbados. They played a critically important role - not just in supporting the parliamentary side in the Civil War, but also in supporting Cromwell and the conservative involution of the English revolution - in the defeat of the Levellers and other popular forces, and in the consolidation of a proto-imperialist capitalist oligarchy, a mercantile oligarchy. These new merchants dominated the parliamentary commission on colonies, and they helped to construct the Navigation Acts, which ensured a monopoly of colonial trade for British merchants. They were really the founders of the later British colonial empire, and they were keen on facilitating the transport of slaves to the plantations.

Ironically, the actual legislation that gave recognition to the whole slave system was not passed until the 1660s - that is, the Restoration. Many of these people made peace with the Restoration anyway. But it is interesting that because of the climate of raised expectations during the revolution parliament did not openly legalise slavery. They let it happen, but they did not actually codify it. It was left to the royalist Restoration to do this.

By the 1660s therefore, the state was directly involved. Part of the strength of the British colonial slave empire - compared to that of the Spanish, French or Portuguese - was that it was able to knit together multilateral exchanges. North America, which was able to supply provisions for the plantation, also produced wood, tar and sail cloth for the slaving boats.

Britain - England and Wales, and later Scotland - provided a large market for slave produce. Although the population of Spain or France was much greater in those days, Britain was an incipiently capitalist country, where the market for tobacco, sugar and cotton was much, much larger.

There was another factor favouring the emergence of the plantation revolution and mass slavery: the oblivious consumer - a consumer completely unaware of the human or ecological cost of satisfying their pleasures. This gave an edge to British merchants.

Spain had been the first country with a big empire of its own, but it did not import or maintain a large slave population.  Spain used Indian communal labour to extract silver out of the mines in Mexico and Peru. In essence, villages would be expected to deliver to the mines a quota of labourers who would return after six months - if they survived. They might even get paid a nominal sum. This was forced labour, but the Spanish found it was much easier and cheaper to get communities to yield to tribute labour than it was to actually enslave large numbers of people.

The slaves they did import from Africa were not usually employed mining silver, which was the main product of the Spanish empire. They were used as gardeners or domestics - even as artisans in the towns. They were not however the fundamental labouring force.

The Portuguese began to develop slave plantations at the end of the 16th century, but they had to rely on Dutch commercial facilities. They did not have access to a large European market. Being the first to develop the trade, they could acquire slaves cheaply, but they did not use the most advanced methods. Their plantation revolution in Brazil did not really begin until the end of the 16th century. Gang labour was much less developed. They also had a mixture of slave and free labour - they used Indians and Portuguese.

It is only with the English in Barbados that plantations were established in the 1640s where there would be 300-400 slaves; where there was mechanised processing, and the efficient production of commercial goods for the European markets.

At first this meant drawing capital off to the developing English colonies. But, as I explain in my book, by the mid-18th century it actually provided a foil for the industrial revolution.

The colonies were extremely wealthy by this time. The amount of sugar produced rose dramatically. The maximum sugar yield produced by the early colonies in the 16th century was about 2,000-3,000 tonnes. This went up to about 20,000 tonnes - for Barbados and Jamaica - by the end of the 17th century.  By the end of the 18th century it increased to 200,000 tonnes. So it multiplied by a factor of 100 over two centuries. There were about three million slaves by the end of the 18th century.

By the 1770s the British colonies had the largest number of slaves, followed by Portugal (in Brazil), then the French and Spanish colonies. The British new merchants not only preserved their own trade in the English colonies, but also successfully penetrated the Spanish, Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the French markets. French merchants did provide stiff competition in some areas - especially metal goods and textiles, the products most in demand from the colonies.

Interestingly then, the first way the colonies could be said to have stimulated the industrial revolution is through providing a market, through providing demand. The second way is through the achievement of a surplus - the profits. It used to be thought - including by Eric Williams - that the plantations became unprofitable towards the end of the 18th century. Modern research shows that this was not the case. Indeed they were at their most profitable during this period: they were providing super-profits to merchants in England, which enabled them to offer credit to early industrialists and manufacturers.

As I argue in the book, colonial profits contributed massively to the industrialisation process. Of course, Britain was drawing colonial super-profits not just from the slave markets. There was also the Irish landed estates and the sacking and plunder of India. But the super-profits of the slave trade were by far the most significant.

In terms of raw material too the contribution of the plantations was of the utmost importance. Cotton was a uniquely well adapted raw material for the industrial revolution. It was far more suitable for adaptation to industrial methods than wool, for example.

To ensure the enormous quantity of cotton now demanded by the factories, it was necessary for the plantation and gang slave labour system to spread across mainland North America. In fact, what was really remarkable - efficient, if you like - about the slave plantations, was that they were able to maintain a constant supply of cotton without price rises.

Normally, if there is burgeoning demand for a given product, you would expect the price to go up. But because of the enormous resources of the slave plantations, operating on a proto-capitalist basis, the price remained the same - or even dropped, as indeed it did after the Napoleonic Wars.

It should also be said that the products of the slave plantation revolution created a new mode of consumption to which industrialised capitalism adapted - sugar, sweetened beverages, coffee, tea, chocolate. Here lies the origins of the original junk food industry - and sugar was very important to it. In my view this changed consumption acted as a consolation for the impoverishment of the early wage-earning industrial proletariat - a way of buying acquiescence.

Therefore the new capitalism and the plantation revolution produced a change of perceptions. The new textiles, the new colours, the new dyes - all played their part. As did the oblivious consumerism, unconcerned about the product’s origin or its cost in human terms.

Once this system established itself, once it contributed to the industrial revolution, then the industrial revolution itself encouraged the further expansion of slavery in the cotton plantations. It created even greater demand for sugar. By the early 19th century slave plantations had already been in existence for four or five generations.

By then more and more African captives began to find forms of solidarity on the plantation itself. One reason why the slave plantations had been able to enforce control is that the slaves had been torn from different African peoples and spoke different languages. But once they were gathered together in huge plantations in the Caribbean, they began to acquire and develop new languages - creole and patois. They developed their own new traditions of solidarity and resistance. That occurred over several generations. Alongside the resistance of the slaves themselves abolitionism developed in the metropolis.

In time, the planters began to find it convenient and less costly to allow the slaves to feed themselves. They gave them little plots of land. The slaves grew food and the slaveowners let them sell the surplus. In fact, the slaveowners and the free whites lived off food partly grown by slaves and then exchanged in the markets.

This whole process of development over several generations created vibrant markets, which provided a means of communication amongst the slaves. Resistance intensified. That is, of course, another story, which I discuss in The overthrow of colonial slavery.

The sobering lesson for the working class is that when layers of grasping capitalist entrepreneurs develop new needs, they find it convenient to ‘outsource’ to new geographical zones - where the masses are more exploitable. In this way they attempt to outflank the more inherited forms of solidarity - like the free air doctrine, the ‘free born Englishman’ doctrine, or whatever. They use ethnic and racial antagonisms and prejudices to confer dubious privileges - but only in order to exploit vulnerable populations all the more effectively.

Today, there is probably more forced labour than at the height of New World slavery - child labour, debt bondage, etc. Pure chattel slavery is somewhat rare of course, but there are forms of forced labour very close to it in Africa, Asia and in Latin America.

This may be a story about history, but it is also a story about a mode of production which is still with us, which has lessons for today’s world. I think it is essential for labour movements, along with ecological and consumerist groups, to be aware of the varied conditions of production and of the ways in which capitalist competition and oblivious consumerism can lead to the spread of human misery and horrendous suffering.

Further reading from Robin Blackburn ...

The making of New World slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (£25, 602pp, Verso, 1997)

The overthrow of colonial slavery 1776-1848 (£17, 560pp, Verso, 1988)