Atlantic Trade, Slavery and Britain's Rise

Britain's 18th-century economy was tied to an Atlantic system in which enslaved Africans were forced to work on Caribbean and American plantations producing sugar, tobacco and later cotton. British ships carried manufactured goods to West Africa, enslaved people across the Atlantic, and plantation produce back to Britain. In 1944 historian Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery that profits from slavery and the slave trade helped finance British industrialization.

Critics replied that slave-trade profits were too small a share of national investment to be decisive. More recent research has shifted the question to the wider economy: plantation demand for British goods, slave-grown raw cotton and the wealth of slave owners all fed industry, even if no single profit stream caused it. Studying this link reminds us that industrial progress in Britain was connected to great suffering elsewhere.