TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER..............

The European penetration of Africa begins in 1415 with the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the Moorish stronghold. Henry , the Portuguese prince who would become known as the “Navigator”, was present at the capture of Ceuta and heard from the Arabs in the area many stories of the fabulous wealth of Timbuktu and other cities in the “Land of the Blacks”. From Ceuta Henry returned to Portugal with his head chockful of plans to capture the great gold of Africa.

And so began the Portuguese explorations of the African coastline. These explorations went deeper and deeper as the years passed and in 1441 a Portuguese sailor named ANTAM GONCALVES returned to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, with a cargo of blacks...the Portuguese traffic in “mahogany flesh” was on its way.

The Portuguese trade in Africans grew and grew and growth brought profits that attracted European rivals, including the British who led off with John Hawkins, “Queen Elizabeth 1's personal slave trader”. An extremely ruthless man, Hawkins “attacked Portuguese caravels loaded with slaves and robbed them of their cargoes of “specimens”, a contemporary name for the African human exports. According to Nick Hazlewood, “Hawkyns's voyages were exercises in turning a quick profit: for the queen, for himself, and for the group of rich London merchants and royal
courtiers who had invested in the expeditions”.

Hawkins was joined by other British slave hunters and many of these men brought some of human cargoes back to England, where there was a thriving business in black body -servants. The presence of these blacks scandalized good Queen Elizabeth, who went on to call upon her subjects to throw the blacks out. Said the Queen:

“understanding that there are lately divers blackamoores brought into this realme,of which kind of people there are already here too many, considering how god hath blessed this land with great increase of people of our own nation as anie countries in the world, whereof manie for want of service and means to set them on work fall to idleness and to great extremity....that those kind of people should be sent forth of this land”..

Many of these unwanted “blackamoores” were taken from England and brought to Spain and Portugal.

But the British continued their trade in Blacks. Indeed,they went on to win in 1713 the Spanish Asiento, the grand
lottery of the slave trade. The Asiento gave the British the sole right to supply the Spanish Empire with as many
as 144,000 slaves over a period of thirty years. The British supplied the Spanish and later on they would have to supply their own colonies in the West Indies and in North America; the British trade continued until it was banned on this day two hundred years ago.

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And why did the British abolish the slave trade?

The British explained that the abolition of the slave trade was a consequence of British humanitarianism led by
the so-called Saints: Wilberforce, Clarkson and company.  This view remained unchallenged until Eric Williams
wrote his magisterial Capitalism & Slavery (1944). Williams rejected this long-standing “idealist interpretation”,
especially that of Oxford's Beit Professor of History Sir Reginald Coupland. It was not British humanitarianism
that brought an end to the slave trade, said Williams, it was the laws of economics.

In a June 1943 letter to the director of the University of  North Carolina Press, William T. Couch, Eric Williams
explained how the laws of economics subverted and overthrew the slave trade and slavery. He wrote:

“The book [Capitalism and Slavery] attempts to place in historical perspective the relations between early capitalism in Europe, as exemplified by Great Britain, and the Negro slave trade in the West Indies. It shows how the commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century was built upon slavery and monopoly, while nineteenth century industrial capitalism destroyed slavery and monopoly”.

Williams's view of history seems in full agreement with Marx' economic determinism ( also called technological
determinism). Marx illustrated this conception of history in his “Poverty of Philosophy” where he said: “The hand -
mill gives you society with the feudal lord, steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist”. This of course is the
base/superstructure model ; the base being the economic mode of production while the superstructure consists of
morality, religion ,ideas and so forth.

For the record, Eric Williams did not acknowledge Marx as an intellectual influence.

In the Caribbean the “Williams Thesis” enjoys what UWI professor Hilary McD Beckles has described as “ an
almost unblemished reputation”: The thesis contains four major elements. These are:

Negro slavery was an economic (not racial) phenomenon: it had to do not with the colour of the labourer , but the
cheapness of the labour; (ii) the British Industrial Revolution was financed to some significant degree by the profits derived from the slave economies of the West Indies; (iii) the profitability of the West Indian colonies declined in the years following the American War of Independence (1776-1783) ; and (iv) the abolition of slavery was not a consequence of British humanitarianism but of economic laws.

The Williams thesis is at the core of the radical intellectual tradition in the Caribbean; indeed, it was a radically
re-conceptualized of our history and this led to a new day in our historical scholarship and economic thought.

The Williams thesis inspired Walter Rodney's “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa', a book that is the logical 'other side' of the Williams's main argument in Capitalism and Slavery: slavery and imperialism enriched the British; it therefore impoverished British colonial possessions.

The Williams thesis also inspired the “development” school of economics , providing it with historical arguments on which to make its claim that our “persistent poverty” was institutionally based. Andre Gunder Frank acknowledged Williams's important contribution, and so too have the authors of the theory of plantation economy and society, Lloyd Best (1934-2007) and Kari Levitt.

Best described Capitalism and Slavery as a “monumental attempt to trace out linkages between the slave economy
and British capitalism without the aid of a quantitative framework” ( The Mechanism of Plantation -Type
Economies:Outline of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy”, Social and Economic Studies, 17 (1968).

Kari Levitt (Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal) paid tribute to Williams's robust
intellectualism in a recently published book, entitled “Reclaiming Development : Independent Thought and
Caribbean Community”. Professor Levitt wrote: “Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery was a path-breaking
work and remains so, regardless of critics who have pointed out that the contribution of the Atlantic slave
trade and the West Indian plantations to the financing of the English industrial revolution was not perhaps
as direct as Williams believed it to be”.

Two hundred years later ................................


Caldwell Taylor
© March 25, 2007