Capitalism and Slavery

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'If one criterion of a classic is its ability to reorient our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept, Eric Williams's study supremely passes that test' Seymour Drescher

Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since. Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an immoral economic programme. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress.

'Its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship' New Yorker

About the series

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A classic critique
Guardian

The slave trade built capital for the slave-owning Empire, on which the Industrial Revolution was formed. The slave trade was abolished not because of moral outrage but because of a decline in returns. Slavery and capitalism are linked, and Williams launches a full frontal attack on it in this classic, which first appeared almost a century ago. Essential reading for anyone who wishes to know more about the Caribbean.
Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

About Eric Williams

Eric Williams (1911 - 1981) was a pioneering historian and politician born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. He graduated with first-class honours from St Catherine's College, Oxford in 1935, and completed a DPhil in History in 1938. His dissertation, 'The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,' was published as Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, while he was a professor at Howard University. In 1956, Williams founded the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago's first modern political party. He led the country to independence from the British and became the nation's first prime minister in 1962.

Details

Series: Penguin Modern Classics
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Published: 24/02/2022
ISBN: 9780241548165
Length: 304 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 17mm x 130mm
Weight: 224g
Price: £9.99

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Capitalism and Slavery

Format:

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About the series

A classic critique

Groundbreaking

A landmark study

It's often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it.

This book, recommended to me by a Jamaican fellow-student in 1968, changed my view of the world. It was the first time I was brought up hard and fast, face to face, with how modern Britain developed off the back of the transatlantic slave trade and the wealth created from the labour of slavery

Wherever you stand on the legacies of slavery and colonialism, Williams' elegant, passionate analysis is simply inescapable. Essential reading for anyone who really cares about history.

A vital, urgent read. A forensic examination of the system behind systemic racism. Eric Williams succinctly sets out how racism, and all its implications, injustices and inhumanities, was a harrowing repercussion of slavery, invented as a justification for lining a few dead men's pockets

**There can be no effective understanding of modernity and the post-colonial world without an engagement with Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery. This is where the rubber hits the road.**

No historian of colonialism or slavery can ignore Eric Williams. This book endures as a seminal moment in the historiography of the British Empire

About Eric Williams

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