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Imprint: Penguin Classics
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Published: 24/02/2022
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ISBN: 9780241548165
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Length: 304 Pages
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Dimensions: 198mm x 17mm x 129mm
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Weight: 224g
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RRP: £9.99
Capitalism and Slavery
'It's often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it' Sathnam Sanghera
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 economic decision. 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
-
Imprint: Penguin Classics
-
Published: 24/02/2022
-
ISBN: 9780241548165
-
Length: 304 Pages
-
Dimensions: 198mm x 17mm x 129mm
-
Weight: 224g
-
RRP: £9.99
Reviews
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A classic critique
Guardian
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Groundbreaking
New York Review of Books
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A landmark study
Wall Street Journal
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It's often said that books are compulsory reading, but this book really is compulsory. You cannot understand slavery, or British Empire, without it.
Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
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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
Michel Rosen
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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
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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.
Trevor Phillips
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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
Nick Hayes, author of Trespass
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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.
Prof. Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies
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No historian of colonialism or slavery can ignore Eric Williams. This book endures as a seminal moment in the historiography of the British Empire
Michael Taylor, author of The Interest
