Empire: Britain's Expanding World

‘no single trade was vital to the nation’s prosperity in the eighteenth century, that the profits of the slave trade were not fed significantly into British industry, and that the gains from the trade were relatively small in relation to the increase in per capita income.’

However, the most influential and famous analysis of the relationship between slavery, American commerce and Britain’s economy was in Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery written in 1944. First of all, Williams, an economic historian, maintained that slavery and overseas commerce did contribute greatly to Britain’s industrialisation. This was because, as Williams argued, the slave trade and the sale of sugar in Britain offered a substantial amount of the capital and the demand for the growth of British manufactured goods, and consequently, it was these two elements that proved to be the stimulus for Britain’s transition into an industrial nation. Also, in Williams’ analysis, he noted that the entrepreneurs behind the colonial trade were the West India merchants and planters, who exerted their influence over economic and political matters in Britain. Williams’ analysis was not original: his ideas have been found in earlier works including Wilson E. Williams’ Africa and the Rise of Capitalism in 1938, which stated that the profits from the slave trade promoted growth in industrial employment, without which capitalism in Britain could not have experienced the progress it did. This is not too dissimilar from Williams’ claim that ‘the slave trade profits fertilized Britain’s whole productive system in the eighteenth century.’ 

However, contemporary historian David Richardson has argued that the contribution of the profits from slavery to capital investment in Britain has been overstated and never exceeded one per cent in the late 1780s. Still, as this paper will demonstrate, there was a strong relationship and correlation between the expansion of the slave trade and the annual growth rate of industry, especially after the 1760s, which should not be ignored by historians such as Richardson. According to Phyllis Deane, industrial growth and output before 1760 had been comparatively slow at half the rate in relation to the last two decades of the century, which experienced an annual growth rate of over 100 per cent. The profits and benefits from this, even if interpreted as insignificant, had greater implications because trade helped to expand Britain’s trading ports, namely London, Bristol and Liverpool, and thus from this perspective, as Postlethwayt claimed, Britain formed ‘a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation.’

Trade and opportunities for new markets intensified growth in the shipping sector in British ports. A larger and stronger navy was needed to accommodate a growing Atlantic empire of goods and slaves. Thus it is evident that trade and shipping were intrinsically linked and helped expand each other. Subsequently, the cities of Liverpool and Bristol became major ports to service the triangular trade. Merchants from Liverpool had established themselves in key strategic trading ports around the Atlantic empire. In particular, agents were active in Virginia and West Indies, but Liverpool’s fortunes accumulated because local landlords invested money into the city’s trade. The profits from the slave trade were invested into the expansion of the city’s port and fleet. Though Liverpool’s slave trading comprised of less than 20 per cent of the city’s total maritime trade, Liverpool became Britain’s leading slave trade port. It is stated by James Walvin that between 1750 and 1775, 1,868 ships left Liverpool for Africa. Furthermore, Richardson notes that between 1790 and 1799, 1,011 slave ships left Liverpool. This is just one example of the expansion of shipping and trade as a result of the slave trade, and this point demonstrates well the ‘magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power’ as claimed by Postlethwayt.

The profits of the Atlantic empire made on the slave trade encouraged growth in the port of Bristol as well. In the course of the eighteenth century, the merchants of Bristol opted for privateering over the slave trade, but still obtained vast amounts of profits and benefited indirectly from the slave trade. This was also the case for other major industrial cities such as Manchester and Glasgow because such manufacturing centres became incorporated into the triangular trade network. By 1800, whilst Liverpool had invested in the slave trade, Bristol had committed its resources to the sugar trade; Manchester exported cotton in unequalled quantities; and Glasgow concentrated on tobacco. This had emerged because Britain’s cities increasingly became specialised in one particular trade from the American commerce to limit competition from rival ports. Still, Bristol’s relationship with the Atlantic empire and in keeping with domestic demand allowed the city to develop a wide range of industries such as soap making, glass and pottery manufacture, and most importantly metal works. The investment, as Kenneth Morgan claimed, was provided from the Bristol merchant community and their wealth was accumulated, of course, from the slave trade either directly or indirectly. It is evident that given the commodities, such as sugar, rum and tobacco, Bristol, Liverpool, and other trading ports produced, it is unlikely they could have done so without the slave trade.

However, many contemporary and economic historians believe there were other factors that should take precedence over the significance of the slave trade. This naturally takes this paper back to the debates over the growth and industrialisation of Britain’s economy. As mentioned before, Britain became gradually more dependant on colonial trade but this still implied that trade with Europe was an important source of revenue. In the last two decades of the century, foreign demand for British export had been greater than any previous period. Nevertheless, Morgan noted that the historians whom discussed this issue failed to present a sound argument: ‘their views quoted are often summary opinions rather than the result of a sustained marshalling of appropriate evidence.’ For Thomas and McCloskey, ‘trade was the child of industry’ because they believed that the industrialisation of the Britain’s economy and the export of goods helped to strengthen commerce abroad. However, overseas trade is a major factor in the growth of Britain’s metropolitan economy. Deane and Cole argued that the annual level of trade increased by 0.8 per cent between 1700 and 1740, but this had doubled to 1.7 per cent in the next thirty-year period, and by 1800, the rate of growth had risen another 2.6 per cent. The growth rate of trade, Deane and Cole stated, increased more rapidly than that of total output. Therefore, the rate of trade accelerated when it was apparent that Britain had began the process of industrialisation towards the end of the eighteenth century. The structure and rate of economic life in Britain were shaped by a gradual increase in industrial labour, manufacturing, and produce. 

Furthermore, historians had placed some considerable emphasis on domestic demand and consumption. This line of argument is widely supported, for example by Deane and Cole, and it suggests that rising demand for imports from a widening market stimulated the expansion of the export industries, and thus aided Britain’s overall economic growth. This argument is rather a simplistic view and emphasises the importance of foreign and colonial trade as the real trigger for economic growth. However, the British Atlantic empire was a triangular trade network, and therefore, the slave trade should not be underestimated or overlooked as these arguments evidently do. They have appeared to have only analysed the immediate direct causes for economic growth. Nonetheless, the indirect factors are equally important. As this paper has demonstrated so far, merchants and traders from major industrial trading ports exploited the wealth of the slave trade and subsequently expanded commercial enterprise home and abroad.

One other important but indirect benefit from the slave trade to Britain’s Atlantic empire was the formation of the largest and strongest navy in Europe. In 1775, Britain’s navy in tonnage was about one and a half times the size of her closest competitor, France, but by 1815, the British navy was the size of the French, Spanish and Russian fleets combined. This was because Britain by 1815 had destroyed rival navies, but in essence, Britain had the capacity to build a large navy at a rate faster than rival nations. This was primarily a result of a series Navigation Acts that were introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Navigation Acts dictated firstly that transoceanic commerce must be conducted in British ships sailed by British sailors, and secondly, there were restrictions on imports and exports from outside the British Atlantic empire. Thus the Navigation Acts effectively empowered the British navy to monopolise the trade of all its colonies, and in periods of war the sailors from the merchant fleets could be called upon for service. The important point to make from this is that given the size of Britain’s slave trade, which was as mentioned before about half of the slave trade conducted between 1662 and 1807, the British navy had to expand in number and strength, and consequently, British sailors became more experienced on the seas. In time, by the end of the century, the ‘magnificent superstructure’ of the British fleets had these distinct advantages over its maritime rivals. Without the slave trade, the state of the British navy would have been in a different state.

In conclusion, Britain in the eighteenth century had established a transoceanic network of trade and a large naval presence in the Atlantic, which arguably centred around, if not on, the slave trade, which Postlethwayt referred to as an ‘African foundation’. As this paper has outlined there have many arguments and explanations debated by historians concerning Britain’s creation of a ‘magnificent superstructure’ of trade and economic growth since Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery. Nonetheless, as a result of the Williams’ thesis, Morgan believes that it is impossible for contemporary historians to discuss Britain’s economic growth without consideration of the slave trade. This paper has demonstrated the significance and importance of the slave trade in the Atlantic empire focusing on primarily indirect factors including profit and investment, which contributed to the growth of domestic industries and shipping. In essence, Britain developed the famous ‘sweet tooth’ in the eighteenth century as a result of slave-produced commodities such as sugar becoming an everyday luxury for even the poorest Britons because the slave trade was an integral part of the Atlantic empire.

Words: 2435.

Bibliography

Deane, P. and Cole, W.A. British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure (London, 1967)

Inikori, J.E. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A study in international trade and economic development (Cambridge, 2002)

Morgan, K. Slavery, Atlantic and the British Economy, 1660-1800 (Cambridge, 2000)

Morgan, K. Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993)

Richardson, D. ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660-1807’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P.J. Marshall (Oxford, 1998), pp. 440-63.

Walvin, J. Slaves and Slavery: The British Colonial Experience (Manchester, 1992)

Williams, E. Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1964)

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