In this post, Steve Cushion, Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of the Americas, and a former PhD student of the department, reflects on his most recent book.

Slavery in the British Empire and Its Legacy in the Modern World

Steve Cushion

My original motivation for writing this book was to bypass the apparently interminable discussion about whether “Britain” had, or had not, profited from slavery and the trafficking in enslaved Africans. Basing the discussion on macroeconomic statistics seemed to me to miss the point that Britain is divided into social classes and interest groups. This book has sought to address that gap by examining those who gained so much from the business of slavery, using examples of major businessmen, bankers, and commodity traders, as well as landowners and enslavers, all of whom placed profit before people. Their fabulous wealth contrasted starkly with the overwhelming majority of the population of Britain, who lived in abject poverty. Trickle-down economics was no more a reality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than it is today. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England describes most workers and poor farmers earning only enough to survive – a subsistence income that barely allowed them to maintain their ability to work.

Profit and loss take place at the level of individual enterprises. A single businessman making an exceptional profit can be significant in promoting economic development, but his role is obscured if we only look at average figures and global statistics. The fact that many of the early developers of industrialisation, as well as their financiers, made their initial capital through slavery and trafficking is therefore more important than the generalisations. (more…)