It is a week or so ago now that Kemi Badenoch claimed that it was wrong to suggest that the wealth of the UK was founded on the basis of its slave-owning and imperial past. She did, instead, suggest that the foundations of modern British wealth could be found in the relationships embedded in the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of the Stuarts and brought William and Mary to the throne in 1688.
In a post I published here I expressed my considerable doubt about this claim, with reasons given.
In response a commentator named Steve Cushion offered a much more detailed analysis. He has, since then, explained that this comes from academic research that he has been undertaking on behalf of Caribbean Labour Solidarity, who have published his work here.
I did, however, feel it worth promoting both that paper and his original comment as a weekend read on the blog, just to show how utterly unfounded is the claim made by people like Badenoch.
This is the comment that he posted:
A different explanation of the “Glorious Revolution”
The Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the trafficking of enslaved Africans, acted as a means for the Stuart royal family, Charles II and James II, to finance their dictatorial rule without Parliamentary sanction, while personally enriching themselves and their associates and backers from the City of London. However, denying other City of London businessmen, as well as traders based in other cities, access to this profitable trade was one of the reasons the increasingly powerful capitalist class in England turned against Catholic King James II. It led to their support for the 1688 invasion from the Netherlands, led by Protestant William of Orange and James's daughter Mary Stuart, resulting in the coup d'état known as the Glorious Revolution. Opposition to the monopoly of the Royal African Company also came from the owners of the slave plantations in the West Indies, whose increased wealth enabled them to buy growing influence in the British Parliament. The Royal African Company could not supply enough enslaved labourers to meet the West Indian landowners' requirements for the growing slave-based economy. At the same time, restricting the numbers shipped by the Company enabled it to exploit its monopoly to force up the price of enslaved Africans.
Pressure from those businessmen excluded from the trade, as well as the demands of the West Indian plantation owners for ever increasing supplies of enslaved labour, forced Parliament to pass the Trade with Africa Act 1697. This opened the slave trade to all English merchants who paid a ten per cent levy to the Company.
Colonial commerce, including the business of slavery, was one of the driving forces of the capitalist economy from its earliest manifestation, encouraging the expansion of a manufacturing economy. Exports from Britain accounted for around half of all industrial production in the 18th century. Inikori tells us that, in 1770, the slave trade and the plantation economy furnished as much as fifty-five percent of gross fixed capital formation investment in Great Britain.
The increased rate of industrial growth based on exports depended on purchasing power generated by the British West Indies. Demand stemming from Africa, the Caribbean and North America based on the sugar industry was responsible for more than half of the growth of English exports in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The business of slavery greatly contributed to increasing investment in the British Empire, particularly the construction of the infrastructure that such trade required. Additionally the re-export of sugar to the Europe brought enormous profits. Half of the non-agricultural workforce in England and Wales was employed in production for export, accounting for much of the growth in manufacturing output.
Based on: Patrick K. O'Brien and Stanley L. Engerman, “Exports and the growth of the British economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens in Barbara Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
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Very many thanks to Steve Cushion.
I was fortunate enough to teach the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade as part of the excellent Scottish history curriculum, and we taught that the Industrial Revolution was predicated by the slave trade, as was British banking.
Had Badenoch had even a basic Scottish secondary education she would have learned this.
The Royal African Company was a crucial element, and whole towns like Greenock were then built on sugar which funded so much of Scots wealth (as did tobacco) at the time.
Some people are dangerous because they don’t know or understand what they are doing, and some because they do. Where Badenoch fits, I could not say.
Dundee was built on sugar and oranges….
….Sugar and oranges……. and jute I think.
I am going to disagree- not a lot but some. The wealth generated by colonial activity is a vital part of the story of Britain’s wealth.
The potato played a large part in keeping famine at bay. Cotton transformed lives and was the first industry.
Later rubber became essential. Using seeds smuggled out of Brazil, a new industry was created.
However, there is a distinction between wealth based on moving commodities from one place to another and, on the other hand, industrial production. Spain and Portugal had the first empires and Spain ‘owned’ much of the New World. Neither kept their place in the world or became industrial leaders.
By the late 1700 half of the world’s trade was by the East India company which supplied many goods to Europe. We didn’t send much the other way until the industrial revolution was under way. Then it lead to the impoverishment of the Indian textile industry. Machinery killed off cottage industries in Europe too.
Other factors than raw materials were: the agricultural changes , the enclosures which together with new machinery, selective breeding and better access to markets enabled many to leave the land. By the late 1800s we depended on imports of wheat and meat from the US, Canada and Australia.
Companies raised money from thousands of small investors.
Our coal fields were a source of power.
We were difficult to invade.
By 1900 our exports were ships, banking and insurance (Lloyds etc), coal, textiles, steel and other machinery.
I think the enduring wealth came from industrial innovation. This is what differentiated us from the previously prosperous empires of India and China. Mass production did them a lot of harm but it could not be uninvented.
The steam engine made possible faster transport and distribution, but also huge hammers , mass production, pumping out mines but much of the rest of the work was still done by hand-tending the textile machines, riveting, building house and roads, much of the metal bashing industries. The advent of the fractional horse power motor -such as the electric drill- improved productivity up to the present.
As so often, there is more than one cause. I don’t agree with Ms Badenoch’s conclusion but I find it difficult to agree slavery is the main cause of British wealth. You do say ‘slavery and its Imperial past’. Empire is a major cause but the commodity trading empire would have gone the way of Spain if it had not been for the industrial innovators.
The debate is really about how far the American trade created the capital basis for further expansion.
I am going to make the case that there IS a damaging legacy of the Imperial era which dogs us still.
The aristocracy traditionally got their wealth from owning land -rentiers.
They certainly got involved in the colonial enterprises and drew wealth from them. The early companies farmed intensively -cotton, sugar, tea. rubber etc and traded them around the world. They were also much involved in finance and banking.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of a new class of industrialists who owned factories mills, mines, shipyards etc. They asserted their presence in the repeal of the Corn Laws. Industry was now more important.
The farming interest declined around 1870 and this hit the income of the aristocracy. The opening up of the wheat growing areas of North America, the railways to move the grain, steamships to carry larger cargoes, refrigeration , canning -all meant cheap food. Income from land fell sharply.
However, we did not have the Revolution as in France (several in fact) or as Germany had in 1918, or 1945. The landowning class absorbed many of the new rich and imparted their attitudes.
It seems to me an enduring legacy that the political direction of the country remains with those who see drawing rents and dividends as the main source of wealth.
When there was a clash of interests, the City trumps the industrial interest. In the 60s we stuck to an over valued pound far too long and defended the parity with high interest rates which discouraged investment inner modern methods.
Very interesting economic history.
But someone like Badenoch chucking out an ideological sound bite doesnt deserve a reasoned response. And a reasoned response doesnt work .
Fascist propaganda seems to work on emotion and the story of what we want history to be rather than what it actually is.
Accepted. But still worth sharing
I don’t think the development of the East India Company that established British colonial rule in India had anything to do with a Dutch King coming here and a “constitutional monarchy” established. Badenoch needs to provide the evidence for her thesis but she will find that this does not exist.
Great discussion sparked by an ill informed comment.
Another thread in the complex history of empire and industrialisation is the training ground the Atlantic slave trade provided for a Royal Navy that allowed a small island nation to dominate so much overseas territory for so long. No straight lines of cause and effect but a web of contributing factors.
Thanks again Richard for providing and curating this conversation space.
Another aspect. A paper called: Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution by Jenny Bulstrode
It was African slaves in Jamaica in the 18th century that developped the “cort process” for redering scrap iron into bar iron. This was revolutionary. Indeed, historically, (as the paper noted) Africa was more advanced in iron work than Europe – e.g. Lisbon 1494, had amonst the most advanced ironworking technology in Europe all dependent on the skill of Black metallurgists.
So the British, not just parasitical in terms of slaves, sugar etc, but parasitical in terms of craft and knowledge, Cort & co hijacking the knowledge and techniques that African slaves had. Twas always thus, with the ghastly Tories attempting to re-write history. Pathetic.
Thanks
One point I think worth making is that the landed gentry in a significant number of cases may have lost rents as agriculture declined, but those who won the lottery of geology discovered that there were copious seams of coal on their lands; and so we able to extract rents (in the economic sense) from developing or licencing mines. Viewing this from Sheffield, as I do, many of the local aristocracy (Devonshire, Fitzwilliam, Wentworth, Manvers, Norfolk…) exploited these reserves and (with greater or lesser ‘benevolence’) their workforce, through the 19th and 20th centuries, until their fortunes were reduced by world wars and finally the post-WW2 nationalisations.
That isn’t to deny the significance of the triangular Afro-Caribbean trade, with its much earlier beginnings; nor the ‘imperial privilege’ that denied development to commodity producers such as India; as discussed by other commenters already.
It strikes me that all of these situations rely on power imbalance: the control of land, trade and investment and development, by those capable of enforcing their will – from the Norman conquest right up to the ‘battle of Orgreave’ just 40 years ago.
As I have explained here several times, the Union of Parliaments (1707) that developed the mercantilist, slave plantation business model and the dramatic growth of a British Empire, was itself the consequence of an unintended consequence of the Glorious Revolution; the reaction of the Scottish Parliament to the continued application of the Scots being blocked from the late 17th century English Empire, by Downing’s Navigation Acts (notably against Scotland).
The reaction of the Scots was to pass the Act creating the ‘Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies’ (1695) in the Scottish Parliament, in order to create an independent Scottish mercantilist imperial project. The project was not intended to be in Darien, or indeed the Caribbean or America. The real purpose was to meet a demand of London-based, and even Dutch capital to invest in a competitor to the English Chartered monopoly Goliath; the East India Company (EIS). The Scots Company would compete with the EIS. It couldn’t happen in England, but Scotland had the power and its independent Parliament, to pass the Act. It was intended to launch the IPO and raise half the capital in London. The conception was William Paterson’s, the genius behind the founding of the Bank of England (1694).
The Crown, (William of Orange) quietly intervened to prevent the Scots IPO it had created in close coordination with English and Dutch, anti-monopoly capital. He killed the IPO stone dead. The capital raising was stopped, and the project collapsed. Scotland was left to find all the capital, but not enough to compete with the EIS. The Navigation Acts remained active against Scotland. Paterson came up with the Darien option, off-the-hoof, in Scotland’s last desperate bid for independent action, using its own capital alone.
The Crown reacted by approaching England’s great enemy, Spain to ensure Darien failed (it was a mad idea – it would have failed anyway, but the Crown left nothing to chance). Scotland exhausted its capital on the Darien disaster, but also realised when the colony failed, that in spite of the Presbyterians having backed William of Orange to the hilt (a substantial part of the Dutch army was Scots), the Crown was prepared to betray Scotland without hesitation; for the Crown’s English and Dutch political interests. The Scottish Parliament had no independent future in what the Scots realised was going to be a mercantilist, imperial future; from which they, alone would be excluded by its own Monarch.
The Union was the realisation of a financially ruined Scottish elite that Scottish independence was the price of to be paid for waht it believed was the future of the world. The Union was, by 1705-6 for the Scots the only viable option. The Union Treaty’s crucial clauses are in the Equivalent, the brilliant idea of William Paterson (with the radical financial maths by David Gregory – a breakthrough idea), creating the first genuinely modern financial valuation of what was presented officially as the price of Scotland (which was ‘bust’, but critically with no material national debt) to be paid by England for Scotland to take a share of England’s massive national debt; but in reality the Equivalent (circa 50% of it), was compensation to be paid to the Scottish elite (the Darien shareholders) for the financial losses they suffered from Darien – an implicit but not explicit acceptance that the Crown had betrayed Scotland; a resolution that was a ‘sine qua non’ for the Union to happen. The payment was duly paid in specie (sent to Edinburgh in chests under armed guard – the chests survive), but in typical standard form – most of its in bonds; an addition to the National Debt. The Scots recognised that the National Debt was England’s strength, not its weakness.
The vital power of the National Debt was a crucial understanding by the Scots that, ironically modern Britain and Neoliberal ideology has entirely lost. Scotland in 1707 had virtually no material debt at all, which is why Scotland was “broke”. Following the 1707 Union Treaty, the Navigation Acts fell. In consequence, within a few decades the Scots dominated the American tobacco trade, and had taken a major presence in the Caribbean sugar business. Indeed Scotland’s impact on the Empire, and the application of the slavery plantation business model, was greater than the Scots application of effort in the development of the Scottish economy itself, which broadly stagnated until around the 1750s.
This aspect of the history of the Glorious Revolution has been less well researched by historians, with William Deringer, ‘Calculated Values’, one of the few to explore the significance of the Equivalent.
Thanks
One further thought. Mr Cushion stresses the power of the anti-monopolist capital in rejecting James II and VII. This over-reaches the influence of the anti-monopolists in London; which the Scots found to their cost. The real power lay with mercantilist capital, with for example the East India Company (and its Dutch equivalent, with King William). The monopolists routed the anti-monopolists over the Scottish Company. So why did they desert the Stuarts (traditional history over stresses other political issues, and religion)? The reason was still money. The Stuarts were never trusted over money and debt, particularly after Charles II chose to default on debt payments in 1672. It was a characteristic trait, and with the ruin of the Goldsmiths trust collapsed. The mercantilist-monopolists won the day; and established the prevailing dogma for the eighteenth century (and even dragged its orthodoxy well into the nineteenth century); until challenged, but never completely defeated by Adam Smith (who, with David Hume had their own problems understanding the nature of money).
The problem in so much defective history being written is twofold. First, history suffers from the unacknowledged trauma of having two silos that never communicate; intellectual history and economic history. The economic historians only talk to themselves and have been drinking the economic theory Kool-Aid too long. The intellectual historians are weak on economics. In the history of slavery the flaws persist. Eric Williams wrote the first great shock therapy against the complacent, self-serving, smug tosh British history had produced, until Williams wrote ‘Capitalism and Slavery’, (1948). The problem then became a debate that became secondary to the divisions that opened between Williams’s Marxist inflected analysis in the age of the Cold War. Historians are easily trapped by the intellectual age in which they write; and the effect here was to lose much of the plot, to pursue an endless and furious debate that still goes on; which is driven as much by a British desire to prove that Britain’s domestic industrial revolution was not actually funded by slavery, and those who (perhaps understandably given the scale of the British slavery interests) wish to prove it was so funded. Much of this is unproductive, and has in consequence spent too little time researching in the appropriate areas. The economic historians, with a few exceptions (and even there often insufficiently effective or focused research) have typically failed to turn up at all. I can write this from direct experience, as i plough my own furrow.
An additional, equally interesting angle can be found in Accounting for Slavery by Caitlin Rosenthal: https://www.newsfromnowhere.co.uk/page/detail/Accounting-for-Slavery/?K=BDZ0039908552
She describes how plantation owners developed methods of management we would recognise only too well today, methods that Charles Babbage was very keen to transpose into the burgeoning industries of the UK on behalf of their owners.
That is shocking at oine level and at another unsurprising.
Human capacity for organised cruelty was not a 2oth century construct
Essentially the technology changes everything, seemingly radically; but at a deeper level the same human processes silently reassert their authority conveniently out of sight, adjusting fast to the need to adapt, to the minimum possible; and where these processes essentially possess a dark nature, the hardest work is expended to keep it all hidden, and silent. Slavery worked in the Empire because it happened where it was furthest from direct, general public knowledge in Britain, where the politics mattered. The money made from slavery funded spin and propaganda in the public forms of media available in Britain. Today the money spins propaganda about welfare and immigration, when the biggest Britain faces for its own future is a declining birth rate, well below replacement, labour shortages, and refusal to accept a fundamental need for immigration – for the economy.
Agreed