Williams develops his argument in two parts: slavery as the
engine of British capitalism’s rise, and abolition as capitalism’s rational
response once slavery no longer served its interests. A deeper Marxist reading reinforces
both claims by placing them within the frameworks of primitive accumulation,
formal and real subsumption, and the dialectic of economic crisis and political
action — concepts Williams approached but did not fully develop.
Slavery as Primitive Accumulation: Capital’s Violent
Foundation
Williams’ first claim — that slavery financed the rise of
British capitalism — is now widely accepted, though often detached from its
theoretical force. His point was not merely that Britain profited from slavery,
but that the plantation complex formed a stage of primitive accumulation (Marx
1976, 873–940): capital’s violent pre-history, in which wealth was extracted
through extra-economic coercion. The Caribbean plantation was a modern
capitalist enterprise under conditions of formal subsumption: capital controlled
the labour process without yet transforming it. Surplus was extracted through
the whip, the chain, and the legal fiction of human property. Slavery was therefore
indispensable to early British capitalism because it generated enormous coerced
surplus, supplied capital for industrial investment, and integrated Britain
into a global commercial system whose profits exceeded those of domestic
production.
Williams documented this with a precision few historians
have matched, drawing on shipping records, customs ledgers, and parliamentary
debates (Williams 1944, 51–78). The result was a portrait of a capitalist
system whose industrial future was financed by the blood and labour of enslaved
Africans.
Abolition as Capitalist Rationalization: When Slavery
Became a Barrier
Williams’ second claim — that capitalism discarded slavery once
it was no longer profitable — remains contested. A Marxist framework, however,
sharpens his argument. By the early nineteenth century, the plantation system faced
structural crisis: exhausted soil depressed yields (Beckles 2013), protected
monopolies clashed with free-trade ideology (Ragatz 1928), industrial capital required
mobile wage labour rather than fixed chattel (Engels 1845), and the Haitian
Revolution greatly increased the costs of military repression (Dubois 2004).
Slavery had become a barrier to capital’s shift from formal
to real subsumption: from extracting surplus through direct coercion to
extracting it through wages, machinery, and rising productivity (Marx 1976,
1019–1038). Abolition was not capitalism’s redemption, but its modernization.
Williams came close to this conclusion but never fully stated
it: abolition marked the shift from mercantile to industrial capitalism, from
plantation extraction to factory exploitation. The form of domination changed,
but domination itself remained.
Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery and the 1619
Project
Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) has returned
to public debate in recent years, partly because of its 2022 republication as a
Penguin Modern Classic and partly because controversies around the New York
Times’ 1619 Project have revived questions about slavery, capitalism, and
the origins of the modern world. Williams’ thesis — that slavery built British
capitalism, and that capitalism abandoned slavery only when it was no longer
profitable — speaks directly to the 1619 Project’s central claims, even though
the two works differ in method, scope, and political purpose.
Williams’ Thesis: Slavery as Engine and Obstacle of
Capitalism
Williams’ argument has two parts. First, he shows that the
profits of Caribbean slavery financed Britain’s commercial and industrial expansion,
supporting port cities, banks, and the early industrial revolution (Williams
1944; Project MUSE summary). Second, he argues that British capitalism opposed
slavery only when the plantation system began to obstruct further accumulation.
Abolition, in this account, was not a moral awakening but a rationalization of
capital.
Williams’ thesis broke with the liberal historiography that
had long dominated Anglo-Caribbean history and helped open the way for a
generation of West Indian scholars and anti-colonial thinkers (Marshall 1991;
JSTOR summary). As the Royal Historical Society observes, it remains “perhaps
the most influential book written in the twentieth century on the history of
slavery” (RHS panel summary).
II. The 1619 Project: Slavery as America’s Foundational
Structure
The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times in
2019, makes a related but distinct argument: that slavery fundamentally shaped the
United States, and that 1619 — when the first enslaved Africans arrived in
Virginia — should be understood as the nation’s true founding. Its essays contend
that American capitalism, political institutions, racial ideology, and
democratic contradictions cannot be understood without placing slavery at the
centre. While Williams focuses on Britain and the Caribbean, the 1619 Project centres
the United States. While Williams writes as an economic historian dismantling
imperial self-mythology, the 1619 Project intervenes journalistically and politically
to reshape national memory. Both, however, share a core premise: slavery was
not an aberration within capitalism, but one of its constitutive foundations.
Williams argues that slavery financed Britain’s industrial
revolution; the 1619 Project argues that slavery shaped the distinctive
features of American capitalism, including labour discipline, financial
instruments, and racialized class relations. Both reject the idea that
capitalism and slavery were opposites, insisting instead that capitalism developed
through slavery. For Williams, plantations were capitalist enterprises driven
by profit, not feudal remnants. The 1619 Project makes a similar claim,
presenting plantation accounting systems, productivity metrics, and coercive labour
management as precursors to modern corporate practice.
Williams showed that British humanitarianism closely tracked
changing economic interests, while the 1619 Project argues that American ideals
of freedom and democracy rested on the material foundation of racial slavery.
In both accounts, morality follows interest, not the reverse. Williams grounds
his analysis in trade statistics, shipping records, and economic logic; his
critics argue that he underplays enslaved resistance and political mobilization
(Drescher 2010). The 1619 Project, by contrast, foregrounds culture, ideology,
politics, memory, identity, and national mythmaking.
Williams writes from the Caribbean, analysing Britain’s
imperial economy. The 1619 Project writes from within the United States,
confronting the legacy of slavery in American institutions. Williams dismantles
imperial self‑congratulation; the 1619 Project dismantles nationalist self‑congratulation.
Williams wrote during the age of anti-colonial nationalism, providing
intellectual support for independence movements (JSTOR summary). The 1619
Project intervenes in a moment of racial reckoning, political polarization, and
debate over structural racism in the United States. Their strongest point of convergence
— and where Williams offers the sharper materialist insight — is abolition. For
Williams, abolition was not capitalism’s moral triumph but its transition from
one mode of exploitation to another: mature industrial capitalism required wage
labour rather than chattel labour, free trade rather than protected monopolies,
and flexible labour markets rather than fixed human property.
Williams underplays enslaved resistance — revolts, sabotage,
flight, and the Haitian Revolution — as material forces that shaped slavery’s
profitability. The 1619 Project, by contrast, foregrounds enslaved people as
historical agents whose struggles helped shape American democracy. In this
respect, it corrects a genuine limitation in Williams’ account. It also examines
slavery’s ideological afterlife, showing how racial capitalism persists in
policing, housing, healthcare, and labour markets — dimensions Williams did not
address.
Despite their differences, Williams and the 1619 Project share
a central claim: slavery was not an external stain on capitalism but one of its
formative structures. Williams demonstrates this through economic history; the
1619 Project does so through national memory and institutional analysis. Both
challenge liberal narratives that portray slavery as a regrettable departure
from Western progress, insisting instead that capitalism’s history cannot be
told without placing slavery at its centre.
The Enslaved as Historical Agents: The Material Force
Williams Underplayed
Critics often argue that Williams underplays the agency of
the enslaved (Drescher 2010). This criticism is valid, but often misdirected.
The problem is not that Williams failed to “give voice” to enslaved people; it
is that he understated their role as material actors who shaped the
profitability of slavery itself. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was
decisive.
The Haitian Revolution showed that enslaved labour was not
passive raw material but a revolutionary force capable of destroying the
plantation system itself. After Haiti, the costs of maintaining slavery rose sharply;
fear of revolt became a constant factor in economic calculation; and the British
state faced the prospect of repeated military intervention to defend planter
property. Enslaved resistance — through revolts, slowdowns, sabotage, and flight
— was not merely a moral drama, but a material pressure that made slavery
increasingly untenable. Later Marxist scholarship has developed the analysis
Williams left implicit (Blackburn 1988; James 1938).
Williams has been criticised for moving too quickly from
economic crisis to political outcome, but this misreads the relation between
economics and politics under capitalism. Mass petitions, abolitionist
agitation, parliamentary debates, and enslaved uprisings were not moral forces set
against economic ones; they were the forms through which economic necessity
became political action.
Capital does not act on its own. It moves through parties,
movements, ideologies, and crises. The political history missing from Williams
is therefore not an alternative to economic explanation, but the mechanism by
which economic imperatives became policy.
Williams wrote in the 1930s and 1940s as a colonial subject,
before the global Marxist revival and before the full publication of Marx’s
economic manuscripts. Capitalism and Slavery was an anti-colonial
intervention aimed at exposing British hypocrisy, not a systematic Marxist theory
of capitalist development. What Williams could not fully state — but what a
Marxist reading must — is that the same British capital that abandoned chattel
slavery in the 1830s was, within a generation, extracting surplus value from
wage labour under conditions Engels described as “social murder” (Engels 1845,
109). Abolition was not the victory of conscience, but the victory of
industrial capital.
Why Williams Still Matters: The Ideology of
Humanitarianism Today
Williams’ method remains indispensable because it exposes
the material interests beneath contemporary ideology: “humanitarian
intervention” conceals geopolitical strategy; “anti-corruption reform” advances
market liberalization; and “corporate diversity” can mask labour discipline and
brand management. The pattern remains the same: morality follows interest, not
the other way round. Williams’ central lesson — that ruling-class morality
discovers itself in line with ruling-class interest — has lost none of its
force.
Williams’ book remains indispensable precisely because it
refuses the liberal fantasy of moral progress and insists that the history of
abolition, like the history of capitalism itself, can only be understood
through the logic of material interests.
Bibliography
Primary Works
- Engels,
Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
- James,
C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.
- Marx,
Karl. Capital: Volume I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
- Williams,
Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1944.
Secondary Works
- Beckles,
Hilary McD. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and
Native Genocide. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2013.
- Blackburn,
Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso,
1988.
- Drescher,
Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Dubois,
Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
- Ragatz,
Lowell J. The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean,
1763–1833. New York: Century, 1928.
