Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

Did slavery really make Britain rich?

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‘It’s a sad truth that much of our wealth was derived from the slave trade’, said London’s mayor Sadiq Khan. Others agree: for Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, ‘Britain was built on the backs, and souls, of slaves’. But there is a problem with this analysis; it’s wrong. Just like the story told of an island nation standing alone since 1066, it’s a myth that the monstrous evil of the slave trade made Britain the wealthy country it is today.

Slavery and sugar did not provide the sinews of finance that drove industrialisation. Total profits from the slave trade, had they been invested entirely in Britain, would have accounted for about three per cent of all capital formation in 1770. These profits, vast as they were for some individuals, were too small to change a nation, and may not have been significantly higher than those found in other industries; if sugar yielded a massively higher return on investment, amoral capitalists would shift their money out of other industries and into it. As a share of the British economy, the sugar industry was roughly equivalent to barley, hops, and brewing. Yet you will find very few people willing to argue that without the profits generated by beer industrialisation would not have happened (although you will find some claiming that civilisation would not have arisen without beer).

What’s also true is that the Caribbean colonies did not provide a unique source of demand for goods which the exploited British worker could not. While Imperial trade policies gave a slight advantage to British merchants, they were totally absent in places where the map was not shaded pink, where British goods did a roaring trade nonetheless. It is not even true to say that the links between the Caribbean and the wider British economy were of special strategic significance; they were only in that they were

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