As an institution, the institution of slavery was declining worldwide in the 19th century.

The critical role of Atlantic slavery in the emergence of the capitalist global economy was obscured in the literature for decades by the debate provoked by the opposing arguments of Reginald Coupland and Eric Williams concerning the morality and economics of abolition (Coupland 1964 [1933]; Williams 1944).1 As a testament to the long-lasting debate, the 1938 Oxford University doctoral dissertation by Eric Williams, “The Economic Aspect of Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery,” was published in full recently, edited by Dale Tomich, with an introduction by William Darity Jr. (Tomich 2014). The more recent literature has moved on beyond these earlier debates. The main focus is now on long-run economic development—the contribution of enslaved Africans in the Americas to the long-run development of the major economies of the Atlantic world that led to the creation of the capitalist global economy. This article examines the disagreements and the emerging consensus in the literature. The central argument of the article derives from the idea that the global capitalist economy developed historically in two stages: the first stage was the rise of the integrated nineteenth-century Atlantic economy—the nucleus of the capitalist global economy—and the second was characterized by the extension of the Atlantic economic order to Asia and the rest of the world to constitute the global capitalist economy. I demonstrate the critical role of Atlantic slavery in the rise of the Atlantic economy. The central argument is developed sequentially in five sections. Because the British Industrial Revolution was critical to the formation of the capitalist global economy, in the first section I discuss the more recent literature on the subject. The second section focuses on the role of the Americas in the rise of Western Europe, with emphasis on the British Industrial Revolution. The third section shows the contribution of Atlantic slavery to the rise of the integrated nineteenth-century Atlantic economy. The extension of the Atlantic economic system to Asia and the rest of the world, through the sheer economic and military superiority of the major economies of the Atlantic world, is the subject of the fourth section. The conclusion of the article is drawn up in the fifth section. To comprehend how the arguments in these sections relate one to another and to the article’s central subject, the section that follows discusses pertinent conceptual issues.

Conceptual Issues

It is important to note from the outset that this article deals with long-run economic development—what is sometimes called development economic history. There are important conceptual issues involved in tracing the evolution of the integrated capitalist Atlantic economic order from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and its extension to the rest of the world to constitute the integrated capitalist global economy. First, there is the conceptual problem of identifying the central feature that unambiguously distinguishes a capitalist socioeconomic formation from other forms of socioeconomic organization. Second, there is the conceptual problem of accurately identifying the defining elements of an integrated regional, national, or global/world economy. What is common to both conceptual problems is the development of price-making markets and market-based economies. It is the price-making market mechanism that integrates economies through the integration of their markets, thereby compelling division of labor among them. Non-market-based economies cannot be integrated, because there is no price-making market mechanism to compel division of labor. Hence, the development of price-making markets (local, regional, national) constitutes an important part of the long-run process of creating integrated economies. An important contribution of enslaved Africans employed in large-scale, specialized production of commodities in the Americas is the development of price-making markets across the Atlantic basin in regions (including Western Europe) that had long been dominated by non-market-oriented production. The development of price-making markets is also central to the origins of the distinguishing feature of a capitalist socioeconomic formation—legally free wage labor as the numerically dominant form of labor in the production of goods and services for the market.2 In this article I trace the rise of the capitalist global economy and the contribution of enslaved Africans in the Americas by identifying and analyzing the factors central to the development of price-making markets and their integration to produce global division of labor among the major economies of the world. Because the integrated world economies have not been equal, another defining feature of the integrated global economy is hierarchy: the global economy is hierarchically structured. It is important to emphasize from the onset that the citing and discussion of literature in the article is strictly limited to publications (old and new) directly related to the issues on which the article focuses.3

I. Recent Literature on the British Industrial Revolution

The observable trend in the more recent literature on the British Industrial Revolution is a movement away from the inward looking of the earlier mainstream literature (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005; Allen 2009; Findlay and O’Rourke 2007; Inikori 2002:89–155; Pomeranz 2000). The inward-looking literature, with emphasis on cultural explanations, no longer occupies the center stage (Clark 2007; McCloskey 2010; Mokyr 2009; Pomeranz 2008:775–779, review of Clark 2007). But there is one confusing feature of some of the contributions to the more recent literature that compels some detailed comment to straighten up the confusion. The literature in question claims there is a major difference between the industrialization process in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and later industrialization processes in the periphery (southern and eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa); the process in England is said to have been driven by a high-wage economy that compelled the application of labor-saving technology (hence, a capital-intensive as opposed to a labor-intensive process), and the process in Asia and the rest of the periphery was based on cheap labor (low wages) that compelled labor-intensive industrialization processes. Various chapters in two edited volumes are representative of the identified feature (Austin and Sugihara 2013; O’Rourke and Williamson 2017). The introductions to both volumes stress this difference:

The traditional perception of industrialization was founded on the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, which was driven by the introduction of machinery and steam power. In contrast, the experience of the global diffusion of industrialization suggests the significance of both the deployment of the abundant resources of labour and the improvement of the quality of labour (human resource development) as major determinants of change. (Austin and Sugihara 2013:1)

Modern industry first emerged in high-wage economies: Britain, Northwest Europe, and North America. According to Allen (2009), this is not a coincidence: high wages, cheap capital, and abundant energy gave entrepreneurs the incentive to search for and adopt modern, labour-saving, and capital and energy-using technologies. Initially, these new technologies were only economical in regions whose factor endowments corresponded with what the technologies had been designed for. But over time, the technologies improved to such an extent that it made sense to adopt them even where factor endowments were quite different. (O’Rourke and Williamson 2017:4)

These claims mischaracterize the British industrialization process and introduce confusion in identifying the main causal factors that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. Left uncorrected, the contribution of enslaved Africans in the Americas to the central factor in the rise of the capitalist global economy could be difficult to demonstrate. The process of industrialization in Great Britain did not begin in a high-wage economy. It was largely an import substitution process that went through protoindustrialization, with the concentration over time of the textile and metallurgical industries in the main Atlantic trading English counties, particularly Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire that had been the most socially and economically backward regions of England. The initial over time concentration of protoindustrial cotton textile manufacturing in Lancashire, and woolen in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was due largely to their exploitation of their cheap labor to capture a large share of the fast-growing Atlantic markets that created the conditions for the inventive activities and the adoption of the invented new technologies in these counties (Inikori 2002:56–88, 140–155, 2015:224–268). Presenting high wages as the cause of the Industrial Revolution makes this portion of the recent literature look confusingly like the old inward-looking literature. If high wages were the prime mover of the Industrial Revolution, it would have occurred in the southern counties of England, especially the counties of East Anglia, that had the highest wages in England for decades up to the 1760s, during which time Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire were among the counties with the lowest wages (Hunt 1986). Yet, the Industrial Revolution and industrial capitalism originated in the latter counties. It is significant that the writer usually cited for the high wage argument makes it clear British high wages were caused, in the first instance, by British success in the international economy, aided by mercantilism and imperialism (Allen 2009, 2011:357). The section that follows shows the full details of the foregoing points in the discussion of the role of the Americas in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Western Europe.

II. The Role of the Americas in the Industrial Revolution and the Rise of Western Europe

The main argument in this section of the article can be reduced to one question: If it is realistic to study the Atlantic world as a unit of economic historical analysis in the period 1500–1850, how do we incorporate the economies of Western Europe into that analysis? In this article I contend that it is realistic to study the Atlantic world as a unit of economic historical analysis in the period 1500–1850 because an integrated Atlantic economy emerged during the period before integrated national economies emerged in the Atlantic basin. Long before the emergence of integrated national economies on either side of the Atlantic, the most dynamic regions on both sides of the Atlantic were more strongly connected to the evolving Atlantic economy than they were to the other regions within the political boundaries of their respective countries. A more realistic approach to the study of Western European economic history of the period, I argue, is to combine Atlantic perspectives with detailed studies of development processes at the micro-regional level. This approach is illustrated in the article with a discussion of the development process in the major regions of England during the period. Particularly important in the English example is the comparative discussion of the development process in northwest England (comprising Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire) and East Anglia (comprising Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk).

The framework by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005), comparing Atlantic trading countries in Europe with the non-Atlantic trading countries, is perfectly applicable to micro-regional studies. In England’s example, Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire (to a somewhat lesser extent, the West Midlands also) are the Atlantic traders and East Anglia is a non-Atlantic trader. Ultimately, the Industrial Revolution occurred in Lancashire and the West Riding, while East Anglia stagnated, very much like Pomeranz’s Yangzi Delta in China (Pomeranz 2000). The industrialization of the Atlantic trading counties provided the basis for the emergence of an integrated national economy in England in the nineteenth century and the integration of the national economy into the Atlantic economy. Although the English economy is unique to some degree, the same process is generally true for the rest of Western Europe.

The central focus of Atlantic world economic history is the long-run integrative process, 1500–1850, which created the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy (Bailyn 2005:61; O’Rourke and Williamson 1999). Economic historians on the western part of the Atlantic have been studying that process for several decades—the movement of people, capital, and products across the Atlantic, especially the flow of people, capital, and products centered on the transatlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas that linked together Western Europe, western Africa, and the Americas (Sheridan 1987; Williams 1944). Directly related to the subject of this article are studies of economic development processes in the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil centered on the growth of the Atlantic economy.

Douglass North’s seminal work The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (1966 [1961]) provided the lead. North’s analysis, like others that followed in the Americas, focused on the development of price-making markets, the growth of regional specialization, and the spread and intensification of the market economy in regions that had been overwhelmingly dominated by subsistence (non-market-oriented) production for centuries before Columbus and continued so for many decades thereafter. For North, the growth of Atlantic commerce, based on large-scale, specialized plantation agriculture (cotton plantations, in particular), was the critical factor in the process that expanded the market sector of the domestic economy of the United States and slowly reduced the predominance of the subsistence sector over time: “An analysis of the United States economic development must necessarily be put into the context of the expansion of the Atlantic economy” (North 1966 [1961]:66). North recognized that the economy’s long-term development depended on factors that stimulated the expansion of its initially small market sector. Given the initial overwhelming dominance of subsistence production, it is to be expected that any market-based production capable of stimulating the growth of the market sector over time would be a small ratio of the GNP, with its huge subsistence component. As North put it (North 1966 [1961]:68–69):4

In this period of rapid growth [1830s], it was cotton that initiated the concomitant expansion in income, in the size of domestic markets, and creation of the social overhead investment (in the course of its role in the marketing of cotton) in the Northeast which were to facilitate the subsequent rapid growth of manufactures. … when income from cotton exports, including shipments to textile mills in our own Northeast, grew from $25 million in 1831 to $70 million in 1836, it set in motion the whole process of accelerated expansion which culminated in 1839.

Shepherd and Walton pushed back temporally North’s framework to the analysis of the development process in colonial North America (Shepherd and Walton 1972:25):

We argue that while subsistence agriculture provided an important base to colonial incomes and was a substantial part of average per capita income, changes in incomes and improvements in welfare came largely through overseas trade and other market activities. Not only did improvements in productivity occur primarily through market activity, but the pattern of settlement and production was determined by market forces. This pattern changed slowly and unevenly, spreading from the waterways and distribution centers along the Atlantic seaboard into the interior.

Kenneth Sokoloff’s extensive empirical study of inventors and inventive activities during early industrialization in the United States (1790–1846) also builds firmly on, and further advances, North’s earlier study (Khan and Sokoloff 1993:289–307; North 1965:673–705, 1966 [1961]; Sokoloff 1988:813–850; Sokoloff and Khan 1990:363–378). Based on the detailed study of patent records and other evidence showing the characteristics of the inventors, the timing of major bursts in inventive activities, and the strong positive correlation between the regional distribution of extensive markets and the density of inventive activities, Sokoloff concludes: “The findings suggest that the growth of markets during the early stages of industrialization diffused a powerful and long-term inducement to inventive activity, and in so doing, helped raise the realization of economic gains into a self-sustaining process” (Sokoloff 1988:846–847).

Other scholars in the Americas have grounded, in varying ways, their analyses of the development process in the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil on the expansion of the Atlantic economy. Three edited volumes (Coclanis 2005; Eltis, Lewis, and Sokoloff 2004; McCusker and Morgan 2000) that deal with the Americas and the Atlantic economy in general contain contributions focused specifically on the United States. The development processes in Spanish America and Brazil have been analyzed in ways very similar to North’s study of the United States, with emphasis on the role of the evolving Atlantic economy in the growth of domestic markets and the geographical spread of the market economy in regions previously dominated by subsistence production (Bakewell 1971, 1984; Brading 1971; Burkholder and Johnson 2004; Hoberman 1991; Lockhart 1972; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). In general, it is fair to say that scholars on the western side of the Atlantic have strongly founded their study of the development process in the Americas on the growth of the Atlantic economy.

It is a different matter on the eastern shores of the Atlantic. Most studies of European economic history pay little attention to the role of multilateral Atlantic trade in the critical centuries of European development from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The early works of Ralph Davis (1954, 1962a, 1962b, 1966, 1967) and François Crouzet (1964), two eminent students of European economic history of the period, provided a strong foundation for connecting European economic history to the evolution of the Atlantic economy, similar to what Douglass North did for the United States. But both scholars later retreated under the strong tide of the inward-looking scholarship of the 1950–1980 historiographical epoch (Inikori 2002:89–155). Davis argued in The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (1973:xi), contrary to his well-informed position in the 1950s and 1960s, that “the main influences on European economic development arose within the countries of Europe themselves,” thus encouraging isolated national narratives in the study of European economic history. In a similar turnaround, Crouzet had stated eloquently in his 1964 article (Crouzet 1964:568):

The eighteenth century can be truly called the Atlantic stage of European economic development. Foreign trade, and especially trade with the Americas, was the most dynamic sector of the whole economy. … Owing to the superiority of sea transport over land transport, the eighteenth-century European economy was organized around a number of big seaports, the most prosperous being those with the largest share in the growing colonial trade, such as Bordeaux or Nantes; each of these had, not only its own industries, but also its industrial hinterland in the river base of which it was the outlet.

In the 1985 reprinted collection of his essays, Crouzet thought it necessary to insert a postscript that he may “have somewhat over-estimated the role of seaborne trade (and especially colonial trade) in the eighteenth-century European economy” (Crouzet 1990:316). Hence, although there are outstanding contributions to European economic history that employ Atlantic perspectives (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2005:546–579; Cuenca-Esteban 1997:879–905, 2004:35–66; Deane 1979 [1965]; Deane and Habakkuk 1963; Hobsbawm 1954a:33–53, 1954b:44–65, 1969; Inikori 2002; O’Brien and Engerman 1991), the mainstream European economic history literature shows little interest in that framework. A recent collection of essays even calls Atlantic perspectives on European economic history a deus ex machina (Emmer, Petre-Grenouilleau, and Roitman 2006).5 I argue in the next part of this section of the article that the growth of the Atlantic economy was a major factor in the development process in Western Europe during the critical period 1500–1850.

“In the lone houses and very small villages which are scattered about in so desert a country as the Highlands of Scotland,” wrote Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1994 [1776]:19), “every farmer must be butcher, baker and brewer for his own family… . The scattered families … must learn to perform themselves a great number of little pieces of work.” These were the observations that compelled Smith to place much emphasis on the development of markets and the geographical spread of the market economy as the central issue in the development process, given economies overwhelmingly dominated by subsistence production. The question is how much of what Smith observed in the highlands of Scotland existed in the economies of Western Europe in 1500. The evidence suggests it was dominant. As late as the French Revolution (1789), “rural inhabitants made up 90 percent of the population in Europe, 92 percent in Mexico, and 95 percent in the United States” (Moya 2007:197, n. 21).6 This would suggest that the subsistence sector was very large and dominant in the economies of Western Europe in 1500. The development of domestic markets and the geographical spread of the market economy was, therefore, a critical element in the Western European development process between the sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries as was the case in the Americas during the same period. The employment of Atlantic perspectives enables us to ask questions about the factors that mattered most in the development of domestic markets in Europe during the period, questions that isolated national narratives preclude. It is significant that the collection of essays, which characterizes Atlantic perspectives as a deus ex machina, focuses discussion exclusively on merchandise exports of the European economies, on the ground that their imports are not relevant in the assessment of the role of the Americas in European development. Yet transatlantic imports were critical elements in the development of domestic markets and the market economy in Western Europe during the period.

As we know too well, the production and distribution of silver and gold in Spanish America powered the commercializing process in both Spanish America and Western Europe for more than a hundred years from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. With treasure pouring in from their American colonies, Spanish elites and their government were encouraged to rely on other Western European economies to supply their needs and those of their Spanish colonies in manufactures and commercial services. As those needs expanded enormously because of an ambitious imperial enterprise, which American treasure also inspired, the silver and gold from Spanish America moved quickly out of Spain to the developing economies of Western Europe to pay for their supplies:

“Half of Europe, from Genoa to Hamburg,” was involved in the “big business” of exploiting America through Spain’s Indies trade. Some 94 percent of the value of all goods shipped to America in Spain’s famous convoys of flotas and galeones in the late seventeenth century consisted of non-Spanish goods; 40 percent of the exports via Cadiz were French in origin. It was a self-intensifying system. As the goods of Europe’s advanced economies flooded Spain’s American markets, capital increasingly drained from lower Andalusia to England, France, Italy, and the Low countries, and the returns in silver from Mexico and Peru flowed back through the foreign branch houses in Seville and Cadiz to irrigate the whole of Europe’s economy. (Bailyn 2005:87–88)

The impact of Spanish American treasure on European economies has been debated in terms of the sixteenth-century price revolution in Europe (Gould 1964:249–266; Hamilton 1929:338–357). The main issue is whether American treasure or population growth was the main factor in the price revolution. What has not been seriously examined is the contribution of Spanish American bullion to the development of domestic markets and the market economy in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, both through the mechanism of the sheer quantity of currency in circulation and via the multiplier effects of intra-European trade stimulated by the import and export trade of Spain in Europe. For all practical purposes, the bulk of Spanish trade with the rest of Europe during the period was part of Atlantic commerce (Inikori 2002:201–210, 2007:74–75). As Stanley Stein and Barbara Stein put it: “We now recognize that American silver was a major (perhaps even the determining) factor in the development of commercial capitalism in western Europe and that silver represented sales returns on the products of Europe’s protoindustrialization: textile manufactures of Holland and Flanders, England, France, Italy, and Germany” (Stein and Stein 2000:71, 77).

Similarly, Portugal’s export and import trade with other European economies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century depended on the Brazilian economy, especially during the gold boom in the first half of the eighteenth century. Even in the late eighteenth century (1796–1806), Brazilian products made up about 60% of the value of all exports from Portugal to other European countries, while goods produced in Portugal were about 25% (Inikori 2002:207). Portugal’s exports to Brazil were largely produced in other European countries, mostly England. To secure England’s military protection against Spanish threats, “Portugal conceded a commercial monopoly to English manufactures in her territories, at the same time agreeing not to establish her own competing industries” (Merrick and Graham 1979:12). Thus, again, Portugal’s import and export trade with other European countries during the period was part of Atlantic commerce in the main.

The reexport of French American products was also largely responsible for the growth of French trade with other European countries in the eighteenth century. Apart from direct reexport of French American colonial products from France to European countries, the Dutch bought them in France and distributed them in Europe, particularly in the Baltic. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, reexport of French Caribbean products made up more than 50% of French exports to the Netherlands (Butel 1990:159–160).

Particularly remarkable is English trade with Continental European countries. In the medieval period England was a peripheral country, trading raw materials (especially raw wool) for manufactures from the Continent. By the seventeenth century, woolen textiles had become England’s main export to other European countries. But as these European countries developed their own industries under mercantilist policies, England lost much of the Continental markets for its manufactures. Hence, between 1699–1701 and 1772–1774, English domestic exports to northwestern and northern Europe declined absolutely from ₤2,114,000 a year to ₤1,769,000. During this period, reexports more than made up the absolute decline in domestic exports to increase total exports by 48.7% instead of the 16.3% decrease that would have occurred without reexports (Davis 1962a:120; percentages are my own computation from Davis’s data). Two-thirds of the reexports were British American products; others were Asian products whose imports were made possible by the reexport of American bullion by the English East India Company. Not only did incomes from the reexport trade create markets in England for European imports, but also reexport of European manufactures to the Americas by British merchants was an important element in British imports from Europe.

There can be no doubt that trade in American products and Asian goods purchased with American bullion was central to the growth of intra-European trade and the development of domestic markets and the spread of the market economy in Europe in the formative years 1500–1800. Much of what is treated as intra-European exports during the period ought to be assigned to Atlantic trade.

Probably the strongest evidence supporting the argument that Atlantic perspectives offer the most realistic framework for the study of European economic history during our period comes from European regional, as opposed to national, history. As Crouzet noted in his 1964 article (Crouzet 1964:568), “The eighteenth-century European economy was organized around a number of big seaports … each of these had, not only its own industries, but also its industrial hinterland in the river base of which it was the outlet.” These industrial regions provided the dynamics for the long-run development of the national economies of Western Europe, similar to what scholars have shown for the US economy. For much of our period, before the inland transportation networks of the railway age in the nineteenth century, these dynamic regions, which included Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the West Midlands (all in England), were more tightly linked to the evolving Atlantic economy than to the rest of their respective national economies. The mainstream literature on European economic history, with its unrealistic exclusive focus on national narratives at a time when integrated national economies did not exist, contains elements of distortion of reality. The rest of this section of the paper is devoted to a more detailed comparative discussion of England’s major regions for illustration purposes.

The assessment of wealth in England’s 40 counties for tax purposes, ranking from 1 down in order of merit, shows that from 1086 to 1660, Lancashire was almost at the very bottom, ranking 35 as late as 1660, while two of the three counties that make up East Anglia, Suffolk and Essex, ranked 2 and 6, respectively, in the same year (Inikori 2002:64). It remained comparatively backward in all aspects of economic and social organization up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Because of the generally poor quality of its agricultural land and the prevalence of smallholdings and subdivided plots, household incomes were very low, as reflected in “the staple diet of oatmeal and offal” (Farnie 1979:46; Walton 1987:66–67).

As would be expected, these conditions meant that wages were generally low in the county. Evidence on regional wage differentials in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows that as late as 1767–1770, Lancashire was still among 11 counties (out of the total of 40) with the lowest wages in England (Hunt 1986:965–966). Among other things, low wages gave Lancashire a competitive edge in labor-intensive protoindustry and in maritime commerce and shipping relative to other regions in England. While this advantage was not large enough for Lancashire to capture markets in other regions of England or Europe in the early decades of its development, it was large enough to make it quite competitive in Atlantic markets: 80%–94% of total export sales of English cotton textiles went to western Africa and the Americas between 1701 and 1774, and 52%–69% between 1784 and 1806. Lancashire’s dominance in Atlantic markets helped to concentrate the labor-intensive protoindustrial production of cotton textiles in the county. Several decades before mechanization and factory organization, the protoindustry sold the bulk of its output in Atlantic markets. It was on the basis of expanding demand from Atlantic markets and competition with Indian cotton textiles in those markets that the technology and organization of the industry were transformed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it was after the transformation that markets in Europe and Asia became important (Broadberry and Gupta 2009:279–305; Inikori 2002). By 1794–1795, Lancashire had become one of the 11 counties with the highest wages in England, and in 1833–1845, it had the third-highest wages among the English counties (Hunt 1986:965–966). No doubt, this fast movement from a relatively low-wage to a high-wage region in England was due largely to the rapid expansion of Lancashire’s export-oriented industrial production during the period. In their 2009 article, Broadberry and Gupta linked the technological breakthrough in Lancashire from the last quarter of the eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century directly to the fast increases in wages as the producers competed on the global market with cotton exporters in India, but they failed to show the connection between the rising wages (from their low levels initially) and expanding exports to Atlantic markets (Broadberry and Gupta 2009).7

It is clear from the evidence that Lancashire industrialization followed a common pattern of import-substitution industrialization, with initial emphasis on the exploitation of cheap labor in labor-intensive manufacturing. Broad national and Continental comparisons, claiming differences between European industrialization based on “large-scale firms and factories” and Asian industrialization based on the exploitation of cheap labor in labor-intensive manufacturing (Austin and Sugihara 2013; de Vries 2008:81; O’Rourke and Williamson 2017), are not accurate representation of historical reality as far as industrialization in Lancashire is concerned. Yet Lancashire was the main center of the Industrial Revolution in England. The bulk of the major technological developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occurred there. The nearest rival was its geographically contiguous neighbor, the West Riding of Yorkshire, whose history, tied up with the growth of the woolen textile industry in England, is also particularly pertinent to the subject of this article.

For my current purpose, it is important to place the rise of the West Riding in the broader context of the regional history of the woolen textile industry in England from the Middle Ages to the mid-nineteenth century. From the medieval period to 1500, when the main operating factors in the development of European regional economies were located within Europe, the wool trade with northern and northwest Europe, from raw wool to woolen textiles, was the critical element in the development process in England. Naturally, the southern regions, such as East Anglia, the West Country, and Devon, with the proper natural resource endowment and advantageous geographical location, were the most socioeconomically developed regions of England. As previously mentioned, the northern regions, particularly Lancashire and Yorkshire, remained extremely backward. The gap between the southern and northern regions of England persisted up to the seventeenth century (Bowden 1962; Bridbury 1962; Coleman 1962:115–117; Lloyd 1977; Mann 1971; Pollard and Crossley 1968; Power 1941).

Things began to change from the late seventeenth century because of two developments in opposite directions. English Atlantic trade expanded considerably from the late seventeenth century, while the markets for England’s protoindustrial products in northern and northwest Europe declined absolutely as the latter regions developed their own protoindustries under mercantilist policy. The woolen textile industry in the southern regions, producing heavy cloths for northern and northwest Europe, was the hardest hit. English woolen exports to northwest and northern Europe declined absolutely by 35% between 1701 and 1806. During the same period, exports to the Americas and western Africa grew by a factor of 18.45, from ₤185,000 to ₤3.4 million (Inikori 2002:412–421).

Like Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire exploited its relatively cheap labor to capture the expanding Atlantic markets for the lighter woolen fabrics. Meanwhile, having lost much of the markets for its manufactures in northern and northwest Europe, and unable to compete in the rapidly expanding Atlantic markets and the growing markets in Portugal and Spain (part of the rapidly growing Atlantic economy as demonstrated earlier in the article), East Anglia stagnated industrially. By the mid-eighteenth century, several decades before the Industrial Revolution was underway, East Anglia, which had maintained its position as one of England’s leading regions in socioeconomic progress for centuries, had lost its dynamism; much of its industrial and commercial life was in decay. In the first half of the nineteenth century, industrial decline in the region gave rise to unemployment, wages fell, and the rate of population growth in its three counties (Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk) was consistently below the national average (Coleman 1962:117, 119, 125; Inikori 2015:247).

Evidence from the 1831 census offers a clear view of the foregoing comparative development trajectory of the major regions of England and points to the factors that mattered most in the successful industrialization process in England from 1650 to 1850.8 As the evidence shows, in 1831, 314,106 adult males were employed in factory manufacturing in England, 964,177 in retail trade and handicraft,9 and 980,750 in agriculture.10 For England as a whole, the ratio of adult males employed in retail trade and handicraft to those employed in factory manufacturing is 3.07, while the agricultural to factory ratio is 3.12. These national figures changed in favor of factory employment in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century,11 but in 1831 the English economy was yet to become a fully developed manufacturing economy.

Comparing the aggregate national figures with those of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire shows a striking contrast. For Lancashire, the ratio of adult males employed in retail trade and handicraft (86,079) to those employed in factory manufacturing (97,517) in 1831 is 0.88, and the agricultural to factory ratio (37,321 : 97,517) is 0.38. The comparable figures for the West Riding are 0.81 (60,109 : 74,669) and 0.57 (42,234 : 74,669), respectively. The 1831 census data show unmistakably that the economies of Lancashire and the West Riding were the only fully developed manufacturing economies in England in 1831. These two contiguous northern regions had together approximately 55% of adult males employed in factory manufacturing in England in 1831 (Lancashire 31% and West Riding 24%). Apart from Stafford in the West Midlands, where factory employment in 1831 (26,755) was slightly more than employment in retail trade and handicraft (24,766), as well as in agriculture (24,242), Lancashire and the West Riding were the only regions in England where factory employment was substantially greater than employment in either agriculture or retail trade and handicraft. The Home Counties (Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex) were dominated overwhelmingly by retail trade and handicraft; they had very little factory manufacturing.

The case of East Anglia is particularly striking. Here we have a region whose three counties (Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex) at various times before the Industrial Revolution had been the center of major industrial and commercial activity (Coleman 1962:115–117). By 1831 the three counties of East Anglia, with 10% of England’s geographical space, had just 2.0% (6,287) of adult males employed in factory manufacturing in England. Like a large majority of regions in England at the time, employment in East Anglia was dominated overwhelmingly by agriculture, while industrial production remained locked in a handicraft cul-de-sac. As a result, the region experienced high unemployment and stagnant population (Coleman 1962:117, 119, 125).12 While the geographical area of East Anglia (3,190,069 acres) was almost three times that of Lancashire (1,117,260), its population in 1831 (1,003,968) was less than that of Lancashire (1,336,854) by 33%.

The concentration of factory manufacturing in Lancashire and the West Riding (and to a lesser extent in the West Midlands) is significant, particularly because it shows where the major technological developments of the Industrial Revolution occurred and points to the main causal factors. Simply put, retail trade and handicraft did not foster technological development, nor did agriculture. Factory manufacturing was the lever of technological change during the Industrial Revolution, as Wrigley rightly argued (Wrigley 1986:335–336).

It is, therefore, understandable why the major technological developments of the Industrial Revolution occurred in the dominant textile regions of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire and the major metal regions of the West Midlands. As mentioned previously in the article, these regions were the main beneficiaries of the rapid expansion of Atlantic markets for manufactures in the 200 years from 1650 to 1850. Before they were effectively linked to the other regions of England by the railways in the nineteenth century, these regions, especially Lancashire and the West Riding, were more firmly connected to markets in the Atlantic world where they sold the bulk of their manufacturing output. Factory organization of production and the invention and adoption of new technologies were induced by the extent and pace of growth of the markets accessible to producers in these regions.

How much light does the English regional evidence shed on the causal relationship between developments in the Atlantic world and the economic development processes in the rest of Western Europe during the period in question? To some degree, the place of the Atlantic world in the development process in England during the period is somewhat unique. For reasons explained elaborately elsewhere (Inikori 2002:156–214, 2007:70–79),13 England secured a disproportionate share of the expanding Atlantic commerce of the period—from 1781 to 1850, between 50% and 61% of commodity production for Atlantic commerce in the Americas was carried out in British America (Inikori 2002:181, table 4.4); through privileges secured from treaties, and the dominant role of mainland British America in intra-American trade, the colonial common markets of the other Atlantic imperial powers in Western Europe were integrated de facto into the British colonial common market (Inikori 2007:76–79). That the direct benefits of the disproportionate share secured by England went to a few regions in the country, in the first instance, as I have shown, largely explains the far-reaching impact on the economies of those regions demonstrated in the article. For all practical purposes, as the 1831 evidence presented shows, the Industrial Revolution occurred in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire (and to a much lesser degree in the West Midlands), from where its impact spread to the rest of England after a national railway network was constructed in the nineteenth century.

Once we account for the distribution of gains from Atlantic commerce among the Atlantic trading nations of Europe, the areas of similarity fall into place. Crouzet’s point about the initial regional concentration of the economic benefits of Atlantic trading in Continental Europe, mentioned earlier, represents a fair summary: “Owing to the superiority of sea transport over land transport, the eighteenth-century European economy was organized around a number of big seaports, the most prosperous being those with the largest share in the growing colonial trade” (Crouzet 1964:568).

Thus England’s case is unique only in terms of the initial magnitude of the direct Atlantic trading impact. In the long run, the economies of Western Europe were all significantly affected by Atlantic commerce and were ultimately integrated into the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy.

III. Atlantic Slavery and the Emergence of the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy

It is now well known to professional economic historians that the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, was central to the rise of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy. The starting point is the nature of economies and societies in the Americas when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Even though there is some disagreement among specialists, there is general agreement that there were about 57.3 million people in the Americas at the time. These were mostly located in two regions of present-day Latin America and the Caribbean: central Mexico, with 37.3% of the total, and the Andean region, with 20.1%. The most sparsely populated regions of the Americas at the time included present-day United States and Canada, with a total of 7 million (5 million for the United States and 2 million for Canada) spread over their combined geographical area of 7 million square miles, a density of about one person per square mile. Brazil was similarly sparsely populated. Within a few decades of the European arrival, more than three-quarters of the native population died off, further reducing densities radically across the Americas (Denevan 1992:xxix; Escosura 2006:463–504, table 13.3, 476–477; Newson 2006:143–184, table 5.1, 148). Given these demographic conditions, with unlimited supplies of land relative to population, it is understandable the economies and societies were overwhelmingly dominated by subsistence production (i.e., production for the immediate consumption of the households with very little market exchange, if any). The long-run development of these economies and societies from the sixteenth century involved, first and foremost, the development of price-making markets and the market-based economy. This all-important development centered on large-scale commodity production for export in the Americas, giving rise to interregional division of labor, the growth of domestic markets, and the geographical spread of the market economy. The availability of low-cost labor of enslaved Africans was a critical factor in large-scale commodity production in the Americas, especially Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States.

The labor of enslaved Africans was critical for two basic reasons. First, the available markets for bulky export commodities from the Americas were in Europe, initially. Given the high cost of trans-Atlantic transportation in the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, production costs for those commodities had to be very low for them to have sufficiently large markets overseas. This meant large-scale production, with extensive economies of scale, as opposed to high-cost, small-scale production. Second, with unlimited supplies of agricultural land in the Americas, large-scale production that required legally free wage laborers was virtually impossible. In Brazil and the United States, the enslavement of the Indigenous people was tried unsuccessfully. In the United States, indentured servants from Europe were tried, also unsuccessfully. In the end, the long-term solution to the difficult problem was found in the importation of captives from Africa for enslavement in Spanish America, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. This experiment was so successful that production costs for sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, and several other commodities were drastically reduced, bringing their prices in Europe within the reach of even the common people.

As the European markets for these commodities grew over time, so, too, did their production expand in Spanish America, Brazil, the Caribbean, and, ultimately, the United States (see Table 1). Expanding production was accompanied by increasing specialization that created domestic market opportunities for other producers in the Americas. Cotton plantations in the United States, very much like sugar, gold, and coffee in Brazil and plantation commodities in the Caribbean, depended almost entirely on the labor of enslaved Africans before the Civil War. Douglass North’s strong statement concerning the importance of the cotton economy in the early development of the United States, cited earlier in the article, is borne out by the data in Table 2.

Table 1. 

Share of export commodities produced by Africans in the Americas, 1501–1850

Table 2. 

Cotton export and regional distribution of US population, 1820–1850

Thus, it is clear from the evidence that the rise, by the mid-nineteenth century, of the major capitalist economies of the Atlantic world—Western Europe led by Industrial Revolution Britain and the rising power of the Americas, the United States—and their integration to constitute the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy depended greatly on the growth of the Atlantic economy that was largely the product of the labor of enslaved Africans. For purposes of logical clarity, the implications of this point should be made abundantly clear. First, the analysis in this section of the article connects directly to the analysis in Section II. This means that the role of enslaved Africans elaborated in this section largely explains the developments elaborated in the preceding section, especially the British Industrial Revolution and its new technologies. The Industrial Revolution and its new technologies were, in turn, central to the integration of the major economies of the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century through its imposition of division of labor among these economies. Second, and by extension, the analysis in the section that follows, largely based on the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, is connected (albeit indirectly) to the role of enslaved Africans in the Americas elaborated in this section.

IV. Extension of the Capitalist Atlantic Economic System to Asia and the Rest of the World

The British Industrial Revolution created the instruments—new technologies employed in manufacturing, transportation (over land and seas), transmission of information (the telegraph), and military hardware—with which the nineteenth-century Atlantic capitalist economic order was extended to Asia and the rest of the world by Great Britain, its Western European rivals (France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Germany), and the United States. The new technologies of the Industrial Revolution and the factory system of organization brought down manifold the cost of manufacturing mass consumer goods; the application of steam power to sea transportation (steel and steamship) and land transportation (railways) reduced transportation costs to small fractions of what they had been for centuries; refrigeration technology allowed the transportation of perishable foodstuffs and animal products over long distances—all this meant no economies anywhere in the world could be protected by distance from the onslaught of mechanized, factory-produced goods of the British Industrial Revolution and Western European and American countries that successfully transplanted the new technologies. The only protection economies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East could get had to be provided by the state, in other words, by governments—state restriction of imports and other forms of state intervention. Then, of course, the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution also provided the military hardware that could crush resisting governments.

The first major victim was India. In 1821, the parliamentary committee investigating the condition of India’s foreign trade asked Charles Grant, a prominent member of the East India Company Directorate and a former chairman of the East India Company, whether the entire clothing needs of India could not be supplied much more cheaply through exports of British textiles, adding that India would be amply compensated for the loss of her manufacturing industry by the encouragement given in the British markets for the export of “raw articles, the produce of India.” Here, in part, is Grant’s response to the question:

But with respect to that very large question, I take the liberty to offer one remark; we have, by protecting duties at home, and our improvements in machinery, almost entirely excluded from this country the cotton fabrics of India, which were formerly their great staple; and if we use the power we have over that country now, to introduce into it the fabrics of this country, so as to exclude their own, it may be questioned how far we act justly with respect to our Indian subjects; for it may be taken for granted, that if they were under an Indian government they would impose protecting duties upon their own fabrics, in their own markets, as we have done in ours. (Cited by Chaundhuri 1983:810)

This well-informed opinion mattered very little. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when Great Britain had become the champion of free trade, British India became the most important single market for British cotton textiles. The export of cotton manufactures from the United Kingdom to India in 1851 is shown in Table 3.14

Table 3. 

Cotton manufactures exported to India from the United Kingdom in 1851

The official values are at 1699–1701 prices and the real values are at 1851 current prices; both are f.o.b. values.15 The difference represents the magnitude of cost and price reduction following the Industrial Revolution (the 1851 current price being 20.4% of the 1699–1701 price). Given the reduction in shipping cost, it is understandable why distance no longer mattered. In 1894, British cotton manufactures exported to India’s Bengal Province alone was approximately 1.2 billion yards, valued at ₤9,040,395 (current prices); cotton yarns, 10,207,200 pounds weight valued at ₤423,436 (current prices).16 By this time, as the Indian economy was integrated into the evolving global economy under British free trade policy, the global division of labor imposed by the world market price mechanism had transformed the Indian economy from a major exporter of cotton textiles to predominantly an exporter of primary commodities; in 1811–1812, cotton textiles still made up 33% of the total value of Indian exports and raw cotton 4.9%; by 1870–1871, cotton textiles were 2.5% and raw cotton 35.2% (Chaundhuri 1983:842, 844, tables 10.10, 10.11).

China in the second half of the nineteenth century was a case of imperialism without colonization. The imperial countries of the Atlantic world, with Great Britain playing the lead role, employed their military superiority to seize China’s major port cities that were placed in a Treaty Ports System. In 1900, there were 90 such cities with 350,000 foreign residents over whom China had no legal control (Inkster 1991:227–247, 205–226 [on India]). The persistent external interference was so great that China’s government could not formulate state policies and mobilize the resources needed for long run economic development. For all practical purposes, China operated an open economy that was integrated into the global economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The situation in the Middle East was somewhat similar. With the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain combined its military power and manufacturing supremacy to replace France as the protector of the Ottoman Empire from Austrian and Russian encroachment. This was the context for the Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention of 1838 between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, under which import duties on British goods entering all parts of the empire were reduced to 3%, a virtual free trade duty. What is more, British assistance kept rebelling provinces, such as Egypt, within the empire, and the terms of the treaty were forced on them. The outcome was similar to that of India, discussed earlier (Inalcik 1987:374–455, 1993:264–306; Wallerstein 1989:176–177).

V. Conclusion

For the individuals and families forced to labor under slave conditions in the Americas, Atlantic slavery was a horrendous crime against humanity. It is, therefore, understandable that much has been written about this inhumanity. The speech of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams during the 2007 British government commemoration of the 1807 British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade is instructive:

We are born into a world already scarred by the internationalizing and industrializing of slavery … and our human inheritance is shadowed by it. We who are heirs of the slave-owning and slave-trading nations of the past have to face the fact that our historic prosperity was built in large part on this atrocity; those who are heirs of the communities ravaged by the slave trade know very well that much of their present suffering and struggling is the result of centuries of abuse. Today it is for us to face our history; the Atlantic [slave] trade was our contribution to this universal sinfulness. (Dickinson 2007)

This statement highlights what is popularly known about Atlantic slavery. Historiographically, emphasis on its evilness has tended to crowd out from the literature studies focused on demonstrating the significant contribution of Atlantic slavery to the rise of the capitalist global economy, a far more difficult subject to deal with conceptually and empirically than its morality. The moral question has also tended to create an ideological problem. As articulated by Rowan Williams, there has been a compulsive tendency for some to resist the idea that their “historic prosperity was built in large part on this atrocity.”

This article has tried to deal with this difficult problem by focusing first on the rise of the nineteenth-century capitalist Atlantic economic order. The evidence accumulated by recent research shows beyond reasonable doubt that the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas phenomenally expanded the Atlantic economy. The major economies of Western Europe and the Americas (especially the United States) benefited considerably from the expansion. But with the use of its naval power, mercantilist Britain dominated the rapidly growing Atlantic markets, which ultimately created the conditions for the Industrial Revolution. Comparative analysis of the long-run development of English counties makes this argument extremely compelling. The United States and Britain’s Western European rivals soon followed. By the mid-nineteenth century, an integrated and flourishing capitalist Atlantic economic order had been established. The article has shown that the Atlantic economic system became the nucleus of the capitalist global economy. The major economies of the Atlantic world, with Britain at the lead, employed the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution to extend, through sheer economic and military superiority, the Atlantic economic order to Asia and the rest of the world to constitute the hierarchically structured capitalist global economy.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Deborah L. Mack and Ibrahima Thiaw, the organizers of the Wenner-Gren symposium “Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World,” for inviting me and for their friendship and generosity during the week-long symposium in Lisbon, Portugal. Many thanks also to Laurie Obbink for her superb coordination work for the symposium and the publication process. My heart goes to all the wonderful participants for their scholarship and unforgettable comradeship.

Notes

Joseph E. Inikori is Professor in the Department of History of the University of Rochester (437 Rush Rhees Library, PO Box 270070, Rochester, New York 14627, USA [[email protected]]).

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What caused the institution of slavery to decline?

Why was slavery abolished in the 19th century?

What happened to the institution of slavery after the American Revolution?

How did slavery affect the economy in the 19th century?