Eighty years late: groundbreaking work on slave economy is finally published in UK
In 1938, a brilliant young Black scholar at Oxford University wrote a thesis on the economic history of British empire and challenged a claim about slavery that had been defining Britain’s role in the world for more than a century.
But when Eric Williams – who would later become the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago – sought to publish his “mind-blowing” thesis on capitalism and slavery in Britain, he was shunned by publishers and accused of undermining the humanitarian motivation for Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act.
Now, 84 years after his work was rejected in the UK, and 78 years after it was first published in America, where it became a highly influential anti-colonial text, Williams’s book, Capitalism and Slavery, will finally be published in Britain by a mainstream British publisher.
Fans of the book include the rapper and author Akala, the novelist Monique Roffey, the poet Michael Rosen and Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland. He welcomed the news that 40 years after Williams’s death, British people are “finally waking up” to the significance of his work: “I think it’s amazing he hasn’t been published until now, because you can’t really make sense of Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery without reading his book,” Sanghera said. “You cannot begin to talk about slavery without talking about it. It’s so important.”
Slavery, Williams argues, was abolished in much of the British empire in 1833 because doing so at that time was in Britain’s economic self-interest – not because the British suddenly discovered a conscience.
“The capitalists had first encouraged West Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it,” he writes. In the early 19th century, slave-owning sugar planters in the Caribbean British
Read more on theguardian.com
