Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson introduce their new book, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Polity Press, 2023). They set the history of Britain’s industrial revolution in a global history framework, focussing on trade and international finance rather than the internalist frameworks that have dominated historical writing on the industrial revolution for so long. In this presentation they will focus on the implications of their book for the history of capitalism. They emphasize the early globalization of the world economy based on sugar, and the financialisaton of the British economy that the slave trade and slavery entailed. Alongside new consumer markets and the demands for British manufactures and skills that slavery precipitated, changes in financial institutions and practices were vital to British industrialization. They also established Britain’s role as a centre for global international investment, financial and shipping services. London became pivotal in this development, but the industrialising economy reoriented geographically to favour the north western ‘slave ports’ and their manufacturing hinterlands. Through these processes, slavery not only gave modern capitalism some of its fundamental structures of production and consumption; it also promoted inequalities of race, class and geography that have characterised Britain and the rest of the world for the past three centuries.
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This project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the ERC grant agreement No 101054345